Template talk:Cite web/Archive 3

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This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.

Opt in for wikilinking accessdate, linkdate=yes should be opt in

I guess I better add my two cents worth. I am trying to figure out when a year should be wikilinked, and when it shouldn't. I read Wikipedia:Only make links that are relevant to the context and my conclusion would be:

• That for historic events, places or people the year that a pages was accessed (eg 2006/2007) has little or no encyclopediac value (other then to certify a citation).
• For current events the date/year may be useful as a chronology of sorts.

So to have a flag with default linkdate=False (or linkdate=No) would seem to be best.

¢ NevilleDNZ 20:27, 20 February 2007 (UTC) ¢

General formatting issues

One of the biggest issue that I have with the use of these templates (cite web, cite news, etc) is that the formatting does not conform to any standard that is used with existing print publications. For example, the dates should use the format of 'December 7, 2006', instead of the less intuitive '07-12-2006'. If you look at references available in MOST academic print publications (most of which are now published on the web anyways), they do it this way. There are other minor punctuation issues as well. These issues NEED to be fixed if these templates are expected to be used by a wider group. Dr. Cash 04:56, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

If the full date is used and wikilinked (either manually or automatically via the template), the format in which the date is displayed is determined by your user preferences. --ElKevbo 05:25, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Date formatting is a somewhat frustrating perennial discussion (scroll up and look into the archives). Historic consensus is to have dates in a form that enables user date preferences working, a rather obscure MediaWiki software feature available only for readers that use a login, and which requires writing dates in specific ways to make it work (hard-bundled with having the dates linked, yet another frustrating perennial discussion on this wiki). On another note, Wikipedia is not printed - after all it's still a website and a bit of a deviation from "standards" for print (note the plural) should be ok (an interesting link might be [1]). Per the punctuation, it will most likely be impossible to please everybody with a single format. Of course, detailed proposals for changes are always welcome for discussion and will be enacted if they find consensus. And don't forget that use of the citation templates is not mandatory. They are an attempt to split off the "how to format a reference" decision into a single location, separating that from the data set used on each instantiation. With the possible benefit that Wikipedia could look a bit more professional by having consistent formatting of references. The Germans do it by manually following a pile of formatting instructions [2], with the effect that changing them is pointless, as already written references cannot be changed without tremendous work. --Ligulem 10:42, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

They may not be mandatory, but people are encouraged to use them, and they are spreading a systematic breach of the policy on varieties of English across Wikipedia. This systemic U.S. centrism is very offensive. Wimstead 15:52, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Interwiki

Please, add sl:Predloga:Navedi splet. Thanks a lot. --Eleassar ^{my talk} 11:10, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

• Done—Phil | Talk 12:30, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

Retrieval dates

Linking retrieval dates is unnecessary and sloppy, you end up with numerous links to the same year in the footnotes section. The most important link in the footnotes is to the article itself, not more wikilinks.

• ^ "Beckham's tattoo sparks debate", BBC News, 22 May, 2004. Retrieved on 27 June, 2006.

Should just be:

• ^ "Beckham's tattoo sparks debate", BBC News, 22 May, 2004. Retrieved on 27 June, 2006.

--ElectricEye (talk) 18:07, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Not if you want the date to display as set in one's preferences. --ElKevbo 18:14, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

So retrieved dates showing up as one sets in preferences is only possible by making it a wikilink? This should be changed. Wikilinks in the footnotes are getting out of hand. Some have everything linked and this distracts from the important link: The link to the actual reference itself. --ElectricEye (talk) 19:58, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

I agree. As you can see by several of the other discussions on this page, however, it's (inexplicably) a heated issue with some editors. I completely agree that one should not have to wikilink a date to have it honor a user's preferences. It seems to me, however, that it is a discussion to be held over at WP:DATE and not here. --ElKevbo 20:32, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Oh I get it. The community has consented that the date format consensus forum (WP Talk:Date) also has an "authority" to require that ALL dates be wikilinked because they can't figure out how to format the date properly without wikilinking... Doesn't make sense. I'm going to see what they're up to at WP:DATE. ^_^ --ElectricEye (talk) 20:50, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

It's safer than to allow dates that shouldn't be changed (e.g. those in the titles of book) to be caught in the crossfire. Besides, by now it's some sort of legacy code that changing would be far more harmful. Circeus 03:09, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

In a nutshell, having the dates auto-wikilinked is harmless, don't worry about it.--Wizardman 03:52, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

If that's the case, I won't be using this template. I'd rather manually create the references with ONLY a link to the actual document being referred to. No linked dates. --ElectricEye (talk) 08:26, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

Workaround: How to disable linking dates/years with existing Template

Change the template parameter from "accessdate=2006-10-16" to "accessmonthday=October 16 | accessyear=2006".

• Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kakahi&diff=109630777&oldid=105492793

Seeking consensus

I vote no default linkdate, with additional linkdate=yes flag IF possible, ¢ NevilleDNZ 20:45, 20 February 2007 (UTC) ¢

No, because linking dates is a manual of style guideline, and very important to allow date preferences to work. There should be no situation where they aren't. Trebor 21:09, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

I just checked this out by changing my own date preferences

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#prefsection-4

I changed them to: "2007-02-04T11:48:51" (yuk), I then viewed the page to see if my preferences were now reflected in the page when accessdate parameter is used.

• Before and After:
• http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kakahi&oldid=105492793#References
  1. ^ Tribunal, Waitangi. CHAPTER 7 CHRONOLOGICAL RECORD OF LAND ALIENATIONS FROM 1874 TO 1920 (pdf). www.waitangi-tribunal.govt.nz. Waitangi Tribunal. Retrieved on 2006-10-16.
  2. ^ Statute, New Zealand. Maori Purposes Act 1967 (html). Disposal of Tongariro Timber Company railway land. Retrieved on 2006-10-21.

Basically there was no change, and the "Cite_web" template got my preferences wrong anyhow.

Similarly where I used the accessyear=/accessmonthday= parameters there was no change:

• Before and After:
• http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kakahi&direction=next&oldid=105492793#References
  1. ^ Tribunal, Waitangi. CHAPTER 7 CHRONOLOGICAL RECORD OF LAND ALIENATIONS FROM 1874 TO 1920 (pdf). www.waitangi-tribunal.govt.nz. Waitangi Tribunal. Retrieved on October 16, 2006.
  2. ^ Statute, New Zealand. Maori Purposes Act 1967 (html). Disposal of Tongariro Timber Company railway land. Retrieved on October 21, 2006.

I am thinking that the user date preferences mechanism does work on date formats like YYYY-MM-DD and that this "user date preference is a bit of a "red herring". Can you tell me what I am doing wrong?

• I still vote: no default linkdate - having 2006 linked automatically multiple times in one paragraph makes no sense at all, and it doesn't appear to effect preferences. ¢ NevilleDNZ 21:43, 20 February 2007 (UTC) ¢

Um, well it shouldn't have done that. Perhaps you needed to bypass your cache. I just tried it (to make sure) and date preferences definitely do affect how you see it; see readers' date preferences for more info. This is nothing to do with context. Dates including a month and a day should be wikilinked whatever, so there would never be any need to turn it off. Trebor 00:31, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

My apologies... it was a cache problem for in one case. In the other case the format still didn't match the preferences. I will see if I can find a reason why, I am thinking that it shouldn't be necessary to link the year just to get preferences working. But I am willing to eat my hat. ¢ NevilleDNZ 08:43, 21 February 2007 (UTC) ¢

New way to add refs

I know that this would take a lot of work as all current articles would have to be changed (but I think that the bots could take care of the job) but I think that refs should be added to the bottom of the page. Something like this.

The world is round. <ref1> References <ref1>{{cite web web=www.world.com }}

Articles which have many references end up being very difficult to edit as you have to scroll through references and miss some text in the middle. If most of the reference code is found at the bottom it would be much easier to edit as there would just be ref1 (or something else similar) instead of the whole template info. Yonatanh 00:38, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

This has been discussed to no ends on Wikipedia talk:Footnotes.Circeus 01:54, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

I recently struggled through this, and eventually found the templates described at Template_talk:Ref. The explanation there is not the easiest thing in the world to figure out, but the templates do provide a means for having an arbitrary number of arbitrarily-named target-areas within which references and notes can be arbitrarily arranged. Try going to Template:Ref, Template:Ref_label and the matching Template:Note, template:Note_label, and click on the What links here link in the navigation bar on the left of the page for real-world usage examples. Ditto Template:Ref_harvard.

Date formatting problem part 2

Continued from above...

Can the template be edited to allow someone to enter "01 January" instead of "January 01" in the accessmonthday field and have it output "01 January 2006" instead of "01 January, 2006". The former is technically the more correctly formated date. Perhaps another field can be added, labeled accessdaymonth? - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 16:37, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

OK, so now we have accessdaymonth and it works. However, the instructions really could do with being a lot clearer. As I understand it, an editor should provide one of the followin:

• accessdate in ISO 8601 and unlinked
• accessdaymonth and accessyear in dd mmmmmmmm and yyyy respectively and these may optionally be wiki linked.
• accessmonthday and accessyear in mmmmmmmmm dd and yyyy respectively and these may optionally be wikilinked.

Optional wikilinking of accessdaymonth, accessmonthday and accessyear are not currently mentioned, but it does work and is quite common.

Does the above enumerate all the possible access date options? Gaius Cornelius 17:33, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

No, there is one more. The CBE style of YYYY mmmmmm dd. [3]. This one can be done using current parameters accessmonthday and accessyear, but will need some way of recognizing when to use it. Perhaps the template could be edited to show the date depending on which parameter is entered first? eg {{cite web |url= |title= |accessmonthday= January 1 | accessyear= 2006 |format= |work= }} for one way, and {{cite web |url= |title= | accessyear= 2006 |accessmonthday= January 1 |format= |work= }} for the other. - Trevor MacInnis (Contribs) 21:21, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Template used in tables?

This template doesn't seem to work well in tables. I'd like to be able to use this template (or one like it) in a reference section, as you can easily do when the template isn't in a table. When this template is in a table, it displays everything instead of a nice footnote number. Is there a way around this? Any ideas? Is there a similar template that can be used? Firsfron of Ronchester 03:29, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Looks to me like you forgot your <ref> tags. Can you give us a specific example where this occurs? Circeus 22:16, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

The complaint ... it displays everything instead of a nice footnote number describes the template's intended behavior. To display a nice footnote number which links to some other point in the article where the details are displayed, embed the template between <Ref> and </Ref> tags and make sure that the article has a ==References== section with a <References/> tag in it. Alternatively, embed this or other Cite_whatever templates in the {{ref}} or {{ref_label}} templates as described at Template_talk:Ref. -- Boracay Bill 23:59, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Please reformat all of these so they are not U.S. centric

At present these templates impose U.S. formats, by only showing numerals, and by doing so in the American order ie month before day. This means that an article like Alton Towers appears to be written with the convenience of only American readers in mind. This is a breach of the policy of showing equal respect to different varieties of English. It gives a bad impression of Wikipedia and on a practical level will lead to huge numbers of people misreading dates. Can they please all be reformatted so that the month is shown in words? If possible it should also be left to the editor to decide whether the day or month goes first. Wimstead 15:49, 10 February 2007 (UTC)

Eh? It should be entered in YYYY-MM-DD format (the international standard) and wikilinked to allow date preferences to work. That allows a logged-in user to see it in a variety of ways according to their personal preference. Trebor 00:49, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

Gotta agree with Trebor here.. I'm not sure what you're talking about, but perhaps you have some examples of how this template is imposing US formats? The only date fields that are automatically formatted are accessdate and archive date and the rest are up to the editor to format in their preferred date format. --Bobblehead 01:27, 16 February 2007 (UTC)

What a hopelessly inadequate response. It imposes U.S. formats 'every single time. Are you not aware of the issue at all? In the U.S you write month-day, but in the UK we write day-month. British people will interpret 11-02-2006 as 11 February 2006. Wikipedia has 170+ million readers a month and only 2% of them are registered. Do the other 98% not matter. Then what about the many of that 2% who will not be aware of the option to change their display settings. Wimstead 04:16, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Wha-? The software does not display dates in a "11-02-2006" format! Circeus 17:48, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Please start by making your claims in a language that is actualy understandable. If you have a gripe with the use of numbers for the footnotes:^[1], then register your complains at m:Cite/Cite.php. Circeus 22:16, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

It isn't my fault if you simply don't understand the issue. I did not appreciate that Americans do not even realise the difference exists! Wimstead 04:16, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

I am British and I cannot see what the problem is. All the possible date formats are given in the section "Date formatting problem part 2" above. I take it that Wimstead is objecting to the all-digits format. This format is favoured by some in the IT industry because it is easy to sort (an ASCII based sort will put the dates in chronological order). The YYYY-MM-DD format is both rational and international. If we must have an all numbers date format then it would be madness to have more than one standard. Gaius Cornelius 13:32, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

I agree. The international standard seems to be the best way to do it. Trebor 15:42, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

I repeat, please unblock these so I can mark them as unusable for UK articles. And please sort out the U.S. centrism as well

Saying that 2% of users can change their display preferences is a woefully inadequate response. Wimstead 04:17, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

perhaps a change can be made to the default. As I understand it, the current default is to display dates to unregistered users as the dates were entered by the wikieditor. Perhaps a best-guess about the date format desired by users who have not bothered to (1) register or (2) if they have bothered to register have not bothered to express a date format display preference would be to make a guess about their preference based on a guess about their location based on their IP address. Of course, such a change should not be made template-by-template; it should be made globally, wiki-wide. (No, I am not serious) -- Boracay Bill 11:43, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

You understand correctly, Boracay Bill. I have my date preference set to default and whatever format is used by the editor that added the date is displayed. Wimstead, perhaps the problem is that the default date format on your account is set to the US standard instead of the UK standard. Select this link, choose the Date and Time tab, and make sure the radio button next to your preferred date format is selected. --Bobblehead 19:29, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

As I understand it, Wimstead believes that there is in a big problem in that 98% (Wimstead's figure) of wikipedia users do not have wikipedia accounts, and are therefore unable to use date preferences. Wimstead further believes that it is incumbent on wikieditors to use date formats in line with Wimstead's feeling as to what would be the date preferences of that presumed 98% of users who do not have accounts. In particular, Wimstead wishes date formats used by wikieditors in articles related to the UK to be European-style by default. Wimstead believes that it is necessary to warn wikieditors using templates with dates as parameters about this on a template-by-template basis - hence the raising of this issue here on this particular talk page. -- Boracay Bill 23:31, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Interwiki

An admin, please add the Romanian interwiki ro:Format:Citat web.--Roamataa 19:11, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

• Done. —Phil | Talk 09:40, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

publisher or author?

Say if I want to site BBC News and there is no specific author, would I list BBC News as the author or leave author blank and put BBC News under publisher? ex. [4] W3stfa11/^{Talk to me} 08:28, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

* {{cite news
 | url = http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2375967.stm
 | title = Nintendo fined for price fixing
 | work = Business News
 | publisher = [[BBC News]]
 | date = [[2002-10-30]]
 | accessdate = 2007-03-12
 }}

• "Nintendo fined for price fixing", Business News, BBC News, 2002-10-30. Retrieved on 2007-03-12. 

(Note the use of {{cite news}}; it's always best to be specific if you can.) HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 09:37, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

I confirm. In the case of Websites (and web news), it is not seen as bad form to leave the author field blank if the author is unknown. Circeus 17:23, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

If the "title=" is the same as a referenced author "Surname, Firstname", it prevents you from using op. cit.. Is there a way to use nested <ref>s? -- Jeandré, 2007-04-07t23:56z

Interwiki addition

[[fi:Malline:Verkkoviite]] Thanks! —Ppntori 12:52, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Link rot date?

Since the Internet Archive may not have an archive available yet when a link dies, can we have a new parameter "linkRotDate", e.g.:

List of psychotropic substances under international control (PDF) (2005-04-30). Original link unavailable at 2006-09-11.

-- Jeandré, 2007-04-01t19:08z

Forcing one date format

{{editprotected}}

Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Date formats in cite templates to centralize discussion. Please comment there. CMummert · talk 15:23, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

CMummert, I observe that You reverted date formatting changes pending consensus in favor of them at 09:58, April 14, 2007, and Splash reverted your changes on 22:50, April 14, 2007, commenting, "there is the barest minimum disagreement on the talk page => tought luck)". I've looked at the discussion which you moved to the Village Pump, and I agree with you that no consensus was established in favor of the changes. I suggest that you conduct a vote here and now in order to establish whether or not there is a consensus (1) to revert to the pre-changes date format and (2) to retain that format unless and until the Village Pump discussion produces a consensus to the contrary. I vote yes. -- Boracay Bill 20:57, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

I do not plan to revert anything more until the discussion comes to a conclusion, per WP:1RR. CMummert · talk 21:32, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

There was no consensus for the change and it should be reverted pending an outcome of the village pump discussion. The change is inconsistent with template:cite news and causing articles where editors have applied cite templates throughout to appear messy and uneven. Please revert to earlier consensus version allowing display of raw ISO accessdates in the "Retrieved on" part of template:cite web. --HailFire 10:28, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

• Wouldn't it be easier to give anon users standard date preferences based on their IP location instead of altering the format in millions of articles? Not to mention that any other format using spelled out names takes a lot longer to write if there's a lot of references. -- Mgm|^(talk) 10:31, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

• I completely agree with HailFire, and I support an immediate revert. The date change was implemented in an inconsistent manner across the cite templates, resulting in FACs looking like they were sloppily implemented. It needs to be all or nothing. — RJH (talk) 17:57, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Please comment at the village pump, not here, to keep the discussion together. Although it is frustrating for things to be inconsistent during the discussion, nothing would be served by changing back and forth before the final compromise is reached. CMummert · talk 18:02, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

Village pump discussion favors immediate revert to display of unformatted ISO "Retrieved on {{accessdate}}" pending resolution of edit dispute to this protected template. Restoring {{editprotected}} notice at top of this section. --HailFire 20:24, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

N Not done There appears to be no consensus at present in the discussion (given the amount of discussion that's been generated in this issue, across several talk pages, 4-0 in a straw poll in a small separate VPR section is not consensus); the editprotected request above is basically requesting admins to engage in a wheel war. When the discussions die down and/or there is a definite consensus, an edit request may be more appropriate; consider asking User:Tariqabjotu or User:Splash to make the revert (as the admins who made the original change), as they're the only admins who could revert this edit without effectively wheel-warring. (I have no opinion on what the final date format decided upon is; the discussion seems to be swaying towards 'leave it unformatted for the time being' at the moment, but it hasn't reached consensus either way yet.) --ais523 14:54, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

User:Tariqabjotu reverted it on April 20. CMummert · talk 12:47, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Publisher italics

{{editprotected}}

The "Publisher" is italicized. It shouldn't be. Only "Work" should be in italics (unless I'm misunderstanding the fields). You would italicize "Detroit Free Press" but not "Gannett Newspapers".—Chowbok ☠ 01:09, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

N Not done The 'publisher' field isn't italicized, so there's no change here to make. (See the examples on the template itself). If the publisher's appearing italicised in an article, either someone's typing publisher=''Publisher's Name'' or there's a bug not apparent in the examples; could you clarify where the problem comes up? --ais523 08:35, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

Oops, sorry, thought this was {{cite news}}. Not enough coffee when I posted that. —Chowbok ☠ 23:51, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Problem when using URL for publisher

In many cases it disirable to use a named url for the publisher. However when you do that the citation appears with the link for the article being cited appearing right next to the link for the publisher which is very confusing. The only solution I have found for this is someting like publisher= from URL. Note that I need to put in 2 spaces between from ant the url to make it look right. It seems to me that there ought to be a more elegant solution to this problem. Rusty Cashman 19:43, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

I personally don't like the idea, but it works with the existing template. Coding {{cite web|url=http://webpage.example.com/page1.html|title=Web Page Title|publisher=[http://pub.example.com Pub]|date=01/01/01|accessdate=02/02/02}} produces Web Page Title. Pub (01/01/01). Retrieved on 02/02/02. just as I think you'd like. RossPatterson 20:36, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Actually you just demonstrated the problem. Having the 2 links appear back to back is confusing. The only solution I have found is something like this:

web|url=http://webpage.example.com/page1.html|title=Web Page Title|publisher= from Pub|date=01/01/01|accessdate=02/02/02}}</nowiki>

produces Web Page Title. from Pub (01/01/01). Retrieved on 02/02/02.

That works, but it is inelegant especially since you need 2 spaces after from to make it work...Rusty Cashman 00:45, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Actualy I am pretty sure that the correct line for publisher is the Alfred Russel Wallace Page not Western Kentucky University anyway. I think I am pretty well done with this argument. I still think there might be value in having the publisher link in the citation but for now I will just get rid of the second links.Rusty Cashman 04:55, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Since the URL is already an external link, why would you also want an external link for the publisher? If the publisher is significant enough to be linked, link it to the publisher's Wikipedia article. --Scott Davis ^Talk 13:14, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

The idea is to help a reader quickly learn somethig about a source so that they can evaluate it more easily. Obviously a link to an article on the publisher is ideal, but not every small speciality website (The Alfred Russel Wallace Page, the PapuaWeb project, dannyreviews.com etc) is going to have a Wikipedia article of its own, and for the increasing number of them not associated with any dead tree publication their url is their identity and the easiesist way to learn anything about them is often the 'about this website' link on their home page.Rusty Cashman 19:14, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Somehow I miss the part where the result is bad. The case where the publisher has an article ("{{cite web|url=http://webpage.example.com/page1.html|title=Web Page Title|publisher=[[example.com]]|date=01/01/01|accessdate=02/02/02}}" looks like this:
Web Page Title. example.com (01/01/01). Retrieved on 02/02/02.
whereas the case with a URL (as above) looks like this:
Web Page Title. Pub (01/01/01). Retrieved on 02/02/02.
To my eye, there's nothing radically different between them, and the article-link form seems to be well accepted. RossPatterson 21:10, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

You may have a point, but I have gotten a lot of grief on this topic in the FA comments for the Alfred Russel Wallace article, and even I must admit that having the 2 links back to back like that with no non link text in between them is a little confusing. It is hard to see where the link for the reference stops and the link for the publisher begins when it is all blue text.Rusty Cashman 01:21, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

My heart goes out to anyone trying to drive an FA campaign, but looking at the current and previous FA comment pages, it seems the only item related to this issue suggests you shouldn't be trying to link to the publisher. Maybe they have a point. Besides, in the only case where you're trying to do this, the more correct specification would be publisher=[[Western Kentucky University]]. RossPatterson 02:09, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

(Edit conflict - looks like similar sentiment) With the default skin, there's a little icon after each external link, which serves to separate the two consecutive links (for me, anyway), so I support Ross there. For the particular examples at Alfred Russel Wallace, the publisher is really Charles H. Smith (i.e. self-published), not either Western Kentucky University or "The Alfred Russel Wallace Page", which is one of (or a collection of some of) Smith's works. Each (web-)page has a link "Return to home" at the bottom to provide a link to the publisher, so I still don't see it is neceesary to have the link in each footnote, as well as in the External links section. Western Kentucky University does have a Wikipedia page which is not linked from the page, even though some footnotes link to their home page. In short, I think the template is OK, and there are better ways of using it than needing two or more external links. --Scott Davis ^Talk 02:23, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Ok, I think enough time has been spent on this. I have thought of a soluton that works for the references in that article especially since you are correct about the links not being so important for the Alfred Russel Wallace Page because every page has a link back to the main site anyway. I still think the issue is worth thinking about. I think small special purpose websites are going to continue to be come more important as sources, and I think linking to the website as well as the particular item may have value. But I am not going to argue it anymore at the moment.Rusty Cashman 04:55, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Regarding proper publisher info, note WP:CITE#Say_where_you_got_it. Perhaps it might be better to get it from another source - closer to the original publication (or it might not -- I haven't looked closely enough to have an opinion). -- Boracay Bill 05:39, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

doi

{{editprotected}} Non-journal website news articles like [5] have dois, but aren't journal cites. Please add a doi parameter. -- Jeandré, 2007-05-09t18:51z

That seems reasonable. It will happen sooner if you write and test the code in your sandbox, because otherwise someone else has to make time to do the testing. CMummert · talk 22:57, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Test:

[old sandbox test page removed]

Code from journal template, add

<{{#if: {{{doi|}}} | . [[Digital object identifier|DOI]]:[http://dx.doi.org/{{{doi|{{{doilabel|}}}}}} {{{doi}}}] }}

before "accessdate". -- Jeandré, 2007-05-11t22:47z

Change made. With new template:

Odling-Smee, Lucy (2007-05-09). Encyclopedia of Life launched. Online effort aims to bring together biodiversity knowledge.. news @ nature.com. Nature Publishing Group. DOI:10.1038/news070508-7. Retrieved on 2007-05-11.

By the way, a period was in the wrong place above, but I fixed that. CMummert · talk 00:13, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Ta. -- Jeandré, 2007-05-13t08:30z

Using without any values

Instead of just saying "Parameters url and title must be specified", couldn't it say that and then list the blank template with nothing filled in? Then we could type {{cite web}} in an article, preview, and then copy and paste the template into the article so that we don't have to open this documentation page to remember all the field names. This should be done with all the citation templates, really... — Omegatron 16:46, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

A brilliant idea, in itself, only it won't help when adding references to a section, as the citation will not appear when pressing the "Preview"-button in these cases. Shinobu 12:13, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Sure it will. Just don't put it in a ref tag when you preview. :-) — Omegatron 14:35, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

Suggest allowing basic ISO 8601 date intervals for archivedate

I have a case where it makes sense to reference the Wayback Machine's list of all archived versions of a page. Of course the basic syntax for this is easy, but {{cite web}} comes so close to supporting it that it would be nice to be able to use it. If I understand ISO 8601#Time interval correctly, all I'd need is for the template to support something like

archivedate=2004-10-31/2006-05-26

Note that I need only date support, not support for full date and time or any other options. Here's an explicit example:

• http://findinggrace.com. Archived from the original on 2004-10-31/2006-05-26.

Thanks in advance. 66.167.49.170 20:40, 31 May 2007 (UTC).

Parameter format=

At present, 'language=' and 'format=' values are shown in inverse order: An Acrobat logo appears immediately behind a linked url with .pdf extension, followed by the language, and only then the given format of the url. Obviously, format=pdf should cause (pdf) to appear immediately behind the Acrobat logo (unless the template would disregard 'format=pdf' as the logo makes it rather redundant). The Template:Cite journal renders a correct order. {{editprotected}} At present: [the first }} are the end-if mark of what preceeds]
}}{{#if: {{{language|}}} | <span style="font-size: 0.95em; font-weight: bold; color:#555; position: relative;">({{{language}}})</span>
  }}{{#if: {{{format|}}}
| ({{{format|}}})
}}
Should become:
}}{{#if: {{{format|}}}
| ({{{format|}}})
}}{{#if: {{{language|}}} | <span style="font-size: 0.95em; font-weight: bold; color:#555; position: relative;">({{{language}}})</span>
}}
Just copy the 2nd here from the discussion page while in reading mode, and paste it in the template in edit mode, please. — SomeHuman 02 Jun 2007 19:41 (UTC)

I'm worried about this code. It doesn't match the template code due to HTML entities always rendering. In read-mode, the &#32; spaces don't show, and that will most likely cause problems. I suggest putting the code below with but use &amp; where ampersands would go. Cheers. --MZMcBride 01:50, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

I've disabled the editprotected request until the issues have been resolved, and the new code has been tested. Cheers. --MZMcBride 02:44, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

New parameter for dead references

I suggest adding a new parameter (dead=yes, in example). This will add a note in the reference display stating that the web site cannot be access, and that it should be updated/replaced. This is better than deleting the reference or adding a {{fact}} note. Anyone disagrees? -- ReyBrujo 01:51, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

That's the idea behind the archiveurl= and archivedate= parameters. Instead of marking a reference as unavailable, you add these two parameters and the template will use that link instead. Almost every page on the web gets archived someplace, whether intentionally or not. The first place to look is usually the Internet Archive. RossPatterson 13:20, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

I would actually like to know why this or something similar did not exist before. It's really aggravating to get articles based on events, etc that took place in the 90s to FA status because the main sites used as references redirected the pages and the web achieves do not help. Wikipedia is still new, so what will this site do of the current references used in articles decades or even years from now? FMF|contact 02:09, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Well, there are these things called "books" and "newspapers" that western civilizations have been archiving for centuries. :-) Seriously, the transience of the web one of the problems with basing articles on references that are only available on the web. The reference guidelines recommend using more-permanent (and more-identifiable) references for exactly that reason. RossPatterson 13:28, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes, but what about articles whose main references come from web sites, like video games? Should the parameters you mentioned be used for redirected pages? FMF|contact 22:13, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

That depends on what you mean by "redirected". If the referenced page itself has moved, then no, I'd just update the url= parameter. It doesn't matter that the reference isn't at the same place it originally was. But if the referenced page doesn't exist any more and you've found a backup copy at site that archives from other sites, then yes, I'd leave the url= pointing to the old location and set the archiveurl= to the backup site. To my way of thinking, the distinction is whether the new locaion purports to be the page's home, or merely a copy of the page. I know that's pretty arbitrary, but I can't imagine anyone seriously citing a reference "published" by Google's cache servers when it started out at nytimes.com. RossPatterson 22:54, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

There are places that do not allow archive.org to crawl, and cannot be backed up. -- ReyBrujo 22:21, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

I understand the problem, and I sympathize. But to be absolutely honest, a "dead" reference isn't a reference. Especially for an article that's gotten to FA status, references have to be verifiable. A reference that only exists on one place on the web and then disappears is not very different from one that never existed. It's a shame, but that's the problem with web-only references. As to FA articles, any good article needs a good set of references from a durable set of sources. If net archives don't help, then maybe that's a bad choice of reference. RossPatterson 22:44, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

No, a dead reference is a reference that cannot be currently accessed. If the reference has been added, accepted and stayed in the article long enough, it is considered that the reference was, at one time, working (otherwise it would have been removed on sight). We assume good faith and leave the reference there to acknowledge that the information was verifiable at one time. The fact that the article was chosen FA with a reference that was once working only enforces the notion that the reference is valid, although it is currently not working. While, in the end, the reference should be optimally replaced with a working one, there should be a way to have both the old reference marked as currently inaccessible and suggesting to find a new reference, cataloging the article in a maintenance category at the same time. -- ReyBrujo 22:54, 9 June 2007 (UTC)

New parameter for author qualification

I propose a new parameter, called qualification= or qual=, to specify the qualification(s) of a source's author. This would help a reader to quickly distinguish a source written by a layperson, a summary, etc, from one written by a qualified author. For instance:

{{citeweb |url=http://www.asite.org |title=A Scientific Report |first=Bob |last=Smith |qualification=Ph.D.}}

would display:

Smith, Bob, Ph.D. A Scientific Report.

That way, people can tell if the source really knows what he or she is talking about. I'm not familiar enough with the code to implement this myself, so if consensus is an agreement, someone else will have to do it. PaladinWhite 14:30, 14 June 2007 (UTC)

It would be pretty easy to do from a code perspective, but I'm not sure it's a good idea. Wikipedia has considered the question of whether and how much "qualifications" matter on several occasions, and as Wikipedia:Credentials are irrelevant, Wikipedia:Ignore all credentials, and Wikipedia:Credentials matter indicate, there hasn't been any consensus so far. RossPatterson 00:19, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Well said, Ross. Although there may be some cases in which an author's "credentials" may be clear-cut, I fear there are many, many more where they are not. I don't care to leave that judgment to Wikipedia editors. Caveat reader. --ElKevbo 00:31, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Well, aren't those policies aimed mainly at readers? Meaning they're generally intended to point out to the reader that he or she should make a case-by-case judgment about the validity of sources? I don't see how indicating the author's professional accreditations can possibly impede judgment at all; the reader is still free to make his or her own decision about what to trust. PaladinWhite 02:51, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

No, those are not aimed mainly at readers. What if Dr. Smith wrote a paper that was unrelated to his discipline - should his Ph.D. still be mentioned? If we didn't know about his Ph.D., would his scientific paper be more relevant? Shouldn't we have to verify that he actually has a doctorate (from an accredited institution)? What if...you get the idea. I don't think those are the kinds of questions we should have to answer. That raises the bar too high and is unnecessary additional work. It's a solution in search of a problem, IMHO. --ElKevbo 02:56, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Right, simply having a degree does not mean one is qualified as an expert on the subject they're discussing. A PhD in physics doesn't necessarily mean the individual is well-trained in botany, for instance. Not to mention "degrees" from uncertified institutions, which people use to try and make themselves sound knowledgeable about a subject when, in reality, they've had no formal training in it. -- Kesh 00:13, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Reliable sources states, "Reliable sources are credible published materials with a reliable publication process; their authors are generally regarded as trustworthy, or are authoritative in relation to the subject at hand" (my bolding added). My thinking goes something like this: If an author's material is included as a (reliable) article reference, the author has been judged as authoritative on the subject. Conversely, if s/he is not an established authority, the reference's inclusion fails WP:RS, and should be removed. To use your example, I feel that a correctly-referenced botanical article wouldn't cite a physicist in the first place, and thus, the proceeding arguments are a non-issue. The reader ought to be able to see what type of degree the cited botanists have, and the physicists should be summarily eliminated from the list. PaladinWhite 03:02, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

(Deindent) Unfortunately, you'd be opening a huge can of worms. There are certain topics where people will fight tooth and nail to include their pet "experts" as reliable sources, even though these people are not experts in the field of study being discussed. Your point of "they wouldn't be included if they weren't reliable" doesn't hold up on an encyclopedia where anyone can edit & add information. If you want to expand the "qualifications" to include the types of degree held, the citation would become unwieldy in length and, again, would not always be reliable (a PhD in Botany from an unaccredited school is useless, but would require other editors to research the school to determine that). I appreciate your desire to assume good faith on the parts of editors, but in my experience this would be gamed and abused badly. -- Kesh 03:29, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Won't "those people" fight tooth-and-nail for the source's inclusion whether the issue arises through this new parameter, which leads to the source's deletion, or by the flat-out deletion of the source because it is simply judged as unreliable? Again, I fail to see how this parameter would do anything but highlight problems that already exist. If it helps to make a source more defined or accessible in even one article, it has helped, and if it has the added effect of bringing to light questionable sources along the way, I view that as an added benefit. PaladinWhite 06:55, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

Problem with a cite web template not working

Would someone else be so kind as to look at the Robin DeJarnette article and see if they can figure out why the second reference/footnote isn't working correctly, while the others (which appear to me to be the same) are working? Thanks. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 13:02, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

The url was missing the http:// prefix. I've fixed it. → AA ^{(talk • contribs)} — 13:08, 20 June 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I thought I might be overlooking the obvious, but that didn't help identify exactly what I was overlooking. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:07, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

My understanding is that [http://whatever] or [http://whatever named link] will create a link to whatever, while [whatever] or [www.whatever] or similar constructs will just output square-bracketed text (i.e., [6], named link, [whatever], or [www.whatever]). I infer that the wikitext parser uses the presence or absence of the "http//" immediately after the opening square-bracket to decide how to treat the square-bracket-enclosed stuff. I looked around quickly in the guidelines and the help, and didn't find this explicitly documented (it may be documented, but I didn't see it). -- Boracay Bill 23:56, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Sorry about that square-bracket stuff above. I'm going through my watchlist and got confused about which talk page I was responding on. In my confusion, I thought we were talking about a square-bracketed inline external link. I think the remarks above probably apply to most places on wikipages where a URL is expected, including the url= parameters in citation templates. Boracay Bill 00:08, 24 June 2007 (UTC)

I hate this template with a passion

I simply refuse to use it. It's too bloated and too large and gets in the way in the text when you're editing a page to the extent that you can't even see what paragraph you're on. A simple reference is fine as far as I'm concerned. If that stops me from getting articles to GA status, then I'm damned. I'm almost tempted to nominate this for deletion because I hate it so much.--h i s ^{s p a c e} _{r e s e a r c h} 11:31, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

That's why I use WikEd; it color-codes a lot of things in the edit window, including references, making it easier to see the actual text. -- tariqabjotu 13:57, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

Wonderful tool! Glad I had this page on my watchlist :). → AA ^{(talk • contribs)} — 14:10, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

For most web citations, you just need the url, title, and accessdate. That's really not that bloated and large. Wizardman 14:12, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

When one adds author, date (although that is more relevant to cite news) and publisher, it does get longer. Just remember that as long as all references are done sensibly, there's no MoS of FA criterion that can be used against GA status. Templates are explicitly optional. I personally like them for the standardization they bring, but I realize others don't. Circeus 16:55, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

I wholeheartedly concur. It is ugly and inconvenient. Fatalis 22:20, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

accessdate option

i was thinking, i personally have a bad memory and i can never remember what order/format i'm supposed to fill in the accessdate info. so wouldn't it be nice if there was a simple #ifeq function that allowed us to write accessdate=today and save me, and maybe some others, a little headache? -ΖαππερΝαππερ ^Babel_Alexandria 16:52, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

That's not a bad idea... Maybe I'll try implementing that. Circeus 16:55, 25 June 2007 (UTC)

You'd have to use substitution in any case. Of course, it would also depend on what format you'd want to use as default. I've been looking around for a previously-created template that simply displays the time in YYYY-MM-DD format without any subst problems, but I have yet to find it in the gigantic time-related template category. --- RockMFR 21:15, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

having done a quick try, I think that is not possible. If you substitute a template with the appropriate variable, what you get is {{CURRENTYEAR}}-{{CURRENTMONTH}}-{{CURRENTDAY2}} in the article, which still needs to be subst'ed... Circeus 23:33, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

You should be able to type {{cite web}} in an article by itself, press preview, and with no parameters entered, the preview will be the entire list of parameters with the date already filled in for you to copy and paste into the edit box. — Omegatron 06:24, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

Also, "Error on call to" is computer programmer jargon. We should come up with a more user-friendly wording. — Omegatron 16:02, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

Good point. The current text (in two places) is "Error on call to Template:cite web: Parameters p1 and p2 must be specified". How about "You must specify p1= and p2= when using {{cite web}}"? It's somewhat more English-like and less programmer-ese, and it shows the template in the form in which it is used instead of as a page-link. RossPatterson 23:16, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

Excellent rewording. I couldn't think of anything myself.

What I really want to do is have a list of the parameters come up when you don't specify any, as mentioned above. This would double as a "missing parameters" error message and as a brief reminder of all the available parameters when formatting things by hand, so you don't need to go to the template's documentation page. So you'd just type {{cite web}} and press Preview, and it would display something like this:

{{cite web
|url = 
|title = 
|accessdate = 
|accessdaymonth = 
|accessmonthday = 
|accessyear = 
|author = 
|last = 
|first = 
|authorlink = 
|coauthors = 
|date = 
|year = 
|month = 
|format = 
|work = 
|publisher = 
|pages = 
|language = 
|doi = 
|archiveurl = 
|archivedate = 
|quote = 
}}

And then you could copy and paste this template in place of the one you had typed before pressing preview. Of course this would put a bunch of colored boxes all over articles with broken templates, but that would just encourage people to fix them.. — Omegatron 21:26, 15 July 2007 (UTC)

Related to your last comment, how about adding articles with busted citations to something like Category:Articles with broken citations for ease of cleanup? Both ideas should be easy to do. RossPatterson 21:57, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Certainly. — Omegatron 20:39, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

FYI, there is a discussion going on over at Template talk:Cite news about including the archive parameters in that template. This discussion probably applies to that as well. RossPatterson 22:33, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

OK, I've got a prototype of the reworded messages, the categorization, and the preview idea at User:RossPatterson/cite web. Comments and criticism are welcome. RossPatterson 23:03, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Looks fine to me. We can always change it later. The point of putting the parameter list in a separate page and transcluding it was so that we could transclude it into the template and into the documentation at the same time and update them both at once. It's probably not that necessary, though. Anyone changing a parameter can change the documentation in both places, too. — Omegatron 02:17, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

{{editprotected|Please replace the entire contents of this template with the contents of User:RossPatterson/cite web as discussed above.}} RossPatterson 19:53, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Done. We'll see what people think. — Omegatron 21:22, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Interesting result: There are over 200 articles in the new Category:Articles with broken citations already, cases where the template was reporting an error but nobody noticed or cared. Time to start a fixup pass! RossPatterson 12:21, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

OK, the backlog of broken citations is cleaned up. There are still a couple of dozen, but they're all hard to fix or shouldn't be fixed. About half use some really obtuse aviation template that imbeds a {{cite web}} usage in its parameters, and most of the rest are cases where someone puts a sample on their user page for ease of use later. RossPatterson 04:38, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

In the last two weeks, I've seen another dozen or two cases of broken usage in the category and corrected them. The category is down to three instances of deliberately incorrect usage, so I'd say it's done its job. I'm starting to think it would be a good idea to introduce the categorization into some of the other citation templates. Opinions? RossPatterson 03:01, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Quote

When should I be using this parameter? Was the use in Carlos Vela correct? Also, I think the date parameter should automatically be linked as the accessdate parameter is, or alternatively, if people prefer the other way, both should not be linked by default (granted, a bot would have to be run to fix existing instances). Yonatan ^talk 21:34, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Is authorlink broken?

{{editprotected}} I noticed that on Wikipedia:Press coverage 2006 that some of the articles for Carsten Cumbrowski have a correct-looking authorlink parameter, but that that HTML that you get when the template is rendered is broken — somehow mangled with the author first/last name. Could someone with access to this template fix investigate and fix this error. Thx.--76.220.203.159 20:20, 21 July 2007 (UTC)

I think I am seeing the same problem is authorlink is specified for {{cite book}}. It might be where both first and last names of author is given, perhaps because of the intervening blank, because the first name seems to be appended to the HTML link, thus breaking it. Examples:

• Wikipedia:Press coverage 2006 See Carsten cite at end of page
• Anarchism See ref for Spooner book entitled "Poverty"

--75.37.12.168 21:33, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Please diagnose the problem, write test code in a sandbox, and test it, then put u[p an editprotected tag. The tag is the last step in the process, not the first. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:25, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Not found error only in a citation template

Hello, and pardon if this is my error or I overlooked an obvious reason. Under the "External links" section in Minneapolis Post Office, why does the U.S. Postal Service not find a url inside a cite web template and does in a simple link? Looking back in the edit history, 1) a simple link works, 2) cite web template fails to connect, and 3) a visual approximation of cite web but again a simple link works. (To maybe save some time, I'll copy this question to both the Village Pump technical and the cite web talk page.) Thank you. -Susanlesch 03:06, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Template:Cite web worked as it should. If you do <ref>{{cite web...}}</ref> in the text, the link will show up wherever <references /> is placed (under "Notes" here, as it should be). If you want to link to an external website, the best method is not use a regular link because there's no reason for the access date (and other specific information) to appear there. If, however, you are noting a reference, you should use <ref>{{cite web...}}</ref>, which appeared to work as it should – placing the reference under "Notes". -- tariqabjotu 04:05, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Okay... I see another response was given on the Village Pump. I'm unsure which issue you were asking about, so I'll just leave my above reply. -- tariqabjotu 04:10, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

I answered this at WP:VPT#Not found error only in a citation template. Mike Dillon 04:13, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

• Thank you, Mike Dillon and sorry for the cc. Best wishes. -Susanlesch 05:28, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

allow authorlink to work on urls

Often a news source haas a link to a set of bios of regular contributors. I want to be able to include the appropraite one in authorlink= but at the moment that is formatted only to work for wiki-links. I don't think this would be too hard a change, would it? DES ^(talk) 09:06, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

2 external links in a single web reference? I can't possibly be the only one seeing a problem. Circeus 22:05, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Problem? What problem?
De Ridder, Paul, Doctor in Medieval History, Royal Library of Belgium. Linguistic Usages in Brussels before 1794. Vereniging voor Brusselse Geschiedenis (Society for History of Brussels). Retrieved on 2007-05-01.
Simple as Cite web. Btw, this is the solution (as used in a real article):

{{cite web
|title=Linguistic Usages in Brussels before 1794
|author=[http://www.smk.be/boeken/brusselN.html De Ridder, Paul], Doctor in Medieval History, [[Royal Library of Belgium]]
|publisher=Vereniging voor Brusselse Geschiedenis (Society for History of Brussels)
|url=http://www.paulderidder.be/history.htm
|accessdate=2007-05-01}}

Note that this general solution can just as well be used for instance for the publisher. I don't like to learn separate syntaxes for 'author' and for 'publisher', for 'work', ... I see little reason to use 'authorlink' in the first place, one can just as well create

|author=[[User:SomeHuman|Human, Some]], Simple Mind

— SomeHuman 24 Jul 2007 22:46–23:00 (UTC)

Authorlink was implemented to allow for the last/first names (used by the COinS tag of these templates) to still be linked. Circeus 23:07, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with this library referencing, technically or practically, but the purpose that DES appears to have in mind is a firm url link to a normal web page. I suppose that such does not require 'authorlink' or separate 'last' and 'first', but of course it would be difficult to combine an open url with such normal url, hence I see your problem now (I think). — SomeHuman 24 Jul 2007 23:31 (UTC)

"Author" is basically set up for every weird stuff that doesn't fit already. Adding an argument for this just complicate matter unnecessarily IMHO. Circeus 01:17, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Parameter language

{{editprotected}} The template handles the language parameter to be shown by:
<span style="font-size: 0.95em; font-weight: bold; color:#555; position: relative;">({{{language}}})</span>
I assume this "position: relative" to be a mistake: In the article Belgium the extremely lengthy footnotes section has been put into a scrollbox, like this:
===Footnotes===
<div style="height:333px;overflow:auto;padding:3px;border:1px solid #ababab;">
{{reflist|2}}
</div>
But unfortunately, the language indicators (French), (Dutch), etc are simply shown where these would have been without a scrollbox. They clutter everything [in the scrollbox while it is scrolled, and underneath the scrollbox] while on their proper place in the relevant footnotes, a blank remains. This is of course entirely unacceptable. I do not see why the position:relative would be needed, best remove it immediately.
Also, please remove the "font-weight: bold;" from this same line: there is definitely no need to emphasize a reference to be in another language (one would rather expect the author or the title in bold), e.g. the template:cite journal does not show the language in bold and it appears much better (though it superfluously shows "in " in front of the passed parameter); that template also allows its language to scroll properly with the footnote, in that scrollbox on the Belgium article. — SomeHuman 24 Jul 2007 18:51 (UTC)

Hmm... I'm not sure if the browser on this lab machine is having that problem (Firefox 1.5.something, by the look of it), but I'm also not sure why we'd need to specify a position for a span of that nature, either -- I'm no CSS whiz, but unless one says differently before long, I'm inclined to remove it. Compounding that, why on earth are we wrapping templates in divs, instead of creating or modifying existing templates? Ah, wikis. – Luna Santin (talk) 20:52, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Template:Cite journal, Template:Cite news, Template:Cite press release, and Template:Cite book show "(in {{{language}}})" without any span, but their "in " is too much, and Template:Cite web's smaller font and slightly lighter colour (though overruled when linked) are improvements (and the template is probably used and appreciated more often than all similar others together). But not its bold and certainly not its position:relative. The faulty positioning occurs in IE7 (not verfied for other browsers, but as you indicate: the positioning of only one parameter output makes no sense; in particular a <span>...</span> is always by default positioned where it appears, inline, and the language must of course be placed inline between the other elements of the citation). — SomeHuman 24 Jul 2007 21:36–21:56 (UTC)

Please, this is getting quite urgent. Simply replace on line number 39 this part:
<span style="font-size: 0.95em; font-weight: bold; color:#555; position: relative;">({{{language}}})</span>
with:
<span style="font-size: 0.95em; color:#555;">({{{language}}})</span>
Thanks. — SomeHuman 25 Jul 2007 15:56 (UTC)

I've removed the position specification, for now. Will post the village pump about the bolding. – Luna Santin (talk) 20:10, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

I don't have a preference on the bolding issue, but I have found the discussion that led to this: part 1, part 2. Anomie 20:52, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

The discussion does not show much about bolding. I had been using the language icons and it is less obtrusive to see the bold icons because they are used in front of the citations. Thus they indicate "here starts another citation" which makes it rather acceptable (though not really better than normal font-weight: in bold as start of a next citation, one should best show such icon for English as well, and there is certainly no consensus that allolws such). In the citation templates however, the language is never shown at front; hence the bold in the middle of citations draws undue attention. I'm nearly impartial towards the icons, one can leave it to the contributors of an article to make the choice for (bold) language icons at front, or normal font-weight within the citation lines; though one should be consistent per article. It is definitely not a good idea to have Cite web showing bold and other citation templates (normally also used in a same article) showing the language in a notably different style. The slightly smaller character size and the (darkish) grey colour for both the icon and the citation does not appear to annoy anyone, and could best be introduced in the other templates. Anyway, my main concern here was the faulty positioning far outside the citation it belonged to, and I'm glad that this has been dealt with. — SomeHuman 25 Jul 2007 22:48 (UTC)

Does anyone here want to keep the bolding on the templates, or does everyone agree that that section of the template be debolded? --ais523 17:40, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

If you remove the bolding, please change {{languageicon}} too. Ms2ger 16:38, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Ouch! You couldn't pay me enough to get involved in that discussion. RossPatterson 21:01, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

I still don't see why we would want to remove the grey languge format. It makes it makes it much easier to see what languge the references are and thereby lets readers find or disregard certain languges. – Zntrip 15:58, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

The {{languageicon}} might be changed, but as I explained on 25 Jul 2007 22:48 its usage is usually not identical; that remains another discussion as far as I'm concerned. This Cite web template however, should act like other similar Cite templates because their styles concur intertwined in references. The current problem as well as one other, is shown for instance by:

*{{cite web
|title=Vlaanderen – Is er nog een toekomst voor België?
|language=[[Dutch language|Dutch]] <span style="font-size:87%;">description about scientific committee and publishing centre at the end in French</span>
|url=http://www.cjg.be/PDF/CahierFlandre16.5.2007.pdf<!--identically on http://www.mr.be/PDF/CahierFlandre16.5.2007.pdf-->
|format=pdf
|year=2007 |month=April
|publisher=Centre Jean Gol ([[Think tank]] of [[Reformist Movement|MR]] party), Belgium
|work=Les Cahiers du Centre Jean GOL
|accessdate=2007-08-14}}

which unfortunately looks like this (exactly):

• Vlaanderen – Is er nog een toekomst voor België? (pdf) (Dutch description about scientific committee and publishing centre at the end in French). Les Cahiers du Centre Jean GOL. Centre Jean Gol (Think tank of MR party), Belgium (April 2007). Retrieved on 2007-08-14.

(Like Zntrip said: not bad with the [unlinked] 'language' parameter in grey) though in fact it should look like this (here shown without using the template, and without "font-weight:bold;font-size:.95em" for the language parameter which normal font size looks better than .95em when not bold [else it should also become a smaller size for the 'format' parameter]:

• Vlaanderen – Is er nog een toekomst voor België? (pdf) (Dutch description about scientific committee and publishing centre at the end in French). Les Cahiers du Centre Jean GOL. Centre Jean Gol (Think tank of MR party), Belgium (April 2007). Retrieved on 2007-08-14.

Notice that the "(pdf)" should immediately follow the url-linked title (especially immediately with such .pdf indicator image) – I did not as yet check the other templates but they should show the 'format' parameter before the 'language' parameter as well.
Hence, the language parameter in the template should become
<span style="color:#555;">({{{language}}})</span>
and its code (which is more than this 'span') should be placed behind the code for the 'format'
— SomeHuman 14 Aug 2007 18:52–(minor correction:)20:28 (UTC)

    | {{#if: {{{url|}}} | {{#if: {{{title|}}} | [{{{url}}} {{{title}}}] }}}}
}}{{#if: {{{language|}}} | &#32;<span style="font-size: 0.95em; font-weight: bold; color:#555;">({{{language}}})</span> 
}}{{#if: {{{format|}}}
  | &#32;({{{format|}}})
}}{{#if: {{{work|}}}

    | {{#if: {{{url|}}} | {{#if: {{{title|}}} | [{{{url}}} {{{title}}}] }}}}
}}{{#if: {{{format|}}} |  ({{{format|}}})
}}{{#if: {{{language|}}} | &#32;<span style="color:#555;">({{{language}}})</span> 
}}{{#if: {{{work|}}}

Done. Cheers. --MZMcBride 03:17, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

And quick too, thank you. — SomeHuman 15 Aug 2007 21:51 (UTC)

Unlink

{{editprotected}} Please unlink [[{{{accessdate}}}]]{{#if: {{{accessyear|}}} | , [[{{{accessyear}}}]], because there is absolutely no need to link this. If you say "the source was retrieved on 9 August 2007", why on earth would you link those dates? The date/year pages provide a general summary of what happened during that on that day/during that year, so linking to it when mentioning an accessdate is completely unnecessary and irrelevant. Melsaran 17:29, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm inclined to agree, personally; overlinking to date articles like this can be problematic (especially if you're trying to get something done with Recentchangeslinked, and the like). Will wait a bit for any possible objections, though. – Luna Santin (talk) 21:45, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Unlinking accessdate parameter will break a lot of refs wrt date formatting. The linking is necessary to ensure editors personal date preferences are applied when viewing articles irrespective of the date format used as the parameter. As it has always been linked, many articles use the ISO format [[2007-08-09]] which renders as 2007-08-09. Changing the default linking will make those unwieldy to read. → AA ^(talk) — 21:52, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

There IS a (quite obvious, I might add) need: this is the only to properly activate user-preferences for dates. This is the reason all full dates in Wikipedia are systematically linked. Circeus 21:54, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

I have to agree with AA and Circeus on this one. If you don't like that accessdate is wikilinked to support user-preferences for dates, you can always use accessmonthday and accessyear. Using those fields leaves the date field unlinked. Either that, or convince the developers to come up with some other way to allow the dates to reformat to the user's preference that does not involve actually linking to the date and year article. --Bobblehead ^(rants) 22:07, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, okay, thanks. I didn't know that the preferences only worked when linking the dates. Melsaran 22:19, 9 August 2007 (UTC)

While yes, linking enables user preferences, is this really that important that we need to create thousands of extra links in references? It's bad enough we do this in the articles, themselves, but refs just add another mountain onto the pile. – Luna Santin (talk) 04:04, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

I agree that the developers should provide another way to format dates, but until they do the linking is certainly needed. This came up on the village pump recently (Wikipedia:Village_pump (policy)#Frivolous Links to Date / Year). — The Storm Surfer 18:46, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

The formatting for dates should not cause their being linked nor their being shown in blue link colour. But that problem occurs everywhere on WP and there is no reason whatsoever why one should prevent formatting only in templates for references, it is at least as disturbing in articles; by the time a reader gets to references, he/she will probably have unlearnt to click on dates. The correct formatting is more important. Could developers create the code for next syntax where [[2007-08-14]] or [[14 Aug]][[2007]] or [[14 Aug]], [[2007]] etc would format the date but show that format without a link and without a colour change, while in the (much more rare) case one actually wants to link to a date-article, one should have to write [[[[2007-08-14]]]] or [[[[14 Aug]][[2007]]]] or [[[[14 Aug]], [[2007]]]] etc?
Notice that the linking [[...]] should come around the entire normally formatted date. It is not possible to link only a part of such date because the formatting according to user preferences will in some cases disrupt the principle, and it would not be useful either. There is obviously never a need for formatting a 4-digit year, thus [[2007]] would simply link to the article '2007' (though for not confusing some wikipedians, one should recognize [[[[2007]]]] to have that same meaning, thus without causing some bizarre rendering); but there would again be a difference between formatted and linked [[[[14 Aug]]]] and only formatted [[14 Aug]]. I assume that there is never any need for linking an unformatted date, thus things need not to be all too difficult to get used to. (Elsewhere will be shown that a so far in articles uncommon date format [uncommon as written and uncommon as shown] that should remain shown unaltered without influence by user preferences, can have a specific purpose.)
P.S.: For developers: I assume any linked date, regardless the explicitly written format that has been recognized so far, should link to a page titled in a fixed format like "2007-08-14" or for the other sample to "14 Aug" while the pages with those titles (unless they contain the actual article) should redirect to the actual article titled in whatever format that is best suitable for the particular date. Any date that does not deserve a proper article, should not have a page in any format that we currently write in articles; it should thus also allow red links making clear that there is no article and that it makes no sense to put a link on it. Otherwise, numerous idiots will copy linked date formats and plaster them all over WP without any checking, and readers will click on the blue links out of curiosity and, finding nothing interesting, soon get very, very tired of the dates thing. See also what I just wrote in Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Frivolous Links to Date / Year — SomeHuman 14 Aug 2007 21:29–22:59 (UTC)

Actually, if we're going to change date formatting, we might as well format the years to put an end to the A.D./BCE thing. — The Storm Surfer`

In which case e.g., [[2007 AD]] would be rendered as 2007 A.D., 2007 AD, 2007 CE or 2007 ce (etc) according to user preferences, while in articles or phrases that might rather enforce one of these year formats, one should write the full format without using square brackets – in which case however, e.g. a written longer 2007 A.D. could not become displayed as 2007 AD for people having chosen the short AD or short CE display format (which is not a major problem). We could consider allowing a user preferenced format that would display A.D. etc even for a year written as [[2007]] without any era indicator. A (probably rarely needed) link to the current article 2007 would be written as [[[[2007 A.D.]]]], [[[[2007 AD]]]], [[[[2007 CE]]]] or [[[[2007 ce]]]]; assumedly transform-from-written-format code (or else redirect pages) could send those to the same article as [[[[2007]]]] would. I definitely support your suggestion. More difficult to tackle however, would be the question whether to show a user preferenced year format with BC/AD or AD/BCE when currently e.g. [[57 BC in Gaul|57 BC]] or even [[2007 in film|2007]] is in an article. Technically, these square brackets must of course remain recognized as a link because of the piped linking, regardless whether their 57 BC or 2007 is meanwhile displayed in a user preferenced format, while [[[[2007 in film|2007]]]] would not be interpreted differently in any way. For full dates, would there be any sense in considering an extra user preference for a format that puts AD, CE etc behind some of the existing date formats? It does not matter to the discussion at hand (the number of user preferences to choose from does not significantly complicate the differenciating between link-to-article and transform-from-written-format or transform-to-user-preferenced-display-format). — SomeHuman 18 Aug 2007 00:56 (UTC)

It could even be a user preference whether or not to link. I like having a link to August 7 the first time it comes up in an article. As for the pipe links, they're usually inappropriate and confusing anyway. — The Storm Surfer 01:20, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm afraid whether or not to link is not very practical, and more importantly: it would no longer be useful. The whole idea is that the syntax now found in articles would not link and not be shown in blue colour any more, but just format dates. The [[[[...]]]] syntax would definitely be discouraged, unless linking to the year-article would be really relevant for the topic (almost never). Hence choosing to maintain the linking for the current syntax would not be wise, and technically highly complicated. Not linking while the [[[[...]]]] is there would be just as arbitrary as not linking anything that has been linked, which would probably not be preferred by anyone and technically cause major problems.
The piped links are most useful, I find them rarely inappropriate (or no more than many links that show the actual title of the linked article). They are even indispensible e.g. for "films released in 2005, 2006, and 2007..." one does not want to read "films released in 2005 in film, 2006 in film, and 2007 in film...", nor does one necessarily want to show 3 °C (3 °[[Celcius|C]]) as 3 °Celcius or 3 ° Celcius or 3° Celcius or 3 degrees Celcius.
I'm afraid you've lost me with 'the first time it comes up'. — SomeHuman 18 Aug 2007 01:52 (UTC)

I really hate to say it, but this discussion is going no place. If you guys want to argue about how dates should work on Wikipedia, you need to do it in a more visible place. Like at the Village Pump, or one of the other places where this discussion has alredy happened repeatedly. The idea won't go anywhere if it's discussed here, because this is too small a forum for what many consider to be a large issue. RossPatterson 02:29, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

We both know. See The Storm Surfer's link to the discussion on this topic there: Wikipedia:Village_pump (policy)#Frivolous Links to Date / Year, which is repeated in my first comment underneath it, under the word 'Elsewhere'. At the Pump, I suggested a specific naming convention for articles on full dates and for the days of the year; and of course, I had put a clear link to this Cite web talk page. Nevertheless, so far the pump does not appear to push very hard. It does mention Wikipedia:Date debate however, as where a discussion is supposed to go on, and a proposal at BugZilla bug# 4582. I would rather subscribe the "Comment #35 From Tony Souter" on 2006-12-16 there, but find no comments after 2007-01-09.
Though theoretically I could agree with the principle in another comment there, of not using square brackets unless these are links, I think it would not be as easy (while the extra difficulties for developeres appear to have been the cause of not getting anywhere this year) to achieve what I and some others have in mind, as my suggestion here and at the Pump. In particular, my suggestion does not need to find a way to make exceptions for dates in direct quotations, since only a possible (though rather unlikely) occurrence of the hyperlink would be envolved: any formatting would remain identical to what happens now. My suggestion would by default unlink dates, which should not be a problem for loose years, and a bot can easily differentiate stand-alone day-months between square brackets (and give them extra square brackets for assumedly appropriate maintaining of the hyperlink) from those that occur together with a square-bracketed year; also e.g. [[2007-08-17]] full dates are now already hyperlinked as 2007-08-17 to separate year and day-month articles. These should not be hyperlinked: only full dates going to a full date article should by the bot get extra square brackets around the whole and thus preserve the usually interesting hyperlink. I doubt however if there exist such (in a recognizable date format that is our concern), because even 1789-07-14 links to separate year and day-month articles while the article on this most famous date to which a link would generally be useful, Bastille Day, has 0 date pages in any format redirecting to it.
Thus implementing my suggested style on the existing articles would be easy and for the large community satisfying without requiring any scrutinizing of a million dates. The few occasions where the fully automated transition would cause a less desired result, will be outdone by the improvement of far more at present clearly undesired situations (and after a while get resolved by the community's normal editing processes, and quicker than is expected at present because the attention of interested people will be drawn to the topic: the transition in general will not remain unnoticed).
Btw, I now assume The Storm Surfer's 'the first time it comes up' to refer to what on the Date debate talk page is mentioned about Christmas day (and which talk page has no recent comments, at present). Obviously, as for all links, any specific one should occur only once in an article and only its authors decide on that (not some reading user's preference setting or some WP technology or so); and as for all links, whether the link should occur must depend solely on the relevance of the particular linked article for the topic described where the term occurs. Discussing whether one should link to dates because some users have a personal interest in dates or date articles, is as ridiculous as discussing whether we should link all adverbs in each article because some people would have a personal interest in the intricacies of each of these grammatical concepts. Links are there only to augment the quality and usefulness of the article in which they occur: that article describes the topic the reader is interested in while reading it. His or her other interests will be satisfied at another and more appropriate time, and there are sufficient ways to get into date articles then – far more easily than finding most articles on adverbs ;-)   — SomeHuman 18 Aug 2007 11:52–14:25 (UTC)

Includeonly

{{editprotected}} Please place the two occurrences of [[Category:Articles with broken citations]] inbetween <includeonly> tags, so that this template doesn't show up in the category. Melsaran 12:58, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

The reason that {{cite web}} is appearing in that category is that {{Cite web/doc}}, which is transcluded therein, contains an example of a broken template. There is nothing wrong with the code as such. HTH HAND Phil | Talk 14:35, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, fixed :) Melsaran 14:39, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Actually, it was only fixed for the moment. Subst'ing the template is a bad idea for the output of an example — the output should always reflect the current results of the template, not the results at one point in time. I've deleted the example for the time being, but I'm looking for a better answer. RossPatterson 22:47, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

archiveurl is flawed

I have a complaint: If I still have to specific a "original" url, even when I specify an archiveurl, then all URL checkers like m:Using the python wikipediabot's weblinkchecker.py are going to have to trip over that dead url. In my opinion, that is not much progress.--SallyForth123 10:10, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Shouldn't the scripts be fixed to respect archiveurl instead? Reinis^talk 10:24, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

As it stands now, any article that uses archiveurl will end up in the 404 area of Wikipedia:Dead external links. Could we at least stop providing a live link to the "original"? As far as the tools getting smarter: I do not think that any of the existing tools actually parse the wikisource fully. Anyway, they would then also have to take into account our inventory of templates. That is a bit more work that would be never finished because more such templates could be added at any time.--SallyForth123 20:57, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Pleaes update the Usage for authorlink

There is currently no way to know how to use the authorlink field. Some people (like myself), don't really understand that you have to use the first/last fields in addition to the authorlink. There are plenty of opportunties to include this in the examples. Thanks, Cacophony 08:03, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Looks explicit as Deep Throat to me: "authorlink works either with author or with last & first to link to the appropriate wikipedia article. Does not work with URLs." Circeus 20:54, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Title precedence

Is there a precedence for titling a web reference when the article in question has no title? My question arises from citing CSVs. akuyume^T_C 03:07, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

Redundant word "on" before the date

I wonder whether someone here can remove this word from the template; it's appearing in the thousands all over the place, and is quite unnecessary (= irritating). This issue has come up in the FAC room. Tony 13:49, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

This may be a minor issue to some, but as I am currently suffering in said FAC room, here is my tuppence worth. WP:CITE#Embedded Links suggests the format: Accessed [[October 27]] [[2005]]., which is of course what many editors choose to do (although 'Retrieved' seems to be the standard verb at present). If an article ends up with a mixture of reference types those using 'citeweb' will say 'Retrieved on' and those using the standard embedded link will say 'Retrieved'. Editors accused of inconsistency thus have to amend all the standard ref tags, or remove all the citeweb templates, which is a nuisance (=very irritating). My conclusion is that the template is in minor breach of WP:CITE and that one or other of them should be changed. Ben MacDui (Talk) 09:15, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

Yep, the template needs to be changed. Inconsistency is bad, and so is a redundant word, especially when repeated ad infinitum through a work list. I have no option but to discourage the use of the template unless this change is made. Tony 09:45, 30 August 2007 (UTC)