Template talk:Citation

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[edit] Topics from 2008

[edit] Bibliographic record keeping discussion.

WP:VP/T#Is there a centralized bibliographic database for wikipedia? Is there a way to make citations just by giving an universal ID instead of copying a full citation template?. -- Jeandré, 2007-12-31t20:39z

No. -- Fullstop (talk) 00:44, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
Zeteo provides a centralized database that can produce {{citation}} templates for you to copy and paste into articles. It's not very complete, and including the data in an article is more than just supplying a universal ID, but you might find it helpful anyway. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:22, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
refbase and zotero and OttoBib and many others can also provide citation templates, but the original interest in this topic was to be able to use citekeys to easily refer to the same citation in multiple articles. The DOI bot may be close to achieving some of what was wanted (e.g. to provide maximum reference info when given a simple identifier). --Karnesky (talk) 22:48, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
Zotero and OttoBib seem to require you to build up your own bibliography databases; Zeteo's (and refbase's?) is a single centralized db that everyone shares. And I believe Zeteo's was built by crawling Wikipedia. So in that sense it's closer to the original request. I'm very pleased with what DOIbot is doing but you need to start with enough for it to identify the citation; it doesn't seem to be a substitute for filling in citations yourself in that sense. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:49, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Co-publishers

I've been running into a several books that are co-published by two publishers. I'm not talking about different publishers, editors, and printers here. The inside cover literally says "Co-published by Finishing Publications and ASM International" for example. I know this is probably very unusual outside the field of materials engineering, but if it's not too much work, could we modify the template to allow publisher1, publisher2, place1, place2 parameters? The goal is that the citation should come out as

Sheasby, P. G. & Pinner, R. (2001), The Surface Treatment and Finishing of Aluminum and its Alloys, vol. 1 (sixth ed.), Materials Park, Ohio: ASM International & Stevenage, UK: Finishing Publications, ISBN 0-904477-23-1.

Instead of

Sheasby, P. G. & Pinner, R. (2001), The Surface Treatment and Finishing of Aluminum and its Alloys, vol. 1 (sixth ed.), Materials Park, Ohio & Stevenage, UK: ASM International & Finishing Publications, ISBN 0-904477-23-1.

I don't really have the programming skills to do this safely, so help would be appreciated.--Yannick (talk) 19:39, 1 January 2008 (UTC)


In the absence of location1, location2, etc. and matching publisher1, publisher2, etc. parameters, it looks to me as if you can achieve what you are after by (mis?)using {{Citation}} as follows:
  • Sheasby, P. G. & Pinner, R. (2001), The Surface Treatment and Finishing of Aluminum and its Alloys, vol. 1 (sixth ed.), Materials Park, Ohio: ASM International & Stevenage, UK: Finishing Publications, ISBN 0-904477-23-1 
I see that this complete work has a Google Books listing (Vol. 1 alone appears not to), so:
Hope that is useful. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 23:56, 1 January 2008 (UTC)


It is not standard practice to specify multiple publishers. One or the other is sufficient. Just as, for example, one provides only one location= for a publisher even if - for example OUP - has a six or more locations noted on the flyleaf.
It is not even necessary to specify multiple publishers. The point of a citation is to lead the reader to the source in question. Providing multiple publishers or multiple locations does not further that end. -- Fullstop (talk) 00:42, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] FIX for {citation} hack, which new preprocessor will break when date= is provided but year= is not

{{editprotected}} With Tim's new preprocessor, {{citation}} will barf when a year= is not specified but date= is.

The problem is with this code:

#switch: {{#time:Y|{{{date|}}}}}
|Error: invalid time = {{{publication-date|}}}
|{{#time:Y|{{{date|}}} }}

In the first 'case', the #switch is checking if the #time returned an error. This will not work in the new parser.

Replace that snippet with either

#iferror:{{#time:Y|{{{date|}}} }}
|{{{publication-date|}}}
|{{#time:Y|{{{date|}}} }}

or (more correctly :-)...

#iferror:{{#time:Y|{{{date|}}} }}
|{{#iferror:{{#time:Y|{{{publication-date|einval}}} }}||{{#time:Y|{{{publication-date|}}} }}}}
|{{#time:Y|{{{date|}}} }}

-- Fullstop (talk) 01:55, 19 January 2008 (UTC)


I have another comment about this template. I tracked down a diff in the new parser that can be reproduced with the code {{Citation |date=x}} at Special:ParserDiffTest. The new parser spits an error into the HTML. The old one calmly ignores it. It doesn't seem to break anything usability-wise, just seems odd, and I don't understand where the difference came in. Since this template is used in 10,000+ articles I thought I'd mention it here, in case perhaps two errors could be fixed at once to save the servers a bit of work. • Anakin (contribs • complaints) 02:59, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
(confused) Actually, this looks like exactly the same problem Fullstop has reported above. Hadn't realised that. It also breaks on all valid, but wikified, dates, like so: {{Citation | date=[[2003-06-18]]}}, but not if the date is valid and not wikified. • Anakin (contribs • complaints) 03:15, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
yep. Its the same problem, the fix for which is noted above.
See also 7th row in table at m:Migration to the new preprocessor#Expected differences.
-- Fullstop (talk) 06:21, 19 January 2008 (UTC)
Done. Ping me on my talk page if I just broke 11,000 pages. : - ) Cheers. --MZMcBride (talk) 08:23, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
Interesting aside: This exact bug on this same template [1] is what the #iferror parserfunction was conceived for (that is, the bug in #switch accidentally catching errors in the old parser). It was very amusing to realize why this worked in the old parser (the #switch was seeing an equals sign in the error, and causing the #switch not to have a default, so errors suppressed all output). --Splarka (rant) 00:37, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Glitch in Citation template treatment of accessdate= field

(topic copied from Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#Glitch in Citation accessdate= treatment where i first raised it)

An anomaly which comes up in use of what I believe to be a standard Citation reference, is that use of "accessdate=January 20, 2008" ends up generating a red-link to January 20, 2008, while use of "accessdate=2008-01-20" does not. Seems like a bug to me, I am trying to report it here. Please advise on where it should be reported, if not here. (IT SEEMS RELEVANT TO RAISE HERE IN TEMPLATE TALK:CITATION)

This came up for me in editing List of National Historic Landmarks in Oklahoma. I tried eliminating the red-link by going ahead and creating the article on January 20, 2008, but an efficient wikipedian ever-so-promptly and politely deletes the new article (as is appropriate) :) doncram (talk) 23:04, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

References:

This was changed in this edit. Both {{cite web}} and {{cite news}} specify accessdate in ISO format and wikilink it. Apparently Kaldari changed {{citation}} such that it's also wikilinked, which means it must be in ISO format to avoid a redlink. [Cite web and Cite news have code which check if the date (not accessdate) is in ISO format, and only wikilink it if it is. This was apparently never extended to accessdate.] Gimmetrow 02:25, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Gimmetrow. SEEMS LIKE IT SHOULD BE EXTENDED TO ACCESSDATE. Hope that this is helpful and now reaches someone who can evaluate it AND fix it if agreed it is a problem. Sincerely, doncram (talk) 22:16, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Until recently, {{Citation}}'s accessdate parameter required a wikilinked date. That requirement was removed in order to regularize {{Citation}} with {{Cite web}}, {{Cite news}}, etc. The {{Cite web}} documentation for its accessdate parameter reads:
  • accessdate: Full date when item was accessed, in ISO 8601 YYYY-MM-DD format, for example "accessdate = 2008-01-22". Must not be wikilinked.
The {{Citation}} documentation should probably be undated similarly. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 23:21, 22 January 2008 (UTC)


1. The issue of auto-formatting of dates will automagically resolve itself when bugzilla:4582 issue is resolved.
   (in a week or two hopefully)
2. The issue with the redlink for non-ISO dates is known. That is why citation does did not link dates.
3. Would people please relax about date auto-formatting? For 99.99% of all views, dates are not formatted even if wiki-linked.
-- Fullstop (talk) 08:47, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Some thought needed to have been put into this change before making it, I think. I have always wililinked "English" dates in "accessdate", not using ISO. So, I had: 
accessdate = [[1 January]] [[2008]]
As a result of this change, I know of at least three Featured Articles that now need editing, as the citations now appear as: Retrieved on [[1 January 2008]]
What is the recommendation here? Go for horrible ISO dates when using {{citation}}? Carre (talk) 09:03, 24 January 2008 (UTC)

{{editprotected}} Can someone please sort out this template, and either undo the change that added "auto" linking of dates, or add in the check to see if the date is either already formatted, or is in ISO format (as in the {{cite}} family). Thanks. Carre (talk) 08:54, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

Concur. Kaldari's change was thoughtless. He/she should minimally have said something before unilaterally doing what she did (not that she is actually watching this talk page after the fact either, or she would have rv'd himself by now).
A solution without the link overloading could be to change
Retrieved on [[{{{AccessDate}}}]]
to
Retrieved on {{date|{{{AccessDate}}}}}
At the moment, that template will reformat dates to "24 January 2008" style but will eventually (and independent of whats invoking it) be reformatting to reflect userprefs.
-- Fullstop (talk) 12:41, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
Possibly even more thought than that - we need to consider the possible ways this template has been used in the past. Since it never used to link any accessdate parameter, we need to cater for those cases where people have used dates already wikilinked.
At present, Kaldari just does
#if: {{{AccessDate|}}}
     | . Retrieved on [[{{{AccessDate}}}]]
which obviously slaps the wl brackets on regardless. This breaks: non-wikilinked "English" dates (makes the wl to the full date, including year, hence probably redlinked) and also all wikilinked dates (including pre-linked ISO format) by sticking the unneeded brackets in. As Gimme says above, {{cite web}} does this for some dates:
({{#ifeq:{{#time:Y-m-d|{{{date}}}}}|{{{date}}}|[[{{{date}}}]]|{{{date}}}}})
which would appear to trap unlinked ISO dates, and leaves the rest alone. Not sure what it'd do about ISO dates that are already linked though. If we apply that test to the AccessDate parameter here, until that bugzilla date formatting thing is sorted out once and for all, then I think this would be a decent interim solution. Carre (talk) 13:18, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
Watch this:
  • {{date|1980-10-19}} => 19 October 1980
  • {{date|[[1980-10-19]]}} => 1980-10-19
  • {{date|October 19 1980}} => 19 October 1980
  • {{date|19 October 1980}} => 19 October 1980
Note how the pre-linked ISO (or any other format) date doesn't change.
-- Fullstop (talk) 13:25, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
Oh, cool :) I had a look at the source of {{date}}, but didn't really understand it! That'll do nicely, sir/madam. Carre (talk) 13:28, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
The {{date}} solution seems the best one, but I'm hesitant to change this widely-used template again. This has been discussed before at #Problem with accessdate?, where you will see that accessdate did use to be linked automatically. Therefore, I want to wait a bit and see what other people say, instead of making a change that will later have to be reverted. It also worries me a bit that this Template:Date does not seem to be used widely.
I also left a message at Kaldari's user talk page. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 13:49, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

[←] Appreciated, but the problem with that is that the thing discussed at #Problem with accessdate? didn't actually break anything, it just stopped dates linking/formatting. Kaldari's change broke how the template works in some cases. When I first noticed it (looking at one of "my" FAs), I checked the first 20 or so of the articles in "what links here", and 4 or 5 of them were broken by this change. On top of the three FAs that I know are affected. Luckily none of them have appeared on the main page yet. Carre (talk) 14:04, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

  • I'm just going to revert the template for now, since the date parsing fix is expected soon. Kaldari (talk) 15:39, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
    • OK, I see no indication that the date parsing bug is going to be fixed any time soon after looking through the bug comments. Regardless, even if that bug is fixed, it still means that everyone who uses this template will have to unlink their dates. The people who use Cite web, Cite news, etc, will only have to change the templates when the big fix happens. So they are already ready for the bug fix, we are not. Kaldari (talk) 16:19, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

I switched the template to use the {{date}} template for formatting the accessdate, as was suggested above. Let me know if that solution is acceptable to everyone. Kaldari (talk) 16:47, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

There isn't a single accurate statement in the comment of 16:19. But thank you for reverting your "draconian" (your word) edit.
Oh, and that switch to {{date}} is the reason why this template is already ready for the bug fix, while your favorite templates are not.
And the solution to bug #4582 (which is not about "date parsing") has already been 'live' for me for two weeks.
Which of course you might have learned more about if you had ever actually said anything before you made your "draconian" edit, or even if you had checked back afterwards.
It may also be of interest to you that over 99% of the people who use the 'pedia don't profit from linked dates. Neither for their link value, nor for their reformat-ability. Or that YYYY-MM-DD is not friendly for over 99% of the people who use the 'pedia but who see only YYYY-MM-DD in all those {{cite}} invocations.
But of course all this stems from your supposition that linking is the only way to make dates reformattable. Or the notion that it is ideal to do so. Blue is a nice color. But it is not so nice that it would compel anyone to find out what other events took place on the date that some editor accessed some url.
-- Fullstop (talk) 23:49, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
Removed the editprotected template, since Kaldari has reverted.
While I don't necessarily agree with the manner of Fullstop's post above, I do agree with the sentiment of that post, and can assure you that, while there is no default "English" (whether US or Brit) style date format for non-registered/non-preferenced users, you won't get me to touch those hideous ISO dates with a barge pole. I would also suggest that the best thing to do with all those {{cite}} templates is throw them in a bin and replace them with this excellent all-purpose one. Carre (talk) 18:57, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Citation style

The following was just added to WP:CITE:

There are (at least) two families of citation templates, the {{Citation}} template and the {{Cite xxx}} templates where xxx could be book, web, etc. These two families produce different citation styles. For example, the "Cite xxx" family separates elements with a full stop, and gives page ranges as plain numbers, while the "Citation" template separates elements with a comma, and precedes page ranges with "pp." Thus, these two families should not be mixed in the same article.

Would it be possible to regularize citation style across these templates? -- Boracay Bill (talk) 00:43, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

As per the previous section, changing cite templates is dangerous, as modifications that aren't thought out properly can damage hundreds of articles.
Incidentally, putting the trailing period in citations, where those citations are used to create a list of referenced work, goes against the MOS which says that bulleted lists, where not a complete sentence, should end with either semicolon or no punctuation, except the final entry in the list. Carre (talk) 08:54, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
@Carre: Thats a) not the punctuation that Boracay Bill is referring to, and b) a citation is formally a complete "sentence".
@Bill: {{citation}} uses commas to avoid very complex "look-ahead"s. Switching to '.' would require the core to be pre-deterministic, which -- given the lack of string functions -- would either necessitate a whole lot of template code. With respect to p/pp: There is no standard for page numbers, which in the real world would not appear (except for journals) in a bibliography. The present p/pp usage is fine because it unambiguously identifies what those numbers are.
-- Fullstop (talk) 13:14, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
Replacing a comma with a dot seems like it should be a simple change but I haven't looked closely at the code and, having been a programmer, I appreciate that internal details may not be as simple as they seem to an outsider. I picked up, agreed with, and echoed here the point that it would be a good thing if citation style through template usage were regularized across all WP citation templates. I do not believe this to be a radical idea. I think it would be a good thing if {{Citation}} could supplant and deprecate the forest of alternative {{cite whatever}} templates out there. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 14:45, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
I strongly support any changes that make this template behave more like the other citation templates, including switching to periods and eliminating the pp notation. Kaldari (talk) 19:13, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
yes, no question. Standardization would be good thing. -- Fullstop (talk) 19:36, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

←Does anyone else think that this is an ideal situation for a meta-template? {{cite meta}} contains a standardised output format, where parameters are named {{{param1}}}, and have defined formatting. Then all the other citation templates become partially hardcoded instances of the metatemplate, converting {{{first}}} into {{{name1}}}, etc. We define the formatting of each field, and the formatting that goes between them, but let each cite template implement that standardised formatting however works best for that type of citation. Thoughts? Happy‑melon 16:54, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

Such a template already exists. Its called ... {{citation}}. -- Fullstop (talk) 19:36, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
That's not quite what I mean. {{citation}} attempts to cover all possible bases, and probably does so fairly effectively. However, it is not a meta-template - if it were, it would not be utilised directly. What this template tries to do is provide a field to take any possible piece of reference data, and present it in a reasonable format. It has a completely different set of parameters for citing, say, books, as to citing patents. What would happen if someone, for whatever reason, tried to mix and match fields from several different systems, is not clearly defined. A true citation meta template would be quite different. As I said above, it would define a set of preformatted output fields, but let templates like {{cite web}} define how those fields are used. Many fields would be used identically in all citation templates - there will be an italicised field which almost always is used for {{{title}}}, but there are other parameters which vary between citation templates but should still use the same formatting. Essentially we create a way to easily standardise the citation templates while retaining maximum flexibility. Happy‑melon 20:20, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
The meta you are thinking of is citation: the real "engine" is {{citation/core}}, the {{citation}} is just the front that does some elementary rewiring.
The "meta-ness" of {{citation}} isn't diminished by the fact that it can (also) be called directly. For instance, (using your example) there is no reason why {{cite web}} (as well as encyclopedia, book, journal, newspaper ...) couldn't call {{citation}} instead of calling /core. Even episode film tv dvd cd vhs audiotape seem to work ok with a direct call.
The proliferation of cite templates has more to do with the lack of understanding of how citations are built than with any real-life divisions. For starters, the division by medium is insane. But an encyclopedia is an encyclopedia, and Wikipedia would be cited the same way regardless of whether the medium is a book, bazillion volumes, CDs, DVDs or microchips.
There are some {{cite}}s though, maps for example, that don't fit the raster. These would have to call the /core directly (though maps is so odd that it really does warrant its own handler). -- Fullstop (talk) 00:45, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
Aha, yes, {{citation/core}} is exactly what I mean by a meta template. Now can anyone satisfactorily explain why the {{cite X}} templates don't use it :D Happy‑melon 09:09, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Accessdate soft conversion

I've changed this template to use the {{date}} template for the accessdate. That way, any date entered in any format, whether wikilinked or not, will display in a reasonable manner. I have added a note to the template instructions, however, stating that unlinked ISO 8601 date format is preferred (to make conversions between this template and the other citation templates less painful, and to prepare for the 4582 bugfix). I hope this solution is acceptable to everyone. Once bug 4582 is fixed, however, I believe we should switch to match the behavior of the other citation templates. Kaldari (talk) 17:10, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Coauthors

Please can someone show some pity on people trying to cite papers with a dozen authors and add a coauthors field? I hate to type first0=, last0= ... first9=, last9= when I can copy and paste the entire author list. It's only going to appear as et al. in the article anyway, so what difference does it make if we mark-up the authors individually?

I notice we have an authors field, which shows the coauthors, all right, but makes the template useless for {{harv}} because the entire list of authors has to be pasted in the citation, rather than merely the first author's last name. I could not successfully use the authors and last1, which would have been ideal. --Adoniscik (talk) 15:27, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Just mentioning that the template also has an optional ref (lowercase 'r') field. {{harv}} and {{harvnb}} have amatching (in function if not in name—uppercase 'R') optional Ref field. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 23:10, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Thank you, but I could not find much documentation on that field, except that you can set it to "none". How would it help me? --Adoniscik (talk) 23:24, 3 February 2008 (UTC)

Examples:
(Aaron 2000)
and
  • Aaron, A., Bixby, B. Calloway, C. Donovan, D. (2000 :), Title one 
or something like
(Aaron et. al. 2000)
and
  • Aaron, A., Bixby, B. Calloway, C. Donovan, D. (2000), Title one 

-- Boracay Bill (talk) 02:29, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm just dropping by here again to note that the following also works. I hadn't been using {{harv}} and {{harvnb}} that way, but will start doing so. I picked this up from the discussion below of et al again, which also may be of interest.
(Aaron et al. 2000)
and
  • Aaron, A.; Bixby, B.; Calloway, C. & Donovan, D. (2000), Title one 
-- Boracay Bill (talk) 04:01, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Boldface volume

For journal articles, this template uses boldface for volume numbers, which is inconsistent with Template:cite journal. I think we should choose one or the other format for both templates for the sake of consistency. I have no preference for one or the other; both are commonly used.

  • With cite journal:

Breyer, Stephen (October 1972). "Copyright: A Rejoinder". UCLA Law Review 20: 75–83. 

  • With citation:

Breyer, Stephen (October 1972), “Copyright: A Rejoinder”, UCLA Law Review 20: 75–83 

Ashill (talk) 15:25, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

I'd prefer that both boldfase the volume number; it's a standard convention. 71.41.210.146 (talk) 15:27, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Only standard in certain styles, none of the other optional parameters in this template are put into bold (one could make a case that page number for a book should be so highlighted). Discussion already had at Template talk:Cite journal#Bolface in volume parameter clashes and previously at Template talk:Cite journal/Archive 2#Publication volume number in bold / additional data / descriptive labels. Whether or not discussion and change then implemented at {{cite journal}} was correct, more certainly there should be no inconsistancy if {{citation}} & {{cite journal}} are both used in the same article. Unless overriding objection to this, then I make this template follow the (apparently) accepted change of cite journal not to use bold.David Ruben Talk 21:24, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
I did not comment in the previous (very recent) discussion. I would prefer to have the volume in bold for both templates for utilitarian reasons. I agree with Emerson that it makes it very easy to distinguish the four possible numeric fields (volume, date, issue, pages), which is particularly important if any of those are missing. The only objections to the bolding that I've seen are aesthetic. I don't think it looks bad, but would tolerate it looking bad if it made articles easier to locate. --Karnesky (talk) 22:50, 4 March 2008 (UTC)
I concur with Karnesky, who spoke my mind :) (and better than I could have).
With respect to the perennial "consistency" issue:
a) Per David Ruben's comment, that is a problem of the article, not of this or any other template.
b) The need for a whole suite of {{cite xyz}} templates is itself a consistency issue. Fix that, and the other consistency issue will fix itself.
c) The nice thing about conventions and standards is that they are conventions and standards. This citation template does a pretty good job sticking to those conventions and standards. Which is why I use it, even though it is slower and less flexible than writing out bibliography by hand (but which would be standard-compliant too). -- Fullstop (talk) 00:11, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

I prefer the volume number to be in boldface, so it is clearly distinguished from issue and page numbers. This is a common convention. The cite journal template used to do this, and should not have been changed.--Srleffler (talk) 05:37, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

I made that request here; before I found this discussion. The bolding is very useful and it should be instated in {{cite journal}} 66.30.221.105 (talk) 15:46, 21 March 2008 (UTC)

See the extended discussion at Template_talk:Cite_journal#Bolface in volume parameter clashes. I moved your request into that section. Other editors also would like boldface to be restored.--Srleffler (talk) 15:00, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Thesis, dissertation citation

Is there a standard for citing a thesis/dissertation/Habilitationschrift? I used journal=Habil. and place=The Uni, but this seemed awkward. I did not see examples. JackSchmidt (talk) 02:18, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

I've been using series=Dissertation (or whatever) and publisher=The University; I think that works a little better, as it formats the title less like a journal article and more like a book. But some guidance and standardization would probably be a good thing. —David Eppstein

(talk) 15:48, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Quite right. After all, a published diss/habil has the same citation format as any other book.
(Incidentally,... there is no need/purpose for a diss/habil/whatever identifier when citing a published work because -- even if the book were originally a *schrift -- the published book is not the same work/edition as the original manuscript. As always, the source being cited is the work you hold in your hands, and not some previous "edition" or form thereof).
For an unpublished thesis/diss/habil, I have used
    series=Dissertation (or whatever), as David Eppstein also described, but...
    location=Place of University,
    publisher=unpubl. plus the name of the faculty and university in parenthesis.
Giving...
    Keschapp, Heinz (1982), Mein Senf, Habilitationsschrift, Vienna: unpubl. (Institut für Würstchenkunde der Universität Wien) 
With respect to normalization/standardization...
a) The citation format for an unpublished thesis/habil/diss is of course no different from, say, an unpublished screenplay.
b) Adding support for a generic format=** parameter might be the way to go. Besides avoiding the misappropriation of series=, such a parameter would also accommodate/be necessary for citation of A/V material, as in APA/MLA's "[Television broadcast]", "[Audio cassette]", "[CD inlay]" or whatever.
-- Fullstop (talk) 14:16, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
**alternatively, resourcetype= or class= or container=?

[edit] et al again

I think it would be reasonable for {{citation}} to display all authors, while {{harv}} displays the et al. Is this possible? I believe earlier on this page it was also suggested this is a good idea that would follow standard practice in the print literature. This is not currently done:

  • {{ Citation | last1=A | last2=B | last3=C | last4=D | year=2008 | title=Alphabet soup }}
  • A; B; C & D (2008), Alphabet soup 

Thanks to the authors for this great template and citation system (A et al. 2008). Am I allowed to add this feature, perhaps with a flag to control it so that default citations remain with the et al.? JackSchmidt (talk) 02:33, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

I made the tiny changes needed at User:JackSchmidt/Citation and User:JackSchmidt/Citation/core, you can see the difference:
  • {{ User:JackSchmidt/Citation | last1=A | last2=B | last3=C | last4=D | year=2008 | title=Alphabet soup }}
  • A; B; C & D (2008), Alphabet soup
It displays up to eight authors, but lists a ninth author as et al. It doesn't say "and and", but it would be easy to make it do that. It doesn't take a flag to do old behaviour, but that is also easy to add if desired. The user page histories should show the entire diff. JackSchmidt (talk) 03:47, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

I support this change. I took a look at the id= fields generated by Jack's version, to make sure that this will still work correctly with the {{harv}} templates, and all seems ok in that respect. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:44, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] This page sucks

I want to add citations to an article. Learning how to do this is WAY TOO DIFFICULT. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Full Decent (talk • contribs) 01:01, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

Then don't use the citation template. Add the citation information in any way you see fit so that a reader can find the source. Citation templates can help with a uniform citation format, but the use of citation templates is neither encouraged nor discouraged. It's far better to include a citation in a format inconsistent with the rest of the page (that can be cleaned up later) than not to include the basic citation information. Ashill (talk) 04:01, 25 February 2008 (UTC)
I read FullDecent's comment to mean 'citing sources is in general "difficult"', or that the documentation isn't very good. After all, there is nothing particularly "difficult" about 'last', 'first', 'title' and 'year', but perhaps these basic params go under in the doc. -- Fullstop (talk) 09:18, 25 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] parameter request

The current version has the following lines:

|Surname2 = {{{last2|{{{surname2|{{{author2|}}}}}}}}}
|Surname3 = {{{last3|{{{surname3|{{{author3|}}}}}}}}}
|Surname4 = {{{last4|{{{surname4|{{{author4|}}}}}}}}}

The parameters author, author2, etc. are useful for the Japanese version, because the Japanese name order is surname-givenname and the parameters first, first2, etc. are not used.

Similarly, since the Japanese version doesn't use the parameters editor-first, editor2-first, etc., could you please add the bold letters shown below?

|EditorSurname2 = {{{editor2-last|{{{editor2-surname| {{{editor2|}}} }}}}}}
|EditorSurname3 = {{{editor3-last|{{{editor3-surname| {{{editor3|}}} }}}}}}
|EditorSurname4 = {{{editor4-last|{{{editor4-surname| {{{editor4|}}} }}}}}}

Also, why don't you insert a space every three braces? I think "}}} }}} }}}" looks better than "}}}}}}}}}". - TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 09:54, 25 February 2008 (UTC)


When you define contribution-url but not url, the parameter accessdate doesn't work. Is that a supposed behavior?

  1. “ibidem”, Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1), <http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ibidem>. Retrieved on 27 February 2008 
  2. “ibidem”, Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) 

- TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 08:10, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, url= "moves" to chapter-url= when chapter= is provided but chapter-url= is not. This is intentional (and good thinking by whoever wrote it).
See e.g. "= Title of included work =" section in Citation/core
Yes, access-date only appears when url= is defined. This is a bug.
See top #if condition of last section in Citation/core, which should instead read #if: {{{URL|{{{IncludedWorkURL|}}}}}}
-- Fullstop (talk) 09:09, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] PMID

{{editprotected}} For support for PubMed identifiers, please add...
(additions are in green, existing stuff [for context] in grey)

1. in {{Citation}}...

   |OCLC={{{oclc|{{{OCLC|}}}}}}
   |PMID={{{pmid|{{{PMID|}}}}}}
   |DOI={{{doi|{{{DOI|}}}}}}

2. in {{Citation/core}}

     #if: {{{DOI|}}} |&rft_id=info:doi/{{urlencode:{{{DOI}}}}}
   }}{{
     #if: {{{PMID|}}} |&rft_id=info:pmid/{{urlencode:{{{PMID}}}}}
   }}{{
     #if: {{{ISBN|}}} |&rft.isbn={{urlencode:{{{ISBN}}}}}
   }}{{

3. in {{Citation/core}} (note: linkage is not necessary because "PMID \d+" is mediawiki magic)

   <!--============ OCLC ============-->
     #if: {{{OCLC|}}}
     |, [[OCLC]] [http://worldcat.org/oclc/{{urlencode:{{{OCLC}}}}} {{{OCLC}}}]
   }}{{
    <!--============ PMID ============-->
      #if: {{{PMID|}}}
      |, PMID {{{PMID}}}
    }}{{
   <!--============ DOI ============-->

Optional in {{Citation/core}} (occurs 5 times)

   |{{
      #if: {{{DOI|}}}
      |http://dx.doi.org/{{urlencode:{{{DOI}}}}}
      |{{
         #if {{{PMID|}}}
         | http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/{{urlencode:{{{PMID}}}}}
       }}
   }}

Thanks -- Fullstop (talk) 12:25, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

Y Done, but note that you made a tiny but catastropic error - please make a sandbox copy of the code and thoroughly test changes like this before asking that they be made live. Happy‑melon 15:44, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
sorry about that. (ps: I did test it on my personal wiki... I must have dropped the colon while formatting it here). -- Fullstop (talk) 16:24, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
The template still appears to be broken. See, for instance, "Bucentaur#Articles". — Cheers, JackLee –talk– 16:00, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
Um, would you also tell us what you think is wrong? :) The reason why the Shakespeare Quarterly citation appears incomplete is because its missing the author= and year= fields (and the pages= range is incomplete too) (also: the wikilink around journal= breaks COinS). -- Fullstop (talk) 16:24, 3 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Language redux

There's been a request to add a "language" parameter, similar to the one used by other cite templates. It's probably been missed, since it's several screens up the page. Thought I'd re-up the request here. -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 15:21, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

How might a language= parameter might be useful to a reader? I may be missing something (and here I assume that editors are not so crazy as to translate titles), but from a source's title it will be be obvious to a reader whether a source is/isn't in English. That is, a reader will recognize the language if he/she can comprehend what the title says. Inversely, only knowing what language a text is in is not going to help read that source.
I am also not aware of any stylesheet manual that describes how a source's language is cited, and I'd be surprised if one did: After all, the point of a citation is not to describe the source, but to lead the reader as closely to the source as possible. A language= param wouldn't contribute to that.
-- Fullstop (talk) 16:58, 22 March 2008 (UTC)
Yes we are "crazy as to translate titles", but fortunately often done for us. Hence at {{cite journal}} when referencing biomedical papers and using Dibberi's tool to provide citation details from PubMed. The title & abstract are given in English, but the full paper may not have been translated at all,
Hence: {{cite journal |author=Qiu YM, Luo YL, Lai WY, Qiu SJ |title=[Association between ADAM33 gene polymorphism and bronchial asthma in South China Han population] |language=Chinese |journal=Nan Fang Yi Ke Da Xue Xue Bao |volume=27 |issue=4 |pages=485-7 |year=2007 |pmid=17545039 |doi= |url=http://www.jfmmu.com/pdf2/200704/200704485.pdf |format=PDF}}
Gives: Qiu YM, Luo YL, Lai WY, Qiu SJ (2007). "[Association between ADAM33 gene polymorphism and bronchial asthma in South China Han population]" (in Chinese) (PDF). Nan Fang Yi Ke Da Xue Xue Bao 27 (4): 485-7. PMID 17545039. 
The PMID 17545039 link is to abstract in English, the full article is as per the PDF link (but NB acrobat reader wanted to do a 11MB download to shown the simplified Chinese font - I declined).
So yes might link to a source where a meaningful English title that English Wikipedia readers can see, but they need warning that they may well not be able to read the original full source. David Ruben Talk 23:36, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] series number

currently this template uses a series parameter and a volume parameter. volume seems to apply to the volumes of multi-volume books. However, there are also single-volume books that are part of multi-volume series (sometimes called volume, sometimes called number, depending on the publisher). The template doesnt seem to be able to handle this distinction. Does there need to be a series-volume or series-number parameter? So, is there some other way to indicate. – ishwar  (speak) 04:00, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Not ideal, but I've used title (seriestitle XXI) before. As in
West, Edward William (1880), Müller, Max, ed., Pahlavi Texts, vol. I (SBE, vol 5), Oxford: OUP 
Let me know if you come up with a better idea. More often than not, I just drop the series info, since in the field I dabble in, most books are part of some series anyway and series:author (rather than title:author & series:editor) association is doesn't really happen anyway. YMMV of course. -- Fullstop (talk) 01:50, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
Yes, it would be an option to simply omit the series info. But, some authors occasionally refer to works by the series name and its series number instead of the title (for example, Marianne Mithun's book The languages of native North America generally cites all of her bibliographic entries this way). For this reason, I always try to cite a full citation including the series name & number. And, it is for this reason that I generally dont use citation templates (they not being flexible enough).
You could also do what you have suggested above by parenthetically adding series & series number to the title name. But, I would have thought that a template should be able to organize this information with a separate parameter since it uses a separate parameter for title, for author, etc. (otherwise, you could just be everything — the author, date, the publisher — under title.)
The only answer I see is to have both a title-volume parameter and a series-volume (or series-number) parameter. Well, if consistency is the goal, then it's the only answer I see. I think that the template should be able to handle any type of citation. – ishwar  (speak) 03:23, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Complete documentation

Wasn't there a discussion (somewhere) about adding documentation to this template for citing web sites, television, and so on? There is documentation at Wikipedia:Citation templates but none here. Is someone still working on this? (See Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#.7B.7BCitation.7D.7D_and other citation templates) ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 05:31, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

There was something at Template:Citation/doc/draft but it got nuked before I could save it elsewhere. -- Fullstop (talk) 01:59, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
I'd be happy to restore the page for you if you want to work on it. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 12:37, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
Did the deleted sub-page get un-deleted and userfied? If so, where is it? --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 00:54, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The month is not displayed

When you are citing a journal using a month/year format, the month does not get printed. An omission? --Adoniscik(t, c) 01:23, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

Example please where it appears to not work? -- Fullstop (talk) 01:57, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

{{citation|journal=Transactions of the Bigwig Society|first=John|last=Doe|month=January|year=2008|title=I shot the Wiki admin, but I didn't kill the deputy}} , which becomes:

Doe, John (2008), “I shot the Wiki admin, but I didn't kill the deputy”, Transactions of the Bigwig Society 

It expects you to enter the "date" too, for some reason. --Adoniscik(t, c) 02:04, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

There is no month= parameter. You'd want to do this:
{{citation|journal=Transactions of the Bigwig Society|first=John|last=Doe|date=January 2008|year=2008|title=I shot the Wiki admin, but I didn't kill the deputy}}
=>Doe, John (January 2008), “I shot the Wiki admin, but I didn't kill the deputy”, Transactions of the Bigwig Society 
or this:
{{citation|journal=Transactions of the Bigwig Society|first=John|last=Doe|volume=10|issue=January 2008|year=2008|title=I shot the Wiki admin, but I didn't kill the deputy}}
=>Doe, John (2008), “I shot the Wiki admin, but I didn't kill the deputy”, Transactions of the Bigwig Society 10 (January 2008) 
If you don't have a volume number it will also not display as "(no. January 2008)". The second option is formally correct, but if you go with the first option, provide the year= field anyway to be on the safe side. -- Fullstop (talk) 02:20, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

That's funny, 'coz one of the examples in the docs mention the month parameter. Why isn't there one anyway? Can we add it? --Adoniscik(t, c) 02:40, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

That is indeed strange. Perhaps its a throwback to the days when someone was working out what was needed and what wasn't. Its not needed since date= is more generic/flexible, as whoever wrote that example (User:COGDEN?) appears to have noticed too ;). You might want to get his take on it. -- Fullstop (talk) 03:59, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

I think it's awkward because you have to specify the year anyway for purposes of the harv template (which is the only good reason to use "citation" anyway), so why not finish it off with a month field? --Adoniscik(t, c) 04:27, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Archiving

This 198kb talk page was in need of archiving. It already had Archives 1-3 with the third covering Dec-06 to Nov-07, so I've just appended on the Mar-07 to Dec-07 that needed shifting from here (see Template talk:Cite journal/Archive 3#Archiving April 2008) - no way was I going to try and merge into time order :-) David Ruben Talk 12:35, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] It's been approaching 3 months, and the accessdate formating is still broken

Instead of waiting for a fix of bug 4582, which doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon, why not wikilink accessdate in the template, like most, if not all, of the {{cite}} templates do, adjust the docs to require unlinked ISO 8601 YYYY-MM-DD format, and send somebody's bot around to convert everything accessdate=[non-ISO 8601 date] to accessdate=[ISO 8601 date]? With many, if not most date pref settings, the accessdate currently displays in a different format than the other date(s) in the template/on the page. Shawisland (talk) 05:41, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Citing book - I don't want "et al."

I'm citing a book with four authors. How come the forth author is replaced with "et al."? I want the four of them to appear in the citation.

Audette, Ray V.; Gilchrist, Troy; Audette, Raymond V. & Eades, Michael R. (2000), Neanderthin : Eat Like a Caveman to Achieve a Lean, Strong, Healthy Body, New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks, ISBN 0312975910 

--Phenylalanine (talk) 01:34, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree. And we have a solution; it just needs implementation. See "et al again" above. Maybe we can ask JackSchmidt (or someone else who understands template magic better than I do) to merge his changes into the main template? It's been two months and nobody has objected to the proposed change. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:57, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Good idea. --Phenylalanine (talk) 02:02, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
I encourage you to do this as well. Sometimes, you just want to know the authors' names. If the citation is used to refer to the source of an interesting bit of data, one might be interested in seeing if one of the authors wrote any other books or articles. Knowing the fourth or fifth author makes this easier because you dont have to go get the book to find out those other names. – ishwar  (speak) 03:27, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I went ahead and did the merge, since it needed an admin to do it. I hope I haven't broken something else in the process... —David Eppstein (talk) 03:44, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! --Phenylalanine (talk) 10:13, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
Thanks from me as well. JackSchmidt (talk) 19:51, 18 April 2008 (UTC)
Strong object I have been using the Citation template extensively in articles such as General relativity. Now, all of a sudden, in the middle of a peer review and heading for FAC, I notice that all my "et al." are gone, and I find further, upon looking up this talk page, that the reason for this appears to be that the template has been changed. I think that's not a good idea, and frankly, the fact that nobody has objected here on the talk page up until now means very little – I would think that only very few editors watch the pages of all the templates they use; that doesn't mean those editors won't object to changes when you pull some function of the template out from under their feet.
In this case, I am convinced that many other editors did as I did, that is: they list only the first four authors of an article with more than four authors (the last article I entered had 26), and rely on the template's "et al." automatism to take care of the rest – if I remember correctly, the Harvnb template won't even work properly if the Citation lists more than the first four authors. Which means that, with this change you made, there are now very probably a great number of citations which are simply wrong – they list four authors only, with no et al., for articles that have more authors than that. So please, please change it back. If you want the option of not having et al., fine – introduce an extra switch or something, but please do not change the default in a way that is likely to break a great number of references. Given the current state of wikipedia, there's quite enough to do when it comes to adding proper citations and references. Please be so kind as not to make that work any harder and frustrating than it is already. Markus Poessel (talk) 01:40, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
Markus has very valid points. And yes, I too list all authors (my max was only 15 though). ::Perhaps a compromise can be reached in that the full list appears only in a print version? This could be accomplished with a little CSS magic. -- Fullstop (talk) 02:11, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

I believe a reasonable workaround would be to make lastn=others, and omit firstn. E.g.

{{Citation |last=Audette |first=Ray V. |last2=Gilchrist |first2=Troy |last3=Audette |first3=Raymond V. |last4=others |date=2000 |title=Neanderthin : Eat Like a Caveman to Achieve a Lean, Strong, Healthy Body |place=New York |publisher=St. Martin's Paperbacks |isbn =0312975910}}

becomes

Audette, Ray V.; Gilchrist, Troy; Audette, Raymond V. & others (2000), Neanderthin : Eat Like a Caveman to Achieve a Lean, Strong, Healthy Body, New York: St. Martin's Paperbacks, ISBN 0312975910 .

Let that be your "extra switch". —David Eppstein (talk) 02:50, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

As I said, this probably affects everyone who used Harvnb and the old Citation – we could be talking about hundreds of citations that would need to be changed, with no way of knowing which those are. And frankly, even if we could find out who all the other editors were, I think it would be pretty rude to go to all of them and basically say "thank you for putting in citations, and for using proper templates to do so; as a reward, here's some extra tedious work for you." Surely the only thing that makes sense is backwards compatibility – reprogram the template so that a) it doesn't break anything that's already out there, and b) it gives the needed extra functionality (leaving out the et al.) to those who asked for it. Also, there is the issue that WP:CITE explicitly lists Harvard referencing as a citation option (mentioning that it is "the most commonly used reference method in the physical and social sciences"). So leaving users of the Citation template without a proper way of implementing this citation style, well, if your goal is to try and discourage people to put in proper citations, you're on the right track. Markus Poessel (talk) 14:40, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
I don't know what you're on about regarding Harvard referencing. The {{harv}} series of templates haven't changed, nor has the code in this template that makes the link names that the harv templates refer to. The only difference is which authors are displayed in the actual citation. And, by the way, all the citations that listed full author sets for papers, beyond the first three (and there are many of them; I added plenty of them myself) now work, and would be back to their earlier broken state if we added an explicit switch that had to be included in the template to get the non-broken behavior. So that same argument cuts both ways. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:02, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
Putting "others" as an author should never be done. It will make the machine-readable metadata incorrect. I don't see any reason why this template shouldn't use the et al. style for its display. The key to using citation templates is to type in all the data correctly and then, unless it is actively broken, ignore how the overall output looks, leaving that to whoever wrote the template. If an individual editor simply prefers a different style, there's no requirement they must use the templates in the first place. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:26, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
I strongly disagree. The point is that the physicists didn't type the data correctly (and can't do so) because they have papers with thousands of authors. A list of authors that ends with an explicit ellipsis like "others" (and, by the way, "others" is the prescribed method of indicating this in bibtex files as well) is better than one that includes four authors and then stops with no indication that there are really 996 more of them not listed. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:35, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
Yeah, as far as I can tell the only problem is with those uses of the citation template that included only 4 out of n (n greater than 4) authors, and depended on the old behaviour to hide the omission. The use of the {{harv}} templates is completely unaffected. Only the first four authors are used to make the link anchor that the {{harv}} template links to. To me it seems (1) not terrible that "et al." is missing on 4 out of 25 author papers, (2) better to set last4 (or last15 or whatever) to "others" if there are authors missing. For (2), this sounds sane if only because "others" is shorter than the n'th authors full name, which is not going to be displayed anyways.
I probably don't have time to cook up the code for this, but it might not be too hard to include another argument to the template, maybe "numauths" or something, which logically defaults to:
  • 1 if there is no Surname2 (by the time we get to core)
  • 2 if there is no Surname3
  • 3 if there is no Surname4
  • infinity if there is a Surname4 (I think infinity=10 would suffice with the current code, but infinity=999 should be more future proof)
Then, the et al. would be displayed exactly if numauths was greater than the number of Surnames given. For the fairly common case of 4 author works, the bibliographers would be forced to add numauths=4 to get rid of the annoying "et al." refering to precisely one author, but those who were used to the default behaviour would not need to make any changes.
Editting the template code takes a little more concentration than I can give in the next month, but the change is in principle simple. Just give {{citation}} and {{citation/core}} a new argument, do the three deep nested if to set its default value, then change the #if: {{{Given4|}}} guys to include the numauths condition (and I think switch to Surname detection, but I would need to check {{citation}} again). The sea of braces is too much for my tired eyes this month, but if noone here can put something together better than a revert, I'll create a quick version that handles only MP's complaint. JackSchmidt (talk) 15:36, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
Yes, this is a much better fix - we should use template parameter names to specify conditions, not the contents of their arguments. What if there is an author named "other"? — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:46, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
Just to clarify my problem: Back when I put in my citations, I found by trial-and-error that I didn't get the proper behavior out of Harvnb if I included more than exactly the first four authors in the Citation template, and the same four names into the Harvnb template – the link from Harvnb to the Citation wouldn't come out right. That's why I assume that others did the same. If someone could implement the fix sketched by Jack Schmidt, I'd be most grateful. Markus Poessel (talk) 16:03, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
It should still be the case that you need to specify exactly four names in {{harvnb}}, and at least four names in {{citation}}. If this change broke your Harvard templates, that was unintended and should be fixed. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:33, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
"authorX=others" is not a good idea. Fields should not be co-opted to do something they were not intended to do. On the other hand, numauths= is not so good either because it would result in quite a bit of #if-ing. Given that the issue at hand is 'all or 3+et al.', a simple listall= (to override the old et. al. functionality) should suffice.
-- Fullstop (talk) 19:45, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
I think I'm fine with that. The numauths= has the slight advantage that the user can customize how soon the et al. appears, but I suspect the vast majority of people would prefer all or "nothing" (that is, 3). Certainly it is no worse than the current "8 or more are explicit, 9 and higher become 8+et al.". We should document that the "et al." is defined now and forever to occur after the first 3 authors or not at all (on this particular template), to avoid biting MP and other science editors. JackSchmidt (talk) 20:14, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
Yes, that sounds sensible. Also, the numauths/listall possibility could coalesce as a parameter named etal=, with a value of 'off' to turn it off. Then, if more flexibility than just 'off' or 3 (default) is desired, someone could still implement etal=8 for 8+et al, or whatever. -- Fullstop (talk) 20:52, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
Perfect. Right now, just have it be yes/no and only hook it enough to show 3+etal or all. Later on when my eyes are better or when there is actually a pressing need, the etal=8 can be added, hooking "yes" etc. to be 3. This also fairly clearly says "don't set first4=et al." to someone who only reads the parameter names, addressing CBM's concern. It also addresses my concern for metadata: if you omit the authors in the template, they will, a fortiori, be omitted from the metadata. Having the et al. parameter also allows future generations to say "we want better metadata, you should set etal to (whatever) if authors are omitted, so the new metadata scheme can properly encode this." Right now, the current method is probably fine. JackSchmidt (talk) 22:53, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for all your efforts – I appreciate what you're doing here. There's one more thing I noticed. WP:CITE gives the following guideline for Harvard referencing: "For two authors, use (Smith & Jones 2005); for three or more authors, use (Smith et al. 2005).". I'm used to doing the same in the reference section, namely: for the three authors of Smith et al. 2005, I would only list Smith and then et al.: "Smith, J., et al. (2005): Dutch Citing Practices. Harvard University Press." – this is also how it is listed in http://libweb.anglia.ac.uk/referencing/harvard.htm?harvard_id=27#27 (given as a link in the WP Harvard Referencing article). Yet Citation, in this case, would list the first three authors explicitly, and only then add et al. – is this deliberate? Is this a different citation style? Markus Poessel (talk) 00:25, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Questions

  • What citation-style (APA, MLA...) is the template "Citation"?
  • Is the template "Citation" equivalent to the other citation templates (cite book, cite journal...) in terms of the citation-style (APA, MLA...)?
  • Why does Wikipedia use multiple templates for the same purpose (citing books, journals...)?
  • Why isn't Wikipedia consistent in its use of citation templates across articles (some articles use "Cite book", others use "Citation" to cite books, etc.)?

--Phenylalanine (talk) 11:50, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

--Karnesky (talk) 20:51, 20 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi, thanks for the response. By "article location", do you mean the location of journal articles, via pmid and doi? But I don't see how that has anything to do with citation-style. Do Britannica, Grolier and Encarta use their own citation-style? Avoiding well-established citation methods seems unprofessional, the varying and inconsistent use of such methods across Wikipedia is even more so! Just my opinion. --Phenylalanine (talk) 07:37, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
1. If you have concrete suggestions with respect to how we can make things better (read: more compliant) then please list them. For technical reasons (and as Karnesky has already noted), not all of them may be implementable, but I will address them if I can.
2. Wikipedia has multiple templates for historical reasons, and are retained because some people feel very strongly about doing things the way they are accustomed to doing things.
-- Fullstop (talk) 18:50, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
I propose that all redundant citation templates be deleted and that WP make mandatory one particular method of citation, preferably one that is compliant with well established standards, such as MLA or APA... The current wishy-washy attitude with respect to citation styles is totally inappropriate for an encyclopedia.--Phenylalanine (talk) 20:44, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
Please define which styles are 'redundant,' propose how to fix all of the articles that use them before the templates are deleted, and explain why we would want to switch to a style less suited to us (since they contain less information that assists in locating articles (especially online)). I think it might be better to just fix inconsistencies where you see them. --Karnesky (talk) 14:12, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
While I think that our needs differ from those of other encyclopedias, I'd welcome you to state the exact citation styles you think your examples use. Divergence from APA and MLA are incredibly common even in the print world--look at the number of styles included with reference management software.
I think this is almost a special case of WP:ENGVAR. In any case, I don't know what you are trying to accomplish by commenting on a single template page--this would require a more centralized discussion (perhaps on the talk page for the style guideline WP:CITE, since that guideline would have to be edited if others agreed with you). --Karnesky (talk) 14:12, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia_talk:Citing_sources/Archive_12#Why_do_we_allow_so_many_different_styles?, Wikipedia_talk:Citing_sources/Archive_13#My_preference_for_citation, Wikipedia_talk:Citing_sources/Archive_15#Choose_a_style!, Wikipedia_talk:Citing_sources/Archive_16#Multiple_formats? (just a few of many other discussions similar to this). --Karnesky (talk) 14:30, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the links. I agree that additional parameters are useful for linking to external and internal pages, but there is no reason why we can't simply add them on to citations that are formatted using APA or MLA (or other widely used) styles. Also, I think the transition on Wikipedia to a style such APA need not be abrupt. We can start by recommending the style for new articles and by encouraging changes to old articles provided the're not controversial. Some time later, we can turn the recommendation into a rule and start enforcing it through FAC and FAR, etc. By the way, I don't know much about how templates work and how to change them, so I'm being purposefully vague here. --Phenylalanine (talk) 23:30, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
There are already subsets of Wikipedia that have essentially given up on the FAC/FAR process due to an overemphasis there on form over content. We don't need to make the problem worse. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:47, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
Management of volunteer organisations is a complicated matter. Deleting thousands of hours of volunteer labor and then violating established policies like WP:PILLAR by adding some new mandatory rule for editing, in order to gain only a small amount of traditional typographic conformance is not a good management decision.
In another direction, the rigid rules of LCSH has produced a scheme that does not scale well today's information resulting in rigid rules that no one has time to apply. The more liquid and responsive "keyword tagging" has adapted to this environment. With several million articles, and new articles coming in at more than one per second, a flexible method of citation is needed in order to keep up with the large number of unsourced articles.
In other words, until the backlog at Category:Articles needing additional references is more under control, there is little gain in declaring rules for citations. JackSchmidt (talk) 21:04, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
What do we have to lose by at least "recommending" one particular citation style right now??? and not in 10 years, when Wikipedia will have tripled in size, and we will have an even bigger task on our hands. --Phenylalanine (talk) 10:13, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
While I agree with you in principle, there isn't any reason why the present status-quo can't continue indefinitely. But if you think that there ought to be a recommendation, then file a proposal to do so at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals). Keep existing habits in mind if you do so, and remember that there is some {{cite xyz}} functionality that {{citation}} cannot presently (or should not ever) duplicate but that some editors will insist on anyway.
Perhaps it would be good idea to first build a "translation" map, i.e. demonstrate how each call to {{cite xyz}} might translate into a call to {{citation[/core]}}. Besides exposing the functionality that needs to be added to {{citation[/core]}} for compatibility, it will be necessary for any argument towards a recommendation. -- Fullstop (talk) 15:00, 25 April 2008 (UTC)
Thanks. --Phenylalanine (talk) 23:46, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] COinS location

When the COinS span tag wraps around content, that content is replaced by things like OpenURL Referrer extension. So when you wrap it around the reference, the entire reference is removed and replaced with a link.  :) It's supposed to be at the end, enclosing nothing, but Mediawiki strips out tags that enclose nothing, so we enclose a non-breaking space. See [2]. Surrounding an nbsp is the only thing that works on Mediawiki. We might be able to get away with a comment instead? I'm not sure if this would always work. I know Tidy is turned on and off sometimes. — Omegatron (talk) 05:26, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

If I'm reading you correctly, you're suggesting that the end </span> be moved up to after the beginning <span class="Z3988" title="...">, right? -- Fullstop (talk) 18:57, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
Fullstop, I don't quite understand what you mean, but I think you're not quite right. I think that Omegatron is referring to this edit of his to Template:Citation/core. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 20:16, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
Ah, thanks. I didn't put two and two together. But I wasn't far off... Omegatron moved the <span> to the end, while I thought he was suggesting to move the </span> up (so that the cite followed the COinS span). -- Fullstop (talk) 00:17, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
People have tried to wrap the COinS span around the content of several templates a few times now. One reason they have done this is that they want to associate the COinS more with the human-readable reference. The only response to that is to say that COinS does not work that way. A second reason is that they find the non-breaking space to be unaesthetic. A work-around to this seems to be to use
<span style="display: none;">&nbsp;</span>
within the COinS span, a'la Template:Cite journal. For browsers that can render CSS, there will be no "extraneous" space. Tools that replace the contents of the COinS span will replace the hidden span too, so that the link will still be visible. Tools that place a link adjacent to the contents of a COinS span will place it outside of the hidden span. --Karnesky (talk) 21:55, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
  • COinS is supposed to be empty, by design. It's not something you wrap around things, unless you're wrapping it around something that you want to be replaced by COinS-reading tools.
  • display:none; also doesn't work, because it causes the button or icon to be hidden as well. The only thing that works right now is a non-breaking space. Someone could petition the developers for another solution... — Omegatron (talk) 23:56, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
Um, if an extension is replacing the entire contents of the span, then ...
<span class="Z3988" title="..."><span style="display: none;">&nbsp;</span></span>
ought to work fine, no? -- Fullstop (talk) 00:17, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
  • I agree & this is how I've implemented it in refbase and why I said what I did in my first point.
  • You're mistaken regarding my second point. It is true that if you applied the display:none to the COinS span or to a span that contained the COinS span that the link would be invisible. But if you apply it to a span that is contained within the COinS span, it will be replaced too (just as Fullstop states). --Karnesky (talk) 00:31, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Karnesky's idea is great. Gets rid of the whitespace while not being stripped by Tidy and is replaced correctly by OpenURL Referrer:

  1. Empty COinS tag:
  2. Space inside COinS tag:
  3. Comment inside COinS tag:
  4. nbsp inside COinS tag:  
  5. nbsp inside display:none COinS tag:
  6. nbsp inside display:none span tag inside COinS tag:  

— Omegatron (talk) 00:40, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes--Currently, 1-3 are removed by tidy, 4 works & is what we have on many templates (including this one), 5 is not removed by tidy, but LibX (and presumably OpenURL Referrer & other tools) fail to render it (as it is hidden), and 6 works well. 6 is what I encouraged Template:Cite journal to use & I see no reason not to use it on other templates (including this one) too. --Karnesky (talk) 00:45, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
I made the suggested change. I've never used COinS before, so I installed zotero to make sure I didn't make a mistake (and because I wanted to have a look anyway). The non-breaking space is indeed not displayed, and zotero can still find all the information. Omegatron or Karnesky, could you please check whether I didn't break anything? Cheers, Jitse Niesen (talk) 13:05, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
It appears to be fine. Thanks for the super-fast response to GeometryGuy. -- Fullstop (talk) 13:12, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Link accessdate

Can someone please link the accessdate for this template? As it says in the documentation, the ISO standard version for dates is preferred. Since this is what the template expects, could we please have it like {{cite web}} so that linked OR unlinked ISO dates both work, and are automatically linked either way? Right now, it shows the dates, but they are NOT formatted properly. There should also be a period after citations. If how it currently operates is the proper format for these fields, then please disregard this message. Thanks! Gary King (talk) 07:42, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Also, shouldn't there be a period at the end of citations? Gary King (talk) 04:45, 9 May 2008 (UTC)
By now that would be difficult to change. Many articles put in the periods explicitly after this template, because it's not already included. And in some situations, it's useful to be able to tack additional material onto the end of the citation, outside of the template, by using punctuation other than a period. I think we're just going to have to live with that minor inconsistency between this and the {{cite}} series of templates. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:27, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Recent change whitespace

A recent change seems to have resulted in whitespace being added to the end of citation templates. This is unfortunate as many authors prefer to end references with a period, see e.g., Mario Vargas Llosa. Could someone who knows the code track it down? Thanks, Geometry guy 11:04, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

See #COinS location above. Summary: I implemented the suggested fix, so the whitespace should no longer be there. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 13:05, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
Yes, many thanks indeed for the fast response Jitse! Geometry guy 08:27, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion about DOIs over on WP:AN

There's an ongoing discussion relevant to this template at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#DOI bot blocked for policy reconsideration. Partly it's about whether the bot is sufficiently unbuggy to be allowed to run as a bot, but some people over there seem to feel that DOIs are an evil to be eradicated altogether from Wikipedia. (I disagree, but let's not have the same discussion here.) —David Eppstein (talk) 03:27, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] parameter request - LCCN numbers

It would be handy if this template supported Library of Congress Control Numbers. The support would not need to be any more sophisticated than the support for OCLCs. An example of a LCCN is "08035502". An example of a LCCN URL is

http://lccn.loc.gov/08035502

--❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 13:21, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] documentation request - web example needed

Apologies if the article gives one, but I could not find an explicit example of citing a web site. It mentions web-site at the top but I could not fathom it. None of these sections fits for a web cite:

  1. Citing books
  2. Citing journals, newspapers, magazines, or other periodicals
  3. Citing edited books, or parts of edited books, including encyclopedias and encyclopedia articles
  4. Citing contributions, republications, or edited quotations in a periodical article

I have a second query related to URLs that are incompatible with wikimedia software, ie. those containing brackets. Here is the example I have failed to wikify:

http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-545269

I have resorted to using WebCite and nowiki tags like this:

Privacy International. Leading surveillance societies in the EU and the World 2007. 2008-05-15. URL:http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-559597. Accessed: 2008-05-15. (Archived by WebCite® at http://www.webcitation.org/5XpxPOdbb)

Notice the URL contains [ and ]. Thank you for any pointers. -84user (talk) 15:49, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

A web page is just another source. It does not require special handling.
So, use...
{{citation|editor-last=Rotenberg|editor-first=Marc|chapter=Leading surveillance societies in the EU and the World 2006|title=Privacy and Human Rights 2005|year=2006|publisher=Privacy International|location=London|chapter-url=http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd%5B347%5D=x-347-545269}}
which gives...
Rotenberg, Marc, ed. (2006), “Leading surveillance societies in the EU and the World 2006”, Privacy and Human Rights 2005, London: Privacy International 
The '[' and ']' square brackets need to be encoded as %5B and %5D respectively.
The archive link is not valid, since it is not referring to the same document. But not only should you should use archives when possible, the link is for PHR2007, i.e. newer than the 2005 version.
So, use...
{{citation|editor-last=Rotenberg|editor-first=Marc|chapter=Map of surveillance societies around the world|title=Privacy and Human Rights 2007|year=2008|publisher=Privacy International|location=London|url=http://www.webcitation.org/5XpxPOdbb}}
which gives...
Rotenberg, Marc, ed. (2008), “Map of surveillance societies around the world”, Privacy and Human Rights 2007, London: Privacy International, <http://www.webcitation.org/5XpxPOdbb> 
-- Fullstop (talk) 16:29, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Thank you, the method of using hexadecimal code is an excellent solution to URLs such as these, and the example of template use is helpful.

Yes, I gave the direct link to the 2006 survey and the WebCite archive link to the 2007 rankings published online in December 2007. I am confused about Privacy International's year numbers though, I see you found the editor name from the PHR2006 Forward here:

http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd%5B347%5D=x-347-559059&als%5Btheme%5D=Privacy%20and%20Human%20Rights

That looks Ok for 2006.

But I could not locate an editor for 2007 (except for a simple "Privacy International"), so have I understood the 2007 edition links correctly? The "Leading surveillance societies in the EU and the World 2007" at

http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd%5B347%5D=x-347-559597

shows a 2007 map, rankings and a summary. It also states "The most recent report published in 2007, available at http://www.privacyinternational.org/phr ". That phr page has "Privacy and Human Rights 2006". Therefore it seems (but I am not sure) that the 559597 link is a taster for the 2007 edition, yet to be published in print and also not online yet. The EPIC web site it links to here: http://epic.org/phr06/ shows the Privacy and Human Rights 2006 edition, published in September 2007 (ISBN:8930442897).

It appears that PI publishes each year's report late the following year, and also online some months afterwards, so I would expect edition 2007 to appear late 2008. Does this seem right, and if so would it be Ok to just use PI as the editor? -84user (talk) 20:41, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

Good catch with the later publication of the PHR. However, it appears that the 559597 file is one of a series distinct from the PHRs (but like it also appears to be published annually).
The 2007 edition of this report is titled "Leading surveillance societies in the EU and the World 2007" and dated 28 December 2007. (Similarly, the x-347-545269 link that you originally noted appears to be from the 2006 edition of the same series).
As for the editor of a "current" version,... you could use the current director/deputy director.
Taking these three points into account you'd get...
{{citation|editor-last=Davies|editor-first=Simon|editor2-last=Banisar|editor2-first=David|chapter=Map of surveillance societies around the world|title=Leading surveillance societies in the EU and the World 2007|year=2007|publisher=Privacy International|location=London|url=http://www.webcitation.org/5XpxPOdbb}}
yielding...
Davies, Simon & Banisar, David, eds. (2007), “Map of surveillance societies around the world”, Leading surveillance societies in the EU and the World 2007, London: Privacy International, <http://www.webcitation.org/5XpxPOdbb> 
you could also add a chapter-url=http://www.privacyinternational.org/survey/rankings2007/map.jpg if you wish.
-- Fullstop (talk) 21:36, 15 May 2008 (UTC)


[edit] Wikilinked access dates

Access dates display Wikilinked, but the main page of this template specifies unlinked. What gives? See [3] for example, where the dates were just changed from the way they were entered originally (August 6, 2006) to the ISO format (2006-08-06) and they automatically are Wikilinked, and I see no way to-unlink them to comply with this template. Either change the language to call for linking, or change the code of the template. Thanks. Edison (talk) 18:27, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Retrieval dates for online versions of old printed sources, again

Please contribute to this discussion at Citing sources: Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#Retrieval dates for online versions of old printed sources, again --EnOreg (talk) 16:15, 26 May 2008 (UTC)

Consensus: We have a consensus that access dates for online copies of offline sources, while helpful as a comment in the source, should be hidden from the reader. Could somebody who is competent to adapt the citation templates please do so? The idea is to keep the access date as a template parameter but remove the code that displays it. Thanks, --EnOreg (talk) 09:20, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Object. There may be some consensus to do this for "non-web" sources, but "citation" is a generic template & is sometimes used to cite the very "in flux," web-based sources that an accessdate is an important aid for. --Karnesky (talk) 13:16, 5 June 2008 (UTC)
Point taken. I guess it is not viable to refer users to the cite web template for this case? I hope the template experts here will help find a creative solution. Maybe an access date visible flag? Or simply a recommendation to use the access date parameter exclusively for web-only sources while moving it to a comment for all other links? Cheers, --EnOreg (talk) 13:27, 5 June 2008 (UTC)
If the access date is hidden for templates where most resources have physical manifestations, it might be appropriate to:
  • Alter the template instructions (as you suggest)
  • Hide the parameter when a "physical identifier" (e.g. isbn) is provided
I do not think an extra flag to change whether or not the parameter is visible is very useful--it doesn't fix old entries, raises debate about what the default should be, and would most likely be neglected by future editors. --Karnesky (talk) 14:28, 5 June 2008 (UTC)

Can we keep the discussion in the above linked thread where everyone can see it? — Omegatron (talk) 17:32, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Typographic quotation marks

Can we change this to include real quotation marks (“ ”) around a title, instead of the typewriter quotes (" ")? As long as there is no need for an editor to fiddle with the typography, why shouldn't it look as professional as possible? Might even help encourage use of the template. —Michael Z. 2008-05-26 19:43 z

That seemed minor enough that I was bold and did it. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:58, 26 May 2008 (UTC)
Thank you! —Michael Z. 2008-05-26 20:38 z

{{edit protected}}

David, please undo that change. It is both formally and syntactically incorrect. Style manuals (APA, MLA, Chicago whatever) prescribe straight quotes for good reason. A title is not a quotation.
-- Fullstop (talk) 16:20, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
The Chicago Manual of Style uses the "real" curly quotes (and not straight quotes). Can't vouch for the others offhand, but I've seen plenty of print bibliographies that do not use straight quotes. --Karnesky (talk) 16:31, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
Additionally: MHRA uses real single quotes (not straight ones). Does APA even use quotation marks? --Karnesky (talk) 16:44, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
N Not done Unless David Eppstein adds them back. There seems to be a good case for the curly quotes, and this is supported by two editors. PeterSymonds (talk) 17:25, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
I just looked at the house styles for math and computer science journals from ten different publishers (eight commercial, two major societies). Two of them use curly quotes. The rest use a bibliography style that does not use quotes. None use straight quotes. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:32, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
hrm. -- (ps Karnesky: right, APA doesn't use quotation marks at all, and APA is what {{citation}} is based on. Also, my 1993 14th Chicago says straight ones). -- Fullstop (talk) 21:54, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
Re. Chicago: Does is specifically state that, or is it just typset that way? If it is just typeset that way, how does it typeset in-text quotations. My source was the online version, which is an HTML version of the 15th edition and contains figures illustrating usage. --Karnesky (talk) 22:15, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
Turabian (old school chicago) 3rd edition, 1970 impression, uses straight quotes for all examples (which are in typewriter font), but uses curly quotes in the fully typeset portion of the book (the main text). JackSchmidt (talk) 02:23, 31 May 2008 (UTC)
ditto. I looked at the online 15th Chicago and it notes that the changes include updates for "current technology," which I assume is a belated recognition of the general availability of GUI-based word processing software. Anyway, that web edition has typographical quotation marks, and since WP is web too, WP is evidently now up to snuff on "current technology" as well. Right? -- Fullstop (talk) 03:04, 31 May 2008 (UTC)
ps: Just an idea: should we switch to Chicago for year/vol+issue positions?

[edit] Help me fix this template at Linus Pauling

Hi, I'm trying to cite the Dunitz reference in-text using the Harvard citation template over at the Linus Pauling, and it's not working. CTRL-F to Dunitz and try the link; it is dead. Yet Dunitz is referenced at the bottom using Citation. ImpIn | (t - c) 09:46, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Should be fixed now. You need to add the year and use only single | characters, like in {{harvcol|Dunitz|1996|p=...}}. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 11:55, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, that was a typo. I don't see why we need the p=. Why not just have the last field automatically be pages? ImpIn | (t - c) 01:17, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
Because page numbers within a Harvard citation and within a bibliography entry mean different things. In the Harvard citation, it indicates the page where that specific fact can be found, but in the bibliography it indicates the range of pages that publication uses within some larger entity (e.g. a chapter within a book, a journal article within an issue of a journal...). —David Eppstein (talk) 01:37, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
I'm talking about the in-text format, though: {{harvcol|Dunitz|1996|p=...}} This page number will always the page to look for in the article. I'm not really following. In this template, I can do "Dunitz" rather than lastname=Dunitz. The same should apply for page number. ImpIn | (t - c) 01:50, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
Oh, you mean why do you have to use "p=" to specify a page number rather than letting it figure it out from the argument order? Because the template is not coded in a smart enough way to distinguish three arguments that give an author, year, and page from three arguments that give an author, second author, and year. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:59, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but it's almost that smart. Everyone who uses this template is going to naturally put author first, date second, and page third. Might as well allow it to recognize the fields like that. Who does the code for this thing, by the way? ImpIn | (t - c) 02:02, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

I just looked up the docs for {{harvcol}}. It claims to be able to handle a third argument with p=, with pp=, or with nothing. Does it not work if you omit the p=? —David Eppstein (talk) 02:07, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
It breaks it. Still lists the page, but the link doesn't go through and it gets outputted as "(Dunitz & 1996 333)" rather than "(Dunitz 1996:333)". ImpIn | (t - c) 23:26, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
Also, it links to #CITEREFDunitz1996333 instead of #CITEREFDunitz1996. -- Boracay Bill (talk) 04:24, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
One needs the p= to distinguish it from pp., to distinguish it from something other than p./pp., and because the p./pp. is not necessarily in the third argument (think multiple authors). -- Fullstop (talk) 03:31, 10 June 2008 (UTC)
It is necessarily the last argument, however. The p/pp could be coded out. ImpIn | (t - c) 23:26, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Bugs with page/pages and doi

Documentation says that "p." or "pp." is automatically prepended to page numbers, but this is not true (as can be seen in examples). Also, nothing is produced when doi= is added; this forced me to switch to the cite journal template (which had other cosmetical problems). --Blaisorblade (talk) 14:58, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

"p." or "pp." are used for book chapters etc., but our style for journal article citations omits them. As for doi, when no other url is present, it should show up as a link on the title of the article; the actual doi code is not shown in that case. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:38, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
Yep, the suppression of p./pp. is intentional for periodicals. And doi works just fine.
{{citation|last = Zemlyachenko|first = V. N.|last2 = Korneenko|first2=N. M.|last3=Tyshkevich|first3=R. I.| title = Graph isomorphism problem | journal = Journal of Mathematical Sciences| volume = 29| issue = 4| pages = 1426-1481 | doi = 10.1007/BF02104746 | year = 1985}}.
gives
Zemlyachenko, V. N.; Korneenko, N. M. & Tyshkevich, R. I. (1985), “Graph isomorphism problem”, Journal of Mathematical Sciences 29 (4): 1426-1481, DOI 10.1007/BF02104746 .
Tadaa! :) -- Fullstop (talk) 19:59, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Citing foreword, introduction, etc.

The convention when citing a foreword seems to be:

  • Author (of introduction, preface, etc.). Foreword. Title of book. By Author of Book. ...

(boldface added) Is there any way to do that using this template? Merzul (talk) 09:45, 14 June 2008 (UTC)