Template talk:Citation HCA

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Bainer, it's great that you've created these templates, but I have a quibble. The High Court's "internal numbering system" to which you refer on the project page is actually a more widespread system of 'medium neutral citation', a system applied with respect to the reasons published by many courts, including most courts in Australia. A principle of medium neutral citation follows a broader citation principle: Square brackets around the cited year indicate that the year is an essential part of the citation (ie, you cannot find the case without reference to the year), whereas rounded brackets around the cited year indicate that the year is superfluous to the citation. By way of example, a case cited as [1997] 2 VLR 123 is published in the second volume of the VLR's from 1997. You could not find the case without the information in the square brackets. A case cited as (1983) 158 CLR 1 directs you to the 158th volume in the CLR series. You would not need to know that the decision was published in 1983 in order to find the case. Medium neutral citation relies wholly on year-based numbering, and does not rely on a 'volumes' classification. Accordingly, all medium neutral citation adopts square brackets around the year: [2005] HCA 1. Your template for automatically creating a MNC linked to the AustLII page wrongly creates rounded brackets around the year. Can you adjust the template accordingly? --SilasM 07:24, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I know what you mean with the square brackets, but unfortunately square brackets are used for links in the MediaWiki software, and I don't know how to get around that at the moment. I could make the year part separate from the link, as I did with the CLR template (giving something like [1983] HCA 21), but unfortunately you really need the year within the link for it to make any sense. It's the same problem in the title of the Mabo article - you have to say "(No.2)" instead of the more correct "[No.2]". I'll try to find a workaround though. --bainer 10:57, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Ok, with a little trickery it's fixed, I just had to look up the HTML escape codes for square brackets. Anyway, it now displays properly: {{Citation HCA|21|1983}}. --bainer 11:50, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)