Template talk:Patent
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[edit] Revising template
Current output formats are:
- US Patent 6556992 via CAMBIA Patent Lens[1]
- US Patent 6556992 "Method and system for rating patents and other intangible assets."via CAMBIA Patent Lens[2]
Standard methods of citing patents (see "How to Cite a Patent") provide more information, including at least inventor(s) and years, and sometimes date (or filing date and issue date), patent granting authority, and their location. Wikipedia:Citing_sources says "All citation techniques require detailed full citations to be provided for each source used. Full citations must contain enough information for other editors to identify the specific published work you used." The current output format, technically, contains enough information to identify the specific work used, but it should contain more. In keeping with output examples in Wikipedia:Citation_templates, I'd suggest formatting output as something like:
- Wells, Brannon P. (Filed 2003-08-21, published 2005-12-06). "Method and system for rating patents and other intangible assets." U.S. Patent 6,556,992. Retrieved via patentlens.net on 2007-08-23.
That requires more fields in the template itself; something like the cite templates, with each field using an identifier, might look like:
{{patent|authority=US|patent=6556992|accessdate=2007-08-23|publishdate=2005-12-06|filedate=2003-08-21|title=Method and system for rating patents and other intangible assets|inventor=Wells, Brannon P.}}
The template could be written to provide backward compatibility with the current syntax; if no field identifiers like "authority=" or "patent=" start the second field, and there are two or three fields, it could be assumed to use the current {{patent|number|comment}} syntax. If a particular field wasn't included, like inventor, it could leave that aspect blank, as with the cite templates. I'd also look into allowing reference by patent application number as well as patent number, since it can also be useful to cite a pending patent. Although I think there are different ways of indicating a patent app number even within the US system, combining it with series number and year number or something.
-Agyle 18:30, 24 August 2007 (UTC)
[edit] please see use in Drawbar (haulage)
At present one of the methods leads to the patent, the other does not seem to. Please check. Fiddle Faddle (talk) 23:43, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
