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.

One unresolved issue is that users with a language set to other than en see the default message in the selected language without the link to the help page. {{ broken ref/sandbox}} now supports translations of "see the help page" for the top used languages per Wikipedia:Database reports/User preferences. The "see the help page" translations are in {{ broken ref/lang}} and can be easily expanded. Translations were culled from the various language versions of MediaWiki:Newarticletext. Translations for the main message are already in place in each MediaWiki page. --—  Gadget850 (Ed)  ^talk 13:43, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

{{broken ref/sandbox
|msg=Cite error: There are <code><ref></code> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a <code>{{Reflist}}</code> template or a <code><references /></code> tag
|lang=en
|help=Cite error refs without references
|cat=Pages with missing references list
}}

Current message

{{broken ref/sandbox
|msg=Existen etiquetas <code><ref></code>, pero no se encontró una etiqueta <code><references /></code>
|lang=es
|help=Cite error refs without references
|cat=Pages with missing references list
}}

I don't know why there are so many false negatives appear here, i.e. articles that don't actually have any fault. I would estimate at least 50%. The only way I know to clear them is by null edit. There must be one or more background processes which plod through all the pages, occasionally picking on one to mark incorrectly – some of the pages have had no change for as long as a year. It's all very tedious.

John of Cromer in Philippines ( talk) mytime= Sat 15:42, wikitime= 07:42, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

There is no bot or other process that goes through periodically and tags articles. Whenever a reference is added, deleted or changed, the Cite software extension immediately checks for errors and calls the message. Articles can have stale messages, but you can usually fix that with a purge. If you point out a current issue I can take a look at it. --   Gadget850 (Ed)  ^talk 11:04, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

I work through Category:Pages with missing references list. Yesterday it was cleared, twice. It usually gains two or three dozen a day. This morning it had more than 300 items in it. Even now it has 250-ish. At least 80% have no error, but need a null edit to clear them off the list. How/why do they get on the list? Most have not been changed in weeks. I think a reasonable solution would be to make getting on the list a two-step process - since null edit clears the spurious ones, make null edit a part of getting on the list, so that only the really wrong remain. John of Cromer in Philippines ( talk) mytime= Sun 00:22, wikitime= 16:22, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Paularo is an example. It is shown on the category page - even after I purge the category - but the category is not listed at the foot of the article. The article hasn't been edited for weeks, and I can't see any recent template or module edit that would account for it. -- John of Reading ( talk) 16:41, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Ditto the next one in the category, Pemara. -- John of Reading ( talk) 16:44, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

This has nothing to do with the cite system. Per Help:Category#Categories and templates:

Changes to the template, however, may not be reflected immediately on the category page. When you edit an article to add a category tag directly, the list of category members is updated immediately when the page is saved. When a category link is contained in a template, however, this does not happen immediately: instead, whenever a template is edited, all the pages that transclude it are put into the job queue to be recached during periods of low server load. This means that, in busy periods, it may take hours or even days before individual pages are recached and they start to appear in the category list. Performing a null edit to a page will allow it to jump the queue and be immediately recached.

The template {{ broken ref}} is used to control the messages. This can happen to any article in any category for any error message. --   Gadget850 (Ed)  ^talk 17:29, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

I'm confused. Please have a look at the history of Pemara and of the few templates it uses. I can see no reason for that article to have been placed in the error category at any time in the last few weeks. The article has had one edit this year, unrelated to its referencing; and according to the list displayed below the edit box, only one relevant template has changed since 26 February, and that edit was unrelated to referencing. Yet Johnmperry states that the error category was clear yesterday. So how did the article get into the error category today? -- John of Reading ( talk) 19:56, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

I don't know. Ask at WP:VPT. --   Gadget850 (Ed)  ^talk 21:23, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for investigating. I'll save some snapshots of the category in my sandbox and post some solid evidence at VPT if I catch one misbehaving. -- John of Reading ( talk) 06:46, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

I did take it to WP:VPT and a bug has been opened. Main question remains, what is causing dormant pages to be reassessed? John of Cromer in Philippines ( talk) mytime= Sun 18:41, wikitime= 10:41, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

An article is queued for re-assessment whenever there is an edit to any template or LUA module that it uses. Recently there have been many edits to much-used citation and other templates as part of the switch to LUA. It is therefore quite likely that the queues are long, so that the article is re-assessed at a random time some hours or days after the last template edit. But, as the bug report says, that doesn't explain why the articles are dropping into the error category. -- John of Reading ( talk) 11:11, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

I was wondering about that. I have been involved in the Citation Style 1 updates to Lua and we noticed the job queue, but Wikidata was also involved at the time. --   Gadget850 (Ed)  ^talk 11:20, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

BTW, to answer a question above, the probable reason Pemara was re-assesed for categories (A RefreshLinksJob was run in tech speak) was most likely this edit to template:Hesperiinae. (That is of course a guess though). Its impossible to know if a change on a template will affect references (or categories), so any change causes the entire page to be reparsed. Bawolff ( talk) 22:12, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

WT:Criteria for speedy deletion is currently showing "Cite error: <ref> tags exist, but no <references/> tag was found". (I am not asking for help fixing that particular problem; doing so would probably violate comment etiquette anyway.) Is this behavior intentional, or is it a reportable bug? Has this been discussed somewhere else that I haven't noticed? -- SoledadKabocha ( talk) 19:55, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Never mind; it doesn't seem to appear there anymore. -- SoledadKabocha ( talk) 22:24, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

I purged the page, so that probably fixed it. --   Gadget850  ^talk 22:40, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

I guess the page was cached after being viewed by a user with en-gb (British English) or en-ca (Canadian English) selected as language at Special:Preferences. en-gb produces [1] with the cite error message. The default en uses a customized message at MediaWiki:Cite error refs without references which checks the namespace via a template. MediaWiki:Cite error refs without references/en-gb is not customized so the MediaWiki default is used. This is a common problem and the reason Help:Preferences says en-gb and en-ca are not recommended. In this case it can affect not only the user but also others when a page with error messages is cached. I think we should display the customized message for en-gb and en-ca by creating MediaWiki:Cite error refs without references/en-gb and MediaWiki:Cite error refs without references/en-ca with {{MediaWiki:Cite error refs without references}}. A transclusion means we wouldn't have to manually keep the languages in sync. PrimeHunter ( talk) 23:46, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

I have a fix for this, but I have not had a block of time to implement it yet. See #Broken ref: language support. --   Gadget850  ^talk 01:41, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Ok ... maybe I should have paid more attention to the history of that page. Anyway, thanks. -- SoledadKabocha ( talk) 06:28, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

That should help for non-English languages but for en-gb and en-ca, it would be easier to just transclude MediaWiki:Cite error refs without references. Any objections to doing this now? It works for MediaWiki:Histlegend/en-gb. PrimeHunter ( talk) 12:25, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Go ahead. --   Gadget850  ^talk 12:33, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

OK. I started with MediaWiki:Cite error refs without references/en-ca. en-ca now says "Cite error:" and nothing more. [2] It apparently comes from the default MediaWiki:Cite error/en-ca. MediaWiki:Cite error is customized to omit "Cite error:". Should we do the same for MediaWiki:Cite error/en-ca or does that interfere too much with other types of cite errors where en-ca messages expect "Cite error:" in front? Special:PrefixIndex/MediaWiki:Cite error shows a lot of messages. Have all of them been customized for normal English to add the "Cite error:" which is omitted in MediaWiki:Cite error? Do we have to either customize all or none of the cite error messages for a given language? Your template suggestion above at #Broken ref: language support will have the same issue as far as I can see. PrimeHunter ( talk) 13:31, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

I updated the English interface pages, removed "Cite error:" from all of them and deleted MediaWiki:Cite error so it is at default. I can remember why it was deleted, but it seemed more logical to keep the prefix centralized. --   Gadget850  ^talk 17:02, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

That has created the situation I described for en-ca: Cite errors for users with normal English now display "Cite error:" in all namespaces, but nothing after that if the following message is suppressed in the namespace. If we do it like this then MediaWiki:Cite error should be created and use the same namespace suppression as the following message. Do all cite error messages use the same namespace suppression? PrimeHunter ( talk) 21:42, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Missed that. Should be fixed now. --   Gadget850  ^talk 23:35, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

I don't know if this is a red herring, or true, or relevant, but when I visit Category:Pages with missing references list it is empty apart from the 5 permanent members. That happens, but not when I wake up. Unless someone has been working on it I would expect there to be about 10 true members (and the false ones have been stopped by the bug fix). Just saying. John of Cromer in Philippines ( talk) mytime= Sun 06:39, wikitime= 22:39, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

Should be fixed now. --   Gadget850  ^talk 23:35, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

I was going to say here's one Sajid Mahmood Bhatti which should have been enqueued 7 hours ago - I just fixed it. John of Cromer in Philippines ( talk) mytime= Sun 08:42, wikitime= 00:42, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

The standard English and Spanish pages have been updated. British and Canadian English pages have been redirected. {{ Broken ref}} now has a list of all supported language interface pages with an edit link. --   Gadget850  ^talk 01:01, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

I tried maybe a half-dozen variations, saving one just for reference [3]. I'm not sure how they are linked in the implementation, so not sure what to change to get it to work. -- Ronz ( talk) 00:10, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

Don't use the first name in {{ sfn}}. The anchor is made from the last name only. --   Gadget850  ^talk 00:26, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

I tried multiple variations on that without luck. -- Ronz ( talk) 02:35, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

I added a year= and removed the ref marks, and it works now [4]! -- Ronz ( talk) 02:59, 9 May 2013 (UTC)

This error is (um, very) vague, and attempts to find out what it means just go round in circles. I ended up at Help:Cite_errors/Cite_error which claims to offer help, but does not. Perhaps this is an internal error or something -- surely it should be possible to give some sort of indication? Imaginatorium ( talk) 14:24, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

On what page do you/did you find the error? -- John of Reading ( talk) 15:30, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your response... I have fixed the page ( Trolley problem, but I believe it was on this older version: [5] (sorry, don't know how to make a 'smart' link). But now a real meaningful version of the message is there...

So the error message itself is perhaps not a big problem -- but it would really help if the help page said something like "internal/temporary error". Somewhere I saw a suggestion that a "purge" would help, but I couldn't face another Google roundtrip to try to find out what a purge is. Imaginatorium ( talk)

Someone vandalized {{ broken ref/lang}} a while back, which resulted in only the message prefix showing. I reverted and protected that template. The page just needed a purge to resolve this. --   Gadget850  ^talk 18:25, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

The references, used in prior text defined as:

<ref>{{singlechart|UKrandb|1|artist=Rihanna|song=Russian Roulette|date=December 12, 2009|accessdate=March 27, 2013}}</ref><ref>{{singlechart|UK|2|artist=Rihanna|song=Russian Roulette|date=December 12, 2009|accessdate=March 27, 2013}}</ref>

show incorrect results:

83. ^ |UK R&B (Official Charts Company) |align="center"|1

84. ^ |UK Singles (Official Charts Company) |align="center"|2

Cite error: <ref> tag with name "sc_UKrandb_Rihanna" defined in <references> is not used in prior text (see the help page).

Cite error: <ref> tag with name "sc_UK_Rihanna" defined in <references> is not used in prior text (see the help page).

What's wrong? Thx -- Frze ( talk) 14:41, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

And it breaks when used without <ref> tags:

{ {markup |{{singlechart|UKrandb|1|artist=Rihanna|song=Russian Roulette|date=December 12, 2009|accessdate=March 27, 2013}} || UK Hip Hop/R&B ( OCC) ^[1] |style="text-align:center;"|1 }}

{{ Singlechart}} is not intended for this purpose. It creates a table row, so it needs to be included in a table. It also creates a reference, so you are essentially nesting <ref> tags, which does not work. Please read the {{ Singlechart}} documentation or use another method to include these references. --   Gadget850  ^talk 15:07, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

• A note that I've grabbed the standard links and used them as standard references. If you work out how to do it in the more conventional single charts manner, then feel free to redo it. :) Lukeno94 (tell Luke off here) 11:54, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

There is a new feature in, showing Cite error: A list-defined reference is not used in the content (see the help page). instead of Cite error: <ref> tag with name "abc" defined in <references> is not used in prior text (see the help page). Now it is impossible to find out which list defined reference is not used. What can we do to let us show the old version, when the names were given? Thanks a lot. -- Frze ( talk) 08:00, 7 July 2013 (UTC) examples: Psilocybin mushroom, Here's to Never Growing Up

My fault: the name got lost somehow on my last update. Fixed:

A list-defined reference named "$1" is not used in the content (see the help page).

Where $1 will show the name. You will probably have to purge the page where the error shows. --   Gadget850  ^talk 12:27, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

Hello - some editors fight off the vandal hordes, as I do repairing pages with citation errors. If I didn't - there would be a large backlog in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting and in Category:Pages with missing references list as in Category:Pages with broken reference names ( more than 1500 yesterday). It is much more easier to repair references if you do it one hour, one day or one week ago after the errors were made instead of months and years after the error was done. Very, very difficult to find these errors.

Only with WikiBlame Search it is possible to find and repair such errors.

Best wishes -- Frze ^{> talk} 08:49, 10 October 2013 (UTC)

A good idea of User:TheJJJunk: He monitors certain backlog categories using {{User:TheJJJunk/Backlog}}, a template he made:

Backlog status ( Purge)

Category	Current status
Pages with missing references list	Not done
Persondata templates without name parameter	Done
Articles with incorrect citation syntax	Not done
Pages with URL errors	Done

which determines if the category is empty or not. He also uses ARA, a script that he developed, to help fix citation errors. He hasn't used WikiBlame before. — JJJ ^{( say hello)} 16:01, 10 October 2013 (UTC) Copied from my talk page -- Frze ^{> talk} 17:38, 11 October 2013 (UTC)

Posting this here due to a couple of my ref tag cite errors over at Talk:Acid_Rap#Other_sources that the admins aren't helping much with. Ben0kto ( talk) 23:28, 13 October 2013 (UTC)

Which admins? There is no request for help at Talk:Acid Rap#Other sources, so where or who have you asked? -- Redrose64 ( talk) 09:56, 14 October 2013 (UTC)

see Wikipedia:Bot requests#New REFBot

• 1500 pages 10 October 2013
• 21 pages 17 October 2013
• 52 pages 19:30, 21 October 2013 — Preceding unsigned comment added by Frze ( talk • contribs) 19:25, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

For clarity, since this is a shared talk page, Frze has been working on Category:Pages with broken reference names. -- John of Reading ( talk) 19:45, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

I wanted to cite a blog post titled "Commandant's Column: Envisioning USAWC 2020" [6] ( archive) for which "2020" seemed like a reasonable name...denied! — rybec 21:58, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

In the construct <ref name="identifier">text of ref</ref>, identifier cannot be a pure integer. You could use <ref name="USAWC2020"> but please note that blogs are not considered reliable sources. -- Redrose64 ( talk) 23:26, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.

Please add

|nocat={{{nocat|}}}

to the call to Template:broken ref on MediaWiki:Cite croak and any other error messages that lack it. That way, Help:Cite errors/header can include nocat, thereby preventing Help:Cite errors/Cite croak (and other pages) from being included in the maintenance categories. 63.251.123.2 ( talk) 20:04, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

You don't want to hide Cite_croak in any circumstance; it indicates a software error. — Edokter ( talk) — 21:31, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

I know what Cite_croak means. That isn't what is being proposed. What I'm asking is for the existing suggestion from Template:Broken_ref#Examples to be applied, in order to allow the Help pages to avoid being incorrectly included in inappropriate maintenance categories. Please re-consider. 63.251.123.2 ( talk) 21:39, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

This won't be enough to take the help pages out of the error category, because most of them deliberately trigger an error as a demonstration. Try previewing Help:Cite errors/Cite error ref no key after deleting the two instances of Help:Cite errors/header. -- John of Reading ( talk) 21:51, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

I see the problem, yes. It would work for the pages that don't include examples (like Help:Cite errors/Cite croak) but you are right, we'd need to figure out another solution for excluding the subpages of Help:Cite_errors that deliberately include errors. A simple solution would be to exclude the whole of the Help namespace (as is already done for the Talk namespace), but I'm not sure if that is actually a good idea. Suggestions? 63.251.123.2 ( talk) 23:13, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

Not done: please establish a consensus for this alteration before using the {{ edit protected}} template. -- Redrose64 ( talk) 22:39, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

Will do, sorry for the trouble. 63.251.123.2 ( talk) 23:13, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

I added 'nocat' on December 27, 2013. This only works when you directly translude one of the MediaWiki pages but not when cite.php triggers an error. See the doc page. --   Gadget850  ^talk 01:02, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

I noticed that Template:Broken ref works differently in the various namespaces. Actually, I remember that, because I took part in the original discussion regarding this:

• In article, help, category, template and file namespaces: adds message and error category.
• In user namespace: adds message but not error category.
• In other namespaces: the message is suppressed by an invisible span and no error category.

This is pretty logical:

• Both the message and the error category in article, help, and template namespaces: because we want this to be fixed, right away or later by editors who work through the error category..
• Only the message in user namespace: because we don't care to fix other people's userspace, but we still want the user himself to fix it.

I have two suggestions:

• Move category and file namespaces from the first to the second group. They are not an article, not a template which is transcluded in articles, and not a helppage, which is supposed to help so should itself be error-free. So basically, we don't care that much.
• Remove the invisible span from other non-talk namespaces. We still want the editor who makes the error to fix it. Debresser ( talk) 00:46, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

I would like categories and files to remain in the error categories. It's a way to spot some vandalism and misguided edits that would otherwise be missed. -- John of Reading ( talk) 07:55, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

I see your point. You are saying that categories and files are more heavily edited than other namespaces, so you want to keep a check on them. I don't really agree with you, but it is probably a judgment call.

My second-step proposal would be that since the number of pages in the error category is low (used to be hundreds and thousands, and is now tens), we should, after giving people a month or so to see the error messages in other non-talk namespaces, add all of them to the error category, to fix them all. Debresser ( talk) 08:41, 9 December 2013 (UTC)