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Should we tread on other guidelines while writing this one? While I like having an INTEXT section, here's a few changes:
Editors who watch this page may be interested in Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Change_to_template:reflist_wiki-wide?. Please leave any comments on the village pump page. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 20:29, 29 November 2010 (UTC)
Carl, what other methods are there, apart from footnotes and parenthetical referencing? [1] SlimVirgin talk| contribs 03:52, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
[2] SV's copyedit changed "On Wikipedia, there are several different styles. The two most popular are ... " to "The two styles of inline citation on Wikipedia are ..." Editors can also use prose citations, naming the author or work in prose in sufficient detail to identify it in the list of references. Geogre seemed to prefer that, as I recall. Gimmetoo ( talk) 13:16, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
The underlying issue here is standardization.Standardization has both positive effects and negative effects. Among the positive effects are
Among the negative effects are:
I think I am just scratching the surface of this issue. Perhaps an essay would be a good place to collect these arguments.
Standardization, out in the article space, always means changing an article from an unpopular style to a popular style, and, as the guideline should point out at every turn, this is a dangerous practice that can lead to trouble and should only be carried out with caution.
(My own view is that we should eliminate (1) truly unusual citation styles (used in less than 500 articles) that are (2) damaged by neglect and (3) clearly are not an "innovation" in any sense. This includes things like unnecessary use of <cite>
spans, {{
harvrefcol}}, unnecessary use of {{
Ref}}/{{
Note}}, unnecessary use of |Ref=
in {{
cite *}}
templates and many other, weirder things that are floating around. There are tens of thousands of articles with broken and badly formatted citations that use these methods. I think this kind of maintenance should not be controversial, and is the only kind of standardization which makes sense. Otherwise, we should only document the most popular styles and try to document innovations as soon as they are stable. I believe this is what this guideline does.)
Back on topic and with all this reasoning in the background, I think that this guideline should include the observation that there are really only two (stable, reliable, popular) inline citation styles: parenthetical referencing and footnotes. This shortens the learning the curve and is unlikely to cause edit warring. If there are editors who hate both parenthetical referencing and footnotes, we should document that. If someone can find an innovation that isn't one of these styles, we should document that. However, I don't believe there is any such innovation and I don't believe there are any such editors. ---- CharlesGillingham ( talk) 19:10, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
Made a couple of minor edits that I think improve sentence flow. It's Ok if others disagree. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Clipjoint ( talk • contribs) 22:29, 3 December 2010 (UTC)
MediaWiki obviously has this nice feature that a reference that is used more than once can be named, which means if you cite <ref>Miller (2000), p. 100.</ref>
more than once, you can name it <ref name="Miller 2000 p. 100" />
, to avoid a bunch of references that look the same. If it detects multiple identical refs,
WP:AWB automatically applies this
as a general fix. The question now is whether this is based on a MOS guideline, because after applying this
here,
User:Hegvald
reverted it. Who's right? —
bender235 (
talk) 13:17, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
I would be grateful for precedents for following practices (or comment that they would not conflict established WP "official" or accepted style). These measures would make it MUCH easier to refer to WP articles in non-WP publications. (1) State, in the body of the article, the relevance of every item in the "Further reading" list to the subject of the article, and provide citation number to main bibliography unless this would become too long, in which case make secondary bibliography using {{Reflist}}. (2) Number the items in lists instead of using bullets, particularly when there are several, as in Edward Elgar. (3) Put a few (selected) references to biographies, obituaries, photograph collections, etc. at end of opening sentence in article about a person as in William Anderson, artist. I would only do this when it led to just a few references, and not when there is a Biography section covering entire life immediately after opening sentence, as for Edward Elgar Michael P. Barnett ( talk) 17:51, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
I propose to add to WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT, to clarify what does not need to be included in a citation. Some non-Wikipedia style guides call for information that Wikipedia does not request, and too much information may interfere with readers' use of WP.
This follows the discussion at another Talk topic. I've added microforms to the proposal.
Nick Levinson ( talk) 05:25, 5 November 2010 (UTC)
So in your proposal, those two sentences run:
If the publisher offers a link to the source or its abstract that does not require a payment or a third party's login for access, you should provide the URL for that link. And if the source exists only online, give the link even if access is restricted.
On the first sentence, even URLs to WP:PAYWALLed and registration-required sources are desirable in some instances. However, such links, even if free, might not be desirable in others, e.g., when the URL is redundant to the doi, or is at a notoriously unstable website (here I am naturally thinking of links to news.yahoo.com).
On the second, I'm not convinced that this is necessary in all cases. For example, many academic journals provide an online supplement to articles, such as extra images. It would be perfectly adequate to cite "Jones, Mary. 2009. Supplementary images for "<Name of Paper>." M Pressive Journal..." Furthermore, while the source may never reach hard copy, "my" link isn't necessarily "your" link. I might use Athens, and you might use ScienceDirect to reach exactly the same online publication. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 00:32, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
WP:CITEHOW says:
Now where and when does this apply? As far as I understood it this is a rule-of-thumb for disputes in which person A changes the citation style, person B reverts it, and both end up in lengthy discussion (or worse, like edit war). In my opinion, in those cases WP:CITEHOW applies, ending the dispute by keeping the "established style". But how about person A's original modification in case of no opposition? Is this permitted (per WP:BRD), or is it prohibited (per "the established style is cemented for all eternity, no one is allowed ever to change it again")? Does person A violate WP:CITEHOW by changing the style in the first place, or is this permitted as long as he/she doesn't start an edit war, or violating WP:3RR? — bender235 ( talk) 23:52, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
{{Reflist|colwidth=30em}}
. But instead of implementing it right on the spot per
WP:BRD, you pin a request on the talk page that certainly no one will reply to for 30 days. I hope you realize this is deadlock prone. If one has to ask each of the
article's owners before making a minor edit like this, it would essentially kill Wikipedia. It is exactly how Wikipedia does not work, and the exact opposite of
WP:BRD, which instead should apply here. Because, sure, there will be articles where a majority of contributors does not like the proposed style change. But why not speed up the process of finding consensus by following WP:BRD? Allow anyone to intruduce a new citation style. If it sticks, fine. If it get reverted, fine, too. Either case is better than a lengthy discussion. —
bender235 (
talk) 01:23, 14 December 2010 (UTC)Recently, my watchlist has exploded with multiple editors who change the way footnotes are displayed on large numbers of articles, by changing <references> to {{ reflist}} and/or changing the column count of the {{ reflist}} template. For an example of the scale of editing I'm talking about, see these contribs and search for the word "references" in the edit summaries there. I don't want to pick on that editor, who is not the only one doing this.
It has always been the case in the past that no particular style for displaying footnotes was recommended by the style guides, and so editors of each article could choose the style they wanted. This page and the main MOS discourage editors from going around changing articles from one style to another based on personal taste.
The issue of whether the usage of {{ reflist}} should be standardized has been discussed at Template talk:Reflist recently, but relatively editors follow that talk page. One outcome of the discussion was that several editors disliked that allowed wider screens to show more columns, instead of always showing 2 columns. But that change, away from a fixed column count, is one of the changes I keep seeing on my watchlist ( example).
I want to post here to get a broader range of opinions. Are changes like the ones I linked above appropriate? — Carl ( CBM · talk) 00:45, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
{{Reflist}}
with {{Reflist|colwidth=30em}}
actually a "change of citation style"?{{Reflist|2}}
with {{Reflist}}
(if that's what you'd like to do) w/out asking anyone for permission, or whether the original style of the article is cemented for all eternity, whether it be {{Reflist|2}}
, or {{Reflist|4}}
, or whatever. —
bender235 (
talk) 01:27, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
{{Reflist}}
, or {{Reflist|2}}
, or {{Reflist|colwidth=30em}}
suits the article best. And how to find out the consensus? By using
bold, revert, discuss. If the change sticks, its the new consensus. If it gets reverted, the old style is still consensus and should be kept. That's how Wikipedia has always worked in every aspect. —
bender235 (
talk) 01:50, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
Objectively, {{Reflist|2}} is the standard way of making Reference lists multi-column; on occasion {{Reflist|3}} is used when the references are very short (eg lots of references to different pages of a book). Where the hell this colwidth thing comes from, I don't know, but I'm starting to think it should simply be removed from the template. At any rate I can't see any specific circumstances where it is preferable to the status quo, and there is certainly no justification for editors going around adding it willy nilly to articles they're not seriously involved in contributing to. Rd232 talk 08:58, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
There's a proposal to mandate a certain number of columns over a precise number of refs, and of a certain number of ems, which is going to change the text of this guideline, being discussed at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Final proposal. Tijfo098 ( talk) 12:09, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
Is there a way to bundle a bunch of named references into one reference? Like <ref><ref name="nytimes" /><ref name="time" /><ref name="guardian" /></ref> but actually working. - Kollision ( talk) 16:22, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
{{#tag:ref|<ref name="ref1">ref1</ref><ref name="ref2">ref2</ref><ref name="ref3">ref3</ref>}}
---- CharlesGillingham ( talk) 19:31, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
It does work if you use a group, but that means you have to use two instances of {{
reflist}}:
This is a nested reference.{{#tag:ref|<ref name="ref1">ref1</ref><ref name="ref2">ref2</ref><ref name="ref3">ref3</ref>|group=note}} ;Notes {{reflist|group=note}} ;References {{reflist|close=1}}
This is a nested reference. [note 1]
---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 04:19, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
Consider these (arbitrarily formatted) citations:
{{
citation}}
: |last=
has generic name (
help).In each of these cases, the source has a "corporate author"; there is no author's name. What are the recommended ways to format these citations? How should the major citation templates support these? Do the citation templates need to be changed to support these? What should a parenthetical reference or shortened footnote for these sources look like? Finally, what is the proper term for these citations? (i.e. is "corporate authors" the right term?)
I am starting a parallel discussion over at Citation/core, which hopefully will focus on the templates. Here, I hope we can discuss what APA, Chicago, etc. recommend, and reach some consensus what we should recommend. ---- CharlesGillingham ( talk) 19:24, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
Thanks. Anyone else? I was hoping I could get a set of choices based on MLA, APA, Chicago, etc. There's really no other citation experts here any more? ---- CharlesGillingham ( talk) 07:25, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
With the Bundling Citations subsection, I was a little confused on how to write the wiki markup for an intended reference. In other sections, the page gives examples of markup. Could someone please try that for this case?
One way, which numbers references within the bundle, seems to be thus: <ref>Something overall about specific references:<ol><li>One reference.</li><li>Another reference.</li></ol></ref> I guess element classes are not necessary.
I imagine we can use <ref>Something overall about specific references:<ul><li>One reference.</li><li>Another reference.</li></ul></ref> to make an unordered list with discs, but I haven't tested that.
In either case, it seems items should not be written with leading asterisks or hashes, unless we want an asterisk or hash to appear literally, and that <br /> (line break) is unnecessary.
As to the further-information template on citation overkill, I assume it should be deleted, since it's not about bundling, and it probably should be incorporated into a sentence further up the page (and then removed from the See Also list as redundant). Thoughts?
Thanks. Nick Levinson ( talk) 20:20, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
This comment in a discussion over at WT:V caught my eye. There are a couple of points there, and I think the one re Hosting vs. Publishing is relevant here. I've dithered over this when composing some cites. I've generally ended up as identifying the "publisher" (that named field in templated cites, and the field containing that info in hand-crafted cites) as something like "WhereIfoundit.com, originally published by OriginalPublisher". I nearly ran over to the talk page for {{tl:Cite web}} to suggest a host= or similar parameter there (and Host= for {{ Citation/core}}) but thought I'd ask for comments here first.
Two thoughts: (1) perhaps it's better to cast this in terms of "Republisher" rather than "Host"; (2) this concept of citing republication of previously published material might deserve some attention on the project page. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 23:19, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
Various republishers, whether online or print, may have various motives for republishing something. Google Books motive seems to be that the book was found in a reputable library. Project Gutenberg's motive seems to be that enough volunteers could be found to enter and check the text. Dover's motive seems to be the expectation that enough paper copies will be sold to make money. So the reputation and motivation of the republisher can reflect on the reliability of the source, just as the motivation and reputation of the original publisher reflects on the reliability of the source. It is not just a question of whether the republisher can be counted on to provide a faithful copy. The fact that a book was republished recently can mean that an old book is still important today. Jc3s5h ( talk) 18:23, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
Should I prefer the journal name as published or the current one? TCO ( talk) 22:29, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
|journal=Pin Collector (currently Pin Monthly)
. ---—
Gadget850 (Ed)
talk 23:37, 9 January 2011 (UTC)ec: I meant A, a reference citation within Painted turtle to Tanner's expedition. The publishing journal was originally called Great Basin Naturalist, but has since changed to Western Naturalist (or some such). So when you look at the pdf, or bound version, of course it is the former. When you look at the website (where I direct people as pdf is not linkable except going there), you see the journal name with new version and even a citation as new periodical name. Obviously situation will happen lots of times, so would like a general rule. Do you know how this is handled normally in academic publishing advice? (tried googling, but didn't find it exactly, but I'm sure it's the sort of thing that has been adressed. Just wondered general practice.) Oh and I did the opposite of what you say (so would need to go back and put old name in, now) TCO ( talk) 23:41, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
ec: OK. I will go change it back. I think I messed this up one other place, but don't tell anyone as I have 160 refs and can't recall where I did that! TCO ( talk) 23:41, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
About a month ago, User:Hegvald and I had a debate on whether references should be named (and refered to multiple times), like I did with this edit (using WP:AWB). Hegvald disagreed (and reverted), explaining on my talk page that "real-life academic contexts outside Wikipedia" are not using that kind of a reference system. As of now, and as far as I know, there is no guideline that recommends (or prohibits) the use of named references. Therefore, I'd like to discuss this here. And finally, what about WP:NOTPAPER in this context? — bender235 ( talk) 11:23, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
WP:NOTPAPER, as far as I can see, is mainly about the space restrictions of a paper encyclopaedia: no reason to exclude topics because they are no longer current or only likely to be looked up by people in some other place than the area where the [paper] encyclopaedia is marketed.
The arguments for named references seems to be pretty much that it saves space by reducing the number of footnotes. How is that needed when Wikipedia is " not paper"? -- Hegvald ( talk) 15:47, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
Miller (2000), p. 100.
may be useful on paper, where there is a (partial) reference list on every page, but not on Wikipedia, where there is a single reference list at the end of the article. The question was whether
this is merely a style change (i.e., a neutral change from one style to another [which, of course, should be avoided]), or rather a fix (i.e., introducing an improvement). In my honest opinion it is the latter. —
bender235 (
talk) 16:00, 3 January 2011 (UTC)There is a style decision between A and B below, and A is justifiable. Among other things, the references appear in exactly the order they appear in the text, which makes them easier to follow, and B is not an obvious improvement. While I'm sure some editors don't even notice this choice, there are articles written with style A as a conscious choice, so if someone objects, best to leave it alone. Gimmetoo ( talk) 18:01, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
So, where do we stand now? Does DuplicateUnnamedReferences have to be removed from the WP:AWB feature list? — bender235 ( talk) 22:50, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
They are not footnotes, they are endnotes. Really think about it functionally. If someone said they were endnotes, could you prove him wrong? With footnotes, in a document, you have different bundles on different pages within an individual document. For us, our individual document is the "article". And the citations are all in a mass at the end. One section only. And it is very NORMAL to repeat numbers of an endnote. Check out any science journal or even just MS Word. The confusion comes from calling something here a "footnote", but functionally it is an endnote and we use it in that manner. Including repeated numbers. ;-) TCO ( talk) 23:46, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
Let's say I add a citation, then I want to link the same numbered citation again at a different point in the article, how would I do this? -- Rayne117 ( talk) 01:23, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
Bob,
[1] Gulliver,
[2] and Jane.
[1]
Like this. <ref name="Foobar">Foobar</ref> the first time, <ref name="Foobar"/> the other times. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 08:16, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
I would like to incorporate some more info into the "Inline citations" section as follows:
Inline citations
An inline citation is a line of text identifying a source that is added close to the material it supports, offering text-source integrity. If a word or phrase is particularly contentious, an inline citation may be added next to it within a sentence, but adding the citation to the end of this sentence is usually sufficient, so long as it is clear which source supports which part of the text. Likewise, instead of citations after each sentence, one citation can be used for group of consecutive sentences in a paragraph supported by the same source. The citation can be placed at the end of the last sentence of the group of sentences, the introductory sentence preceding a block quotation, or the topic of thesis sentence of a paragraph. Except it is recommended that citations be placed next to direct quotations or statements that are particularly startling or contrary to " common knowledge" (i.e., likely to be challenged). Note that if text citing other sources is inserted inside the text supported by one citation, citations for the existing text will have to updated. The likelihood of such a future edit occurring and how well the text will be monitored, may be considerations in deciding whether to use this method of citation.
Editors are free to use any method for inline citations; no method is recommended over any other. Two common styles of inline citation used on Wikipedia are clickable footnotes (<ref> tags) and parenthetical references.
Comments:
Editors here may be interested in the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Citing sources/example style#why_not_standardize_on_one_format.3F, an effort to impose a one-size-fits-all citation style on every article. My overall impression from the discussion (started by TCO, but expanded beyond his/her original questions) is that the goals are to ban general references, to require the use of <ref> tags (banning WP:PAREN and all other forms of WP:Inline citations), and to require the use of citation templates.
As this discussion about this guideline's contents is (oddly) happening on a subpage rather than on this page, I am providing the link here and hope that you will all join the discussion there. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 04:30, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
18-Jan-2011: A better "tool" to help with sourcing an article would scan outside reliable sources for "key topic phrases" rather than just formatting citations. Also, at the present time (January 2011), the { Cite_web} & {Cite_book} templates need to be rewritten to use less of the MediaWiki preprocessor resources: even though an article can use 1 million tiny templates, only 550 {Cite_book} transclusions can be made. Here's the point: it is not possible to have a "List of news articles about subject XX" which has 800 citation templates, unless the list is split into multiple pages, or {Cite_web} is rewritten for better performance, such as combining the contents of {Citation/core} to allow twice as many citations, allowing 1,100 total (rather than just 550 uses of {Cite_web} or such). Meanwhile, a "tool" to help citations in articles would scan for related issues about the subject:
News phrase[a] | Person: Natalee Holloway | Person: Amanda Knox | Person: Charles Manson |
---|---|---|---|
Google hits for name | 371,000 | 763,000 | 1,470,000 |
"false arrest" | 2,140 | 1,260 | 4,300 |
" false confession" | 2,750 | 7,090 | 3,850 |
"police hit her" (or him) | 6 | 6,340 | 9 |
" new trial" | 20,900 (5.6%) | 49,700 (6.5%) | 40,700 (2.7%) |
[a] - Data from Google Search on 11:13, 18 January 2011 (UTC). |
We need a tool which can adjust the search-engine results, such as the above from Google, perhaps scaling to omit blog counts (by some likelihood factor, not by exact numbers). Also, note the counts of subject-name, " Charles Manson" has twice the hits of "Amanda Knox" which has twice the hits for " Natalee Holloway". Then, the counts need to be adjusted as percentages, in accordance with WP:NPOV neutrality as "proportionately" reflecting the coverage in sources. The highest counts of those phrases were not for Natalee Holloway, but, instead, Charles Manson had 4,300 for "false arrest" which should be considered a significant topic for NPOV coverage of Manson (whether the arrests were later justified). Then, Amanda Knox ranked highest in " false confession" (7,090), "new trial" (49,700) as being re-tried for murder in the Italian appeals court, and "police hit her" (or "him") as 6,340 compared to just "6" webpages about Holloway and "9" for Charles Manson. Hence, for NPOV coverage of Amanda Knox, the topic "police hit her" (whether claimed or substantiated) would be a topic to cover in the intro of an article, as seemingly such a huge issue as reported, neutrally, by the tool. Also, note how a tool would not pre-censor to ban the phrase "police hit her" as being a WP:BLP vio against some police officers, because it is just data, whereas an article would need to add how police denied the allegation during court hearings, for NPOV balance. Now, compared to article citation templates, an obvious implication might be to expand citation templates to include the "phrase" concept, with phrases=xxxx to be listed/indexed as hidden text inside a source citation template, then another tool could count and report the coverage of those phrases within an article's citations. Hence, expect several citations in an article to index the key topic "police hit her" because it is so common in sources. As articles are later edited, and censored for POV-pushing, plus removing reliable sources to make topics seem unfounded, then the proportional usage of topic phrases could be seen as being slanted. Thus, 2 revisions, far apart, could be compared to see where information was censored or added to affect the relative percentages of topic phrases in an article. To help this, article citations should, internally, list the "key topic phrases" which a tool would search. We need to have numeric data to quantify the level of POV-pushing or hopefully, NPOV-balanced coverage of major topics, compared with their source citations. Currently, we have edit-counters which reveal some users editing an article "400 times" as an indication of unusual activity. More about this later. - Wikid77 11:13, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
Am curious about this: is there an obvious way of telling our readers where an offline source (map, journal, less popular books) can be found? There doesn't seem to be a "remarks" field in the standard citation templates. -- Der yck C. 14:14, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
|postscript=
parameter is used to adjust the citation terminator where the terminating period may not be appropriate.*{{cite book|last=Doe|first=John|title=Doe's book}} Available through some obscure process.
Is WP:ASL still reliable and usable? As it was added 4 years ago, so browser question is not a problem any more... What do you think? -- WhiteWriter speaks 15:51, 12 January 2011 (UTC)
I'm trying to source a court decision using the {{ cite court}} template. Unfortunately, the title is long. Extremely long. On the order of 3,000+ characters long. Is it OK if I truncate the title myself, ex to something like Jewel, et al v Hughes Air Corp, et al? Or do I have to use the whole really long ugly title? ( see title) -- Mûĸĸâĸûĸâĸû ( blah?) 15:57, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
I thought that {{reflist}} was the current template, and replaced <references/>. But someone just informed me that the opposite is true. So which is it? This policy page uses the former one. Is it out of date? Which is the right one, or the most current one? Nightscream ( talk) 18:45, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
Policy says: 'Embedded links should never be used to place external links in the body of an article, like this: "Apple, Inc. announced their latest product..."'
In Christianity articles, editors routinely cited chapter and verse (e.g., "Matthew 17:4-7") and use a template to turn that into an external link to a Bible Lookup service. It looks like this routine use of external links embedded in text is against policy. This issue has come up on Talk:Nativity of Jesus. A little guidance? Leadwind ( talk) 15:49, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
Has anyone made a Wikipedia reference style for EndNote? This would ease referencing things considerably for those of us who use EndNote (or Zotero) already. If nobody has made one, perhaps I'll find the time to make one at some point. If so, not sure how I should upload it to share with the community?
Also, I see "You can insert a link beside each citation in Wikipedia, allowing you to export the citation to a reference manager, such as EndNote". Would it be possible/ a good idea to have a bot do this automatically? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pengortm ( talk • contribs) 00:55, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
From the WP:CITEHOW section:
I know this means if an article already has 20 refs, and you're adding #21, you should follow the established style, to have some consistency within the article. But what if one wants to change the style of all references? Does the rule above prohibit this? And if so, wouldn't this mean a certain aspect of one article can never change again? Wouldn't this put undue weight on the first editor's decision? -- bender235 ( talk) 02:58, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
I would interpret the rule to be a bit firmer than Bender235's interpretation. If an article has a nearly-consistent acceptable citation style, it should be adhered to unless one first obtains consensus (or at least no complaints after a reasonable wait) on the talk page. Of course bare URLs is not considered an acceptable style of citation, so if most of the citations are like that , have at it. But a campaign of systematically changing citation styles of articles that already have acceptable citations with the excuse "most of the time no one complains" is not acceptable.
Actually, chances are someone will complain, just because there have been so many campaigns to change "BC" to "BCE" or "colour" to "color" or whatever that any systematic style change tends to be viewed as a direct attack on the principle of national and religious diversity. Jc3s5h ( talk) 23:54, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
The concept that citation templates are preferable has been proposed yet again and failed to achieve consensus yet again this month, this time at Wikipedia talk:Citing sources/example style#why not standardize on one format?.
This needs expansion, but first: are shortened footnotes a subset of long footnotes or a separate method? ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 19:48, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
I have used Template:Cite doi for a journal reference I was having trouble with (ref 105 on Somerset Levels) & all seemed to have worked fine. However I'm doing final reference checks before an FAC nomination & I found although I added "accessdate=13 February 2011" into the citation this doesn't show on the article. This will get picked up at FAC and I was wondering if anyone knew how to overcome this problem?— Rod talk 08:35, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
|accessdate=
will only display if you have specified |url=
. When you cite a journal but not a URL no retrieved date should be needed (the contents of the journal paper don't vary by date, unlike a news story that may be updated over time).
Rjwilmsi 20:50, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
On a related note, I think we need to put all of the ENGVAR-type information in a single section, and point a shortcut like WP:CITEVAR at it. I'm getting tired of spelling it out to editors who change long-established WP:PAREN articles to WP:FOOT, sometimes even under the mistaken belief that ref tags are absolutely required by policies. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 23:02, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
If the article you are editing already is already using a given citation style, you should follow that style. Do not change the citation style used in an article merely for personal preference or cosmetic reasons. If you think the existing citation system is inappropriate for the specific needs of the article, gain consensus for a change on the talk page before changing it. As with issues of spelling differences, if there is disagreement about which style is best, defer to the style used by the first major contributor; if the style has never been stable, defer to the style used by the first major contributor. If you are the first major contributor to an article, then you may pick whatever style you think best for this article.
The above is my current proposal; I've put it in a separate subsection so that anyone can tweak it. If there are no changes or objections in a few days, then one of us should add it to the guideline (at the end?). I think that the examples are important, because it's these specific examples that editors frequently ask us about. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 05:32, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
February 5, 2011
might look less messy or confusing than {{birth date|2011|02|05|mf=y}}
, but the latter offers an additional feature (hCard microformat, that is). The output of both ("February 5, 2011" vs. " February 5, 2011") looks exactly the same, but it's still more than a cosmetic change.I very strongly object to the mandatory use of citation templates, for the simple reason that there are citations (" Natalis Comes: Mythologiae siue explicationis fabularum libri decem; translated as Natale Conti’s Mythologiae, translated and annotated by John Mulryan and Steven Brown; Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006. ISBN 978-0-86698-361-7") which will not fit a standard template, unless it have so many bells and whistles as to be less than useful to the average editor.
We can discuss the hypothetical citation-reading machine when it exists; when it does, it will probably be most useful if it is able to parse the standard format of citations without prompts and labels. Otherwise, the convenience of actual readers (even of actual editors) should not be deferred to the ease of programming a machine. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:48, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
I dislike citation templates. Not only do they encourage inputting of often useless data, as already remarked upon above, they potentially clutter the text in edit mode, often making it difficult to parse. OTOH, there are numerous editors who either do not know how to put in citations, or are too lazy to do so. I find it preferable to have more information than the bare url, and often fix these up by call WP:Reflinks, which usually fills in the whole shebang using {{ citation}}. Note that such action often goes counter to CITEVAR, but Reflinks doesn't give users the choice, AFAIK. However, the problem overall isn't the existence of citation templates, but the tendency of many editors to overpopulate these templates by mechanically and anally inserting information merely because it's available. -- Ohconfucius ¡digame! 02:09, 10 February 2011 (UTC)
I have expanded WP:CITEVAR, but left out the example involving citation templates. That example of a "cosmetic" change said:
I still think that is a useful and valid example, as I don't think that SlimVirgin should be able to force Bender to give up citation templates in an article that has been happily using them for years, just like I don't think that Bender should be able to force SlimVirgin to accept them in an article that has happily shunned them for years.
However, IMO the most important point is all the other stuff, not the one example. Accordingly, I've added the other stuff (slightly tweaking some wording to merge with existing text, in a way that I hope is clear), and hope that works for everyone. If you want to continue the discussion about citation templates vs manual formatting, perhaps we could take that up again—but maybe not until next month, and in a new section. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 22:00, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
The "A quick how-to" section says: Then add this to the end of the article:
==Notes==
{{Reflist}}
Which, historically, makes some sense -- the footnotes section is generally where quick inline citations are given in an article, but the footnotes section isn't exclusively citations, it could also include author commentary on a passage, or a tangential story which helps to explain background but doesn't really fit into the main text. For a Wikipedia article, though, this section is where the <ref> tags in an article are sent, as collated by the {{Reflist}} template. Technically, everything down at the bottom of the article is in the footnotes, the "Notes", the "External Links", it's all that stuff at the bottom of the page that's not really part of the article proper. Calling this section simply "Notes" gives it an air of impermanence, as though what's there was simply jotted down and may or may not actually have anything to do with the rest of the article. I think the section should be entitled "References" since it's where the References in an article appear. "Notes" almost implies what the discussion page is for, a place for brief remarks, marginal comments or explanations.
==References==
{{Reflist}}
Is how it should be formatted. Banaticus ( talk) 19:55, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
== Notes/References/Works cited/Sources/Bibliography/References/some other sensible section heading chosen by editors ==
in the example, then some poor confused person will actually paste that whole mess into an article. So whatever we used in any given example is not a binding determination that 100% of all Wikipedia articles must use that particular word or phrase for the same section: You can use whatever title you think works best for this article, okay?"I strongly agree that notes are not references. Notes are separate from references, see Template:Note or articles such as Juliusz Słowacki. -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 17:23, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
There is a discussion as to whether or not to include quotes in citations discussion at MOS:talk [11]. I am linking to that rather than opening parallel discussions on both this talk page and that one. PPdd ( talk) 22:34, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
On the subjects of uncontroversial edits to CITE that may be controversial, is changing "Generally considered to be cosmetic changes" to "To be avoided unless there is consensus" something that should be discussed here? I think that the previous heading was correct. -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 20:08, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
What is the best way for me to fix a dead link that was in Aaron Schock#References? It is now behind a paywall. I quickly searched the talk archives for paywall but found nothing specific to this case.
where cite 22 was
The chicagotribune URL was dead and not in the Internet Archive. I used the tribune's site search and found the now-paywalled article at http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/chicagotribune/access/1580304701.html?FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Oct+22%2C+2008&author=Anonymous&pub=Chicago+Tribune&edition=&startpage=46&desc=For+Congress
The free abstract is just one sentence that does not support the wikipedia claim. Of course I WP:AGF and am reasonably sure the full text does support it.
The first item under Wikipedia:Citing sources#Preventing and repairing dead_links advises: "First, check the link to confirm that it is dead. The site may have been temporarily down or have changed its linking structure." Well, putting the material behind a paywall is kind of like changing "its linking structure". But should I then replace the original URL with a long paywall URL?
I was unsure so I looked at Wikipedia:Link rot#Repairing a dead link: "If you find an archived version, double-check to make sure that the material still supports the citation." Well, I tentatively decided that the paywall is a kind of "archived version" and added "|archiveurl=longpaywallurl" to the cite, which now looks like this:
My concern? I feel I have somewhat misused the archiveurl parameter in {{ cite news}}, and also that I have not followed the advice "If you find an archived version, double-check to make sure that the material still supports the citation." Normally I double-check such things, but I am not willing to pay money to do so.
There are likely several ways to deal with cases like this, but more advice would be welcome. - 84user ( talk) 22:33, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
Ok, I searched for the text from your post above and found http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2008-10-22/news/0810210269_1_foster-republican-jim-oberweis-illinois-republicans which supports the article. I then made this edit, using the new link as an aid to readers that do not have the print version. Does that look reasonable? - 84user ( talk) 03:07, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
A proposed bot would change the format of dates in selected categories. For example, an article in the category "United States military" would have a date like "July 7, 1777" changed to "7 July 1777". Some dates would be protected, such as dates within single or double quotation marks (that is, if the bot can count them correctly), or dates in the title parameter of a citation template. But the APA style is allowed in Wikipedia articles, and that style calls for the names of articles in journals and periodicals to be written without quotation marks or any special typography. Any title that contained a date with a different format than the format chosen for the article would be altered, which would potentially make it more difficult to search for the article. Jc3s5h ( talk) 03:07, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
New addition under discussion, "Text-source integrity" section:
It is important to remember that Wikipedia articles are usually edited by multiple editors, and change over time. Thus referencing only at the end of a paragraph composed of multiple sentences is insufficient, for the same reasons as general references are: because 1) they do not guarantee that a particular unreferenced sentence was not added later, and is not covered by the end-of-a-paragraph reference, or 2) that the end-of-a-paragraph referenced sentences was not added later as the only referenced sentence to an unreferenced paragraph.
In the following paragraph, for example, there is no grantee that the first two sentences are referenced by the end-of-the-paragraph sentence. Only the last sentence can be reasonably trusted as referenced:
Through the 1940s and early 1950s a wide variety of efforts were made to address the color problem. A number of major companies continued to work with separate color "channels" with various ways to re-combine the image. RCA was included in this group; on 5 February 1940 they demonstrated a system using three conventional tubes combined to form a single image on a plate of glass, but the image was too dim to be useful. [3]
Piotrus, I understand the concern you have, but the prescribed solution won't help. First, it leads us into stupidities. Consider this:
Education researcher Mary Jones says that there are three kinds of students. The first group is made up of students who do their homework as soon as they receive the assignments. The second group contains students who do their homework at the last possible second. The third group is comprised of students who didn't even realize that they were supposed to do the assignment.[1]
One citation ought to be sufficient for this entire paragraph (usually placed either after the first sentence or the last). Nobody will be left wondering whether the middle sentence is supported by the same paragraph as the first sentence or the last sentence.
But even if the original editor spammed citations after each sentence, you can still have newbies (accidentally) and vandals (maliciously) destroy the source-text integrity:
Education researcher Mary Jones says that there are three kinds of students.[1] The first group is made up of students who do their homework as soon as they receive the assignments.[1] The second group contains students who do their homework at the last possible second.[1] The third group is comprised of students who didn't even realize that they were supposed to do the assignment. This division was later rejected by Sam Smith, who proposed a four-part division of students: students who did their homework immediately, students who procrastinated, students who were oblivious, and students who should not have been assigned homework in the first place.[1]
The fact is that no amount of citation by the first editor can prevent the loss of source-text integrity. It is necessarily the duty of the subsequent editors to ensure that their changes do not introduce this problem.
And, if a timely example were needed, I cleaned up an article a little while ago in which a fact-tag had come astray of the sentence it had been applied to. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 00:34, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
Education researcher Mary Jones says that there are three kinds of students. The first group is made up of students who do their homework as soon as they receive the assignments. Independent analysis questioned whether this groups was chosen randomly.[2] The second group contains students who do their homework at the last possible second. The third group is comprised of students who didn't even realize that they were supposed to do the assignment.[1]
I bundle citations as much as I can nowadays at the end of paragraphs, because it reduces the clutter of footnotes, and it makes adding new sources easy:
<ref>For Smith's birthday, see Williams 2011, p. 1.
*For the day of the party, see Evans 2010, p. 2.
*For the quote from Butler, see Keith 2009, p. 3.</ref>
And so on, for as many points as you add to the paragraph. If you include links to specific pages on Google books, or to the articles, the reader can click straight to the words you're relying on. You can use the same system with the Harvard ref citation templates, or with any other templates. SlimVirgin TALK| CONTRIBS 03:19, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
I think it helps to keep some perspective. It is simply not possible (or at least practical) to demand that the connection between text piece and inline citation through placing only is in such a manner that it cannot be confused at all. Citation bundling is not really fixing that either, unless you explicitly comment your sources to avoid any ambiguity. But the thing that matters here is the commenting not the bundling, commenting individual non bundled inline citation achieves the same effect. So unless we would enforce commeting of individual citations there's no way to avoid confusion completely.
I don't really see all that as much of drawback anyhow. The worst case scenario is, that somebody proof reading the article might look at one more source than he theoretically had to (big whoop). The only way to (really) check whether paragraph is properly sourced is to actually look the sources. Once you've done that you know anyhow whether the source covered the whole paragraph or merely parts of it. So if you proof read a paragraoh, you simply check all its sources/inline citations and hence it ultimately doesn't matter all that much where in the paragraph they were placed. Of course that doesn't mean that editors can distribute their inline citation randomly over a paragraph, but it means extensive discussions about "the" perfect placing are probably a waste of time.-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 03:53, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
Sources of any kind are only required for quotations, challenged or likely challenged material, and some biographical information. If a paragraph has none of these things, there is no policy that requires an inline citation of any sort in that paragraph. That is intentional: WP:V is a minimal requirement, not a description of how the "best" articles might be written. The requirements of FA and GA are free to go beyond what is actually required by policy, and they often do. Pages like this guideline need to stick to what's actually required, not the FA or GA requirements. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 22:47, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
User:Piotrus recently made several changes to this page that are dramatic in scope, even though there was no previous discussion that I can see (scrolled off perhaps?), no prior agreement (ditto?), and what appears to be at least some level of disagreement.
I believe these edits were made as part of a thread I am involved in. In a recent DYK entry of mine, Piotrus gave the article a ? for several reasons. One of these was his claim that in order to pass a DYK, every sentence in the article had to be referenced. User:Nyttend quickly replied that this was not the case, and I followed this up with a post on Piotrus' talk page to the same effect. Neither comment received a response.
Instead, a refimprove tag was placed in article in question, shadow mask. When I asked why he did this, he once again claimed that every sentence needs a reference. I again pointed out this was not the case, and removed the tag. Then I received a message claiming that I should check CITE. Sure enough, CITE now included text to this effect -- text he had just entered, which used text from the shadow mask article as an example!
The changes were RVed, but only with a post on my talk page suggesting material would be removed from the article wholesale. This is all very worrying.
Maury Markowitz ( talk) 18:23, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
I'll put this at the bottom since I just read it: "First, let me point out that an article, nowadays, is unlikely to become GA (or higher) as long as it has any unreferenced sentences." I assume Piotr means every sentence within a paragraph as opposed to the end of the paragraph if one citation covers the entire paragraph? This is simply untrue. Period. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 08:58, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
If you have qualms about the beginning of a paragraph sourced only by a footnote at the end, go look at the sources in the footnote. If, when that is done, you don't find the content, then add {{ cn}} or {{ fv}}. If you do, add a sentence to the footnote explaining what is sourced where, if it seems helpful - often an entire paragraph or an entire article derives from the same two=page source. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:34, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
{{
vn}}
is for. If you can't get to the source, then you can ask for help.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 18:39, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
I am against general references sections being used as citations. (see below #General references in FAs). As for the insertion of text. I assume that if that is done then the citation covers everything from the last citation or the start of a paragraph. So for example if there is a paragraph such as:
Here is my first sentence. Here is my second sentence. Here is my third sentence. [p 1]
The if a new sentence is interposed between the by "Anne Other" she would do this:
Here is my first sentence. [p 1] Anne Other's sentence. [p 2] Here is my second sentence. Here is my third sentence. [p 1]
A possibility to help remove ambiguity would be is to use a template that covers the specific text is being cited, but to date the examples I have seen change the visual look of the text which I do not think is desirable.
Another possibility, is to alter the positioning of footnotes at punctuation, {I anticipate a groan going up from some editors :-) } so that if it is to the left of a full stop (period) it means the citation is only for the information in that sentence and if it is to the right of a full stop it means from the last citation or the start of a paragraph (which ever is nearer to the citation under discussion). So in the example I gave above:
Here is my first sentence. Here is my second sentence. Here is my third sentence [p 3].
The if an Anne Other adds another sentence it becomes:
Here is my first sentence. Anne Other's sentence [p 2]. Here is my second sentence. Here is my third sentence [p 3].
In which case my first and second sentences are still not cited.
At the moment it is impossible to tell if a citation at the end of a paragraph is intended to cove all the sentences in the paragraph or if it is only a citation for the last sentence. It would also mean that if there was a reference at the end of the paragraph that was to the right of the full stop that covered the whole paragraph if Anne Other added a sentence in the middle but places the citation to the left of the full stop, there is no confusion as the sentences near the start of the paragraph seem to have no citation but a check of the history would show that all that was needed to fix the problem would be to append the final citation on the paragraph to the end of the sentence directly before Anne Others addition.
-- PBS ( talk) 02:40, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
May a bot be approved which will make alterations that would be inappropriate within quotations and titles, if the bot protects citations that use templates, but does not protect plain citations? In particular, the APA style does not use quotation marks or any other special typography to designate article titles, and thus a bot would be unable to avoid making alterations to such a title. Jc3s5h ( talk) 14:33, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
This question is inspired by Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/MOSNUM Bot. I believe WP:CITE rather than WP:MOS controls citations, and WP:CITE does not give preference to templates compared to plain text for purpose of citations. Thus I believe a bot which would protect templated citations but inappropriately alter plain citations ought not to be approved. It is possible that the proponents of the MOSNUM bot might successfully argue that the change that this bot would make, a change in date format such as "20 February 2011" to "February 20, 2011", is rare enough in titles of external articles, combined with the fairly low usage of the APA style, that the level of false positives is tolerable. I personally would not favor allowing this because of the risk of edit warring between the bot and editors. Jc3s5h ( talk) 14:33, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
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. |
Archive 25 | ← | Archive 29 | Archive 30 | Archive 31 | Archive 32 | Archive 33 | → | Archive 35 |
Should we tread on other guidelines while writing this one? While I like having an INTEXT section, here's a few changes:
Editors who watch this page may be interested in Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Change_to_template:reflist_wiki-wide?. Please leave any comments on the village pump page. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 20:29, 29 November 2010 (UTC)
Carl, what other methods are there, apart from footnotes and parenthetical referencing? [1] SlimVirgin talk| contribs 03:52, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
[2] SV's copyedit changed "On Wikipedia, there are several different styles. The two most popular are ... " to "The two styles of inline citation on Wikipedia are ..." Editors can also use prose citations, naming the author or work in prose in sufficient detail to identify it in the list of references. Geogre seemed to prefer that, as I recall. Gimmetoo ( talk) 13:16, 30 November 2010 (UTC)
The underlying issue here is standardization.Standardization has both positive effects and negative effects. Among the positive effects are
Among the negative effects are:
I think I am just scratching the surface of this issue. Perhaps an essay would be a good place to collect these arguments.
Standardization, out in the article space, always means changing an article from an unpopular style to a popular style, and, as the guideline should point out at every turn, this is a dangerous practice that can lead to trouble and should only be carried out with caution.
(My own view is that we should eliminate (1) truly unusual citation styles (used in less than 500 articles) that are (2) damaged by neglect and (3) clearly are not an "innovation" in any sense. This includes things like unnecessary use of <cite>
spans, {{
harvrefcol}}, unnecessary use of {{
Ref}}/{{
Note}}, unnecessary use of |Ref=
in {{
cite *}}
templates and many other, weirder things that are floating around. There are tens of thousands of articles with broken and badly formatted citations that use these methods. I think this kind of maintenance should not be controversial, and is the only kind of standardization which makes sense. Otherwise, we should only document the most popular styles and try to document innovations as soon as they are stable. I believe this is what this guideline does.)
Back on topic and with all this reasoning in the background, I think that this guideline should include the observation that there are really only two (stable, reliable, popular) inline citation styles: parenthetical referencing and footnotes. This shortens the learning the curve and is unlikely to cause edit warring. If there are editors who hate both parenthetical referencing and footnotes, we should document that. If someone can find an innovation that isn't one of these styles, we should document that. However, I don't believe there is any such innovation and I don't believe there are any such editors. ---- CharlesGillingham ( talk) 19:10, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
Made a couple of minor edits that I think improve sentence flow. It's Ok if others disagree. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Clipjoint ( talk • contribs) 22:29, 3 December 2010 (UTC)
MediaWiki obviously has this nice feature that a reference that is used more than once can be named, which means if you cite <ref>Miller (2000), p. 100.</ref>
more than once, you can name it <ref name="Miller 2000 p. 100" />
, to avoid a bunch of references that look the same. If it detects multiple identical refs,
WP:AWB automatically applies this
as a general fix. The question now is whether this is based on a MOS guideline, because after applying this
here,
User:Hegvald
reverted it. Who's right? —
bender235 (
talk) 13:17, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
I would be grateful for precedents for following practices (or comment that they would not conflict established WP "official" or accepted style). These measures would make it MUCH easier to refer to WP articles in non-WP publications. (1) State, in the body of the article, the relevance of every item in the "Further reading" list to the subject of the article, and provide citation number to main bibliography unless this would become too long, in which case make secondary bibliography using {{Reflist}}. (2) Number the items in lists instead of using bullets, particularly when there are several, as in Edward Elgar. (3) Put a few (selected) references to biographies, obituaries, photograph collections, etc. at end of opening sentence in article about a person as in William Anderson, artist. I would only do this when it led to just a few references, and not when there is a Biography section covering entire life immediately after opening sentence, as for Edward Elgar Michael P. Barnett ( talk) 17:51, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
I propose to add to WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT, to clarify what does not need to be included in a citation. Some non-Wikipedia style guides call for information that Wikipedia does not request, and too much information may interfere with readers' use of WP.
This follows the discussion at another Talk topic. I've added microforms to the proposal.
Nick Levinson ( talk) 05:25, 5 November 2010 (UTC)
So in your proposal, those two sentences run:
If the publisher offers a link to the source or its abstract that does not require a payment or a third party's login for access, you should provide the URL for that link. And if the source exists only online, give the link even if access is restricted.
On the first sentence, even URLs to WP:PAYWALLed and registration-required sources are desirable in some instances. However, such links, even if free, might not be desirable in others, e.g., when the URL is redundant to the doi, or is at a notoriously unstable website (here I am naturally thinking of links to news.yahoo.com).
On the second, I'm not convinced that this is necessary in all cases. For example, many academic journals provide an online supplement to articles, such as extra images. It would be perfectly adequate to cite "Jones, Mary. 2009. Supplementary images for "<Name of Paper>." M Pressive Journal..." Furthermore, while the source may never reach hard copy, "my" link isn't necessarily "your" link. I might use Athens, and you might use ScienceDirect to reach exactly the same online publication. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 00:32, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
WP:CITEHOW says:
Now where and when does this apply? As far as I understood it this is a rule-of-thumb for disputes in which person A changes the citation style, person B reverts it, and both end up in lengthy discussion (or worse, like edit war). In my opinion, in those cases WP:CITEHOW applies, ending the dispute by keeping the "established style". But how about person A's original modification in case of no opposition? Is this permitted (per WP:BRD), or is it prohibited (per "the established style is cemented for all eternity, no one is allowed ever to change it again")? Does person A violate WP:CITEHOW by changing the style in the first place, or is this permitted as long as he/she doesn't start an edit war, or violating WP:3RR? — bender235 ( talk) 23:52, 13 December 2010 (UTC)
{{Reflist|colwidth=30em}}
. But instead of implementing it right on the spot per
WP:BRD, you pin a request on the talk page that certainly no one will reply to for 30 days. I hope you realize this is deadlock prone. If one has to ask each of the
article's owners before making a minor edit like this, it would essentially kill Wikipedia. It is exactly how Wikipedia does not work, and the exact opposite of
WP:BRD, which instead should apply here. Because, sure, there will be articles where a majority of contributors does not like the proposed style change. But why not speed up the process of finding consensus by following WP:BRD? Allow anyone to intruduce a new citation style. If it sticks, fine. If it get reverted, fine, too. Either case is better than a lengthy discussion. —
bender235 (
talk) 01:23, 14 December 2010 (UTC)Recently, my watchlist has exploded with multiple editors who change the way footnotes are displayed on large numbers of articles, by changing <references> to {{ reflist}} and/or changing the column count of the {{ reflist}} template. For an example of the scale of editing I'm talking about, see these contribs and search for the word "references" in the edit summaries there. I don't want to pick on that editor, who is not the only one doing this.
It has always been the case in the past that no particular style for displaying footnotes was recommended by the style guides, and so editors of each article could choose the style they wanted. This page and the main MOS discourage editors from going around changing articles from one style to another based on personal taste.
The issue of whether the usage of {{ reflist}} should be standardized has been discussed at Template talk:Reflist recently, but relatively editors follow that talk page. One outcome of the discussion was that several editors disliked that allowed wider screens to show more columns, instead of always showing 2 columns. But that change, away from a fixed column count, is one of the changes I keep seeing on my watchlist ( example).
I want to post here to get a broader range of opinions. Are changes like the ones I linked above appropriate? — Carl ( CBM · talk) 00:45, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
{{Reflist}}
with {{Reflist|colwidth=30em}}
actually a "change of citation style"?{{Reflist|2}}
with {{Reflist}}
(if that's what you'd like to do) w/out asking anyone for permission, or whether the original style of the article is cemented for all eternity, whether it be {{Reflist|2}}
, or {{Reflist|4}}
, or whatever. —
bender235 (
talk) 01:27, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
{{Reflist}}
, or {{Reflist|2}}
, or {{Reflist|colwidth=30em}}
suits the article best. And how to find out the consensus? By using
bold, revert, discuss. If the change sticks, its the new consensus. If it gets reverted, the old style is still consensus and should be kept. That's how Wikipedia has always worked in every aspect. —
bender235 (
talk) 01:50, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
Objectively, {{Reflist|2}} is the standard way of making Reference lists multi-column; on occasion {{Reflist|3}} is used when the references are very short (eg lots of references to different pages of a book). Where the hell this colwidth thing comes from, I don't know, but I'm starting to think it should simply be removed from the template. At any rate I can't see any specific circumstances where it is preferable to the status quo, and there is certainly no justification for editors going around adding it willy nilly to articles they're not seriously involved in contributing to. Rd232 talk 08:58, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
There's a proposal to mandate a certain number of columns over a precise number of refs, and of a certain number of ems, which is going to change the text of this guideline, being discussed at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Final proposal. Tijfo098 ( talk) 12:09, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
Is there a way to bundle a bunch of named references into one reference? Like <ref><ref name="nytimes" /><ref name="time" /><ref name="guardian" /></ref> but actually working. - Kollision ( talk) 16:22, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
{{#tag:ref|<ref name="ref1">ref1</ref><ref name="ref2">ref2</ref><ref name="ref3">ref3</ref>}}
---- CharlesGillingham ( talk) 19:31, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
It does work if you use a group, but that means you have to use two instances of {{
reflist}}:
This is a nested reference.{{#tag:ref|<ref name="ref1">ref1</ref><ref name="ref2">ref2</ref><ref name="ref3">ref3</ref>|group=note}} ;Notes {{reflist|group=note}} ;References {{reflist|close=1}}
This is a nested reference. [note 1]
---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 04:19, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
Consider these (arbitrarily formatted) citations:
{{
citation}}
: |last=
has generic name (
help).In each of these cases, the source has a "corporate author"; there is no author's name. What are the recommended ways to format these citations? How should the major citation templates support these? Do the citation templates need to be changed to support these? What should a parenthetical reference or shortened footnote for these sources look like? Finally, what is the proper term for these citations? (i.e. is "corporate authors" the right term?)
I am starting a parallel discussion over at Citation/core, which hopefully will focus on the templates. Here, I hope we can discuss what APA, Chicago, etc. recommend, and reach some consensus what we should recommend. ---- CharlesGillingham ( talk) 19:24, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
Thanks. Anyone else? I was hoping I could get a set of choices based on MLA, APA, Chicago, etc. There's really no other citation experts here any more? ---- CharlesGillingham ( talk) 07:25, 28 December 2010 (UTC)
With the Bundling Citations subsection, I was a little confused on how to write the wiki markup for an intended reference. In other sections, the page gives examples of markup. Could someone please try that for this case?
One way, which numbers references within the bundle, seems to be thus: <ref>Something overall about specific references:<ol><li>One reference.</li><li>Another reference.</li></ol></ref> I guess element classes are not necessary.
I imagine we can use <ref>Something overall about specific references:<ul><li>One reference.</li><li>Another reference.</li></ul></ref> to make an unordered list with discs, but I haven't tested that.
In either case, it seems items should not be written with leading asterisks or hashes, unless we want an asterisk or hash to appear literally, and that <br /> (line break) is unnecessary.
As to the further-information template on citation overkill, I assume it should be deleted, since it's not about bundling, and it probably should be incorporated into a sentence further up the page (and then removed from the See Also list as redundant). Thoughts?
Thanks. Nick Levinson ( talk) 20:20, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
This comment in a discussion over at WT:V caught my eye. There are a couple of points there, and I think the one re Hosting vs. Publishing is relevant here. I've dithered over this when composing some cites. I've generally ended up as identifying the "publisher" (that named field in templated cites, and the field containing that info in hand-crafted cites) as something like "WhereIfoundit.com, originally published by OriginalPublisher". I nearly ran over to the talk page for {{tl:Cite web}} to suggest a host= or similar parameter there (and Host= for {{ Citation/core}}) but thought I'd ask for comments here first.
Two thoughts: (1) perhaps it's better to cast this in terms of "Republisher" rather than "Host"; (2) this concept of citing republication of previously published material might deserve some attention on the project page. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 23:19, 31 December 2010 (UTC)
Various republishers, whether online or print, may have various motives for republishing something. Google Books motive seems to be that the book was found in a reputable library. Project Gutenberg's motive seems to be that enough volunteers could be found to enter and check the text. Dover's motive seems to be the expectation that enough paper copies will be sold to make money. So the reputation and motivation of the republisher can reflect on the reliability of the source, just as the motivation and reputation of the original publisher reflects on the reliability of the source. It is not just a question of whether the republisher can be counted on to provide a faithful copy. The fact that a book was republished recently can mean that an old book is still important today. Jc3s5h ( talk) 18:23, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
Should I prefer the journal name as published or the current one? TCO ( talk) 22:29, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
|journal=Pin Collector (currently Pin Monthly)
. ---—
Gadget850 (Ed)
talk 23:37, 9 January 2011 (UTC)ec: I meant A, a reference citation within Painted turtle to Tanner's expedition. The publishing journal was originally called Great Basin Naturalist, but has since changed to Western Naturalist (or some such). So when you look at the pdf, or bound version, of course it is the former. When you look at the website (where I direct people as pdf is not linkable except going there), you see the journal name with new version and even a citation as new periodical name. Obviously situation will happen lots of times, so would like a general rule. Do you know how this is handled normally in academic publishing advice? (tried googling, but didn't find it exactly, but I'm sure it's the sort of thing that has been adressed. Just wondered general practice.) Oh and I did the opposite of what you say (so would need to go back and put old name in, now) TCO ( talk) 23:41, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
ec: OK. I will go change it back. I think I messed this up one other place, but don't tell anyone as I have 160 refs and can't recall where I did that! TCO ( talk) 23:41, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
About a month ago, User:Hegvald and I had a debate on whether references should be named (and refered to multiple times), like I did with this edit (using WP:AWB). Hegvald disagreed (and reverted), explaining on my talk page that "real-life academic contexts outside Wikipedia" are not using that kind of a reference system. As of now, and as far as I know, there is no guideline that recommends (or prohibits) the use of named references. Therefore, I'd like to discuss this here. And finally, what about WP:NOTPAPER in this context? — bender235 ( talk) 11:23, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
WP:NOTPAPER, as far as I can see, is mainly about the space restrictions of a paper encyclopaedia: no reason to exclude topics because they are no longer current or only likely to be looked up by people in some other place than the area where the [paper] encyclopaedia is marketed.
The arguments for named references seems to be pretty much that it saves space by reducing the number of footnotes. How is that needed when Wikipedia is " not paper"? -- Hegvald ( talk) 15:47, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
Miller (2000), p. 100.
may be useful on paper, where there is a (partial) reference list on every page, but not on Wikipedia, where there is a single reference list at the end of the article. The question was whether
this is merely a style change (i.e., a neutral change from one style to another [which, of course, should be avoided]), or rather a fix (i.e., introducing an improvement). In my honest opinion it is the latter. —
bender235 (
talk) 16:00, 3 January 2011 (UTC)There is a style decision between A and B below, and A is justifiable. Among other things, the references appear in exactly the order they appear in the text, which makes them easier to follow, and B is not an obvious improvement. While I'm sure some editors don't even notice this choice, there are articles written with style A as a conscious choice, so if someone objects, best to leave it alone. Gimmetoo ( talk) 18:01, 3 January 2011 (UTC)
So, where do we stand now? Does DuplicateUnnamedReferences have to be removed from the WP:AWB feature list? — bender235 ( talk) 22:50, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
They are not footnotes, they are endnotes. Really think about it functionally. If someone said they were endnotes, could you prove him wrong? With footnotes, in a document, you have different bundles on different pages within an individual document. For us, our individual document is the "article". And the citations are all in a mass at the end. One section only. And it is very NORMAL to repeat numbers of an endnote. Check out any science journal or even just MS Word. The confusion comes from calling something here a "footnote", but functionally it is an endnote and we use it in that manner. Including repeated numbers. ;-) TCO ( talk) 23:46, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
Let's say I add a citation, then I want to link the same numbered citation again at a different point in the article, how would I do this? -- Rayne117 ( talk) 01:23, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
Bob,
[1] Gulliver,
[2] and Jane.
[1]
Like this. <ref name="Foobar">Foobar</ref> the first time, <ref name="Foobar"/> the other times. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 08:16, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
I would like to incorporate some more info into the "Inline citations" section as follows:
Inline citations
An inline citation is a line of text identifying a source that is added close to the material it supports, offering text-source integrity. If a word or phrase is particularly contentious, an inline citation may be added next to it within a sentence, but adding the citation to the end of this sentence is usually sufficient, so long as it is clear which source supports which part of the text. Likewise, instead of citations after each sentence, one citation can be used for group of consecutive sentences in a paragraph supported by the same source. The citation can be placed at the end of the last sentence of the group of sentences, the introductory sentence preceding a block quotation, or the topic of thesis sentence of a paragraph. Except it is recommended that citations be placed next to direct quotations or statements that are particularly startling or contrary to " common knowledge" (i.e., likely to be challenged). Note that if text citing other sources is inserted inside the text supported by one citation, citations for the existing text will have to updated. The likelihood of such a future edit occurring and how well the text will be monitored, may be considerations in deciding whether to use this method of citation.
Editors are free to use any method for inline citations; no method is recommended over any other. Two common styles of inline citation used on Wikipedia are clickable footnotes (<ref> tags) and parenthetical references.
Comments:
Editors here may be interested in the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Citing sources/example style#why_not_standardize_on_one_format.3F, an effort to impose a one-size-fits-all citation style on every article. My overall impression from the discussion (started by TCO, but expanded beyond his/her original questions) is that the goals are to ban general references, to require the use of <ref> tags (banning WP:PAREN and all other forms of WP:Inline citations), and to require the use of citation templates.
As this discussion about this guideline's contents is (oddly) happening on a subpage rather than on this page, I am providing the link here and hope that you will all join the discussion there. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 04:30, 11 January 2011 (UTC)
18-Jan-2011: A better "tool" to help with sourcing an article would scan outside reliable sources for "key topic phrases" rather than just formatting citations. Also, at the present time (January 2011), the { Cite_web} & {Cite_book} templates need to be rewritten to use less of the MediaWiki preprocessor resources: even though an article can use 1 million tiny templates, only 550 {Cite_book} transclusions can be made. Here's the point: it is not possible to have a "List of news articles about subject XX" which has 800 citation templates, unless the list is split into multiple pages, or {Cite_web} is rewritten for better performance, such as combining the contents of {Citation/core} to allow twice as many citations, allowing 1,100 total (rather than just 550 uses of {Cite_web} or such). Meanwhile, a "tool" to help citations in articles would scan for related issues about the subject:
News phrase[a] | Person: Natalee Holloway | Person: Amanda Knox | Person: Charles Manson |
---|---|---|---|
Google hits for name | 371,000 | 763,000 | 1,470,000 |
"false arrest" | 2,140 | 1,260 | 4,300 |
" false confession" | 2,750 | 7,090 | 3,850 |
"police hit her" (or him) | 6 | 6,340 | 9 |
" new trial" | 20,900 (5.6%) | 49,700 (6.5%) | 40,700 (2.7%) |
[a] - Data from Google Search on 11:13, 18 January 2011 (UTC). |
We need a tool which can adjust the search-engine results, such as the above from Google, perhaps scaling to omit blog counts (by some likelihood factor, not by exact numbers). Also, note the counts of subject-name, " Charles Manson" has twice the hits of "Amanda Knox" which has twice the hits for " Natalee Holloway". Then, the counts need to be adjusted as percentages, in accordance with WP:NPOV neutrality as "proportionately" reflecting the coverage in sources. The highest counts of those phrases were not for Natalee Holloway, but, instead, Charles Manson had 4,300 for "false arrest" which should be considered a significant topic for NPOV coverage of Manson (whether the arrests were later justified). Then, Amanda Knox ranked highest in " false confession" (7,090), "new trial" (49,700) as being re-tried for murder in the Italian appeals court, and "police hit her" (or "him") as 6,340 compared to just "6" webpages about Holloway and "9" for Charles Manson. Hence, for NPOV coverage of Amanda Knox, the topic "police hit her" (whether claimed or substantiated) would be a topic to cover in the intro of an article, as seemingly such a huge issue as reported, neutrally, by the tool. Also, note how a tool would not pre-censor to ban the phrase "police hit her" as being a WP:BLP vio against some police officers, because it is just data, whereas an article would need to add how police denied the allegation during court hearings, for NPOV balance. Now, compared to article citation templates, an obvious implication might be to expand citation templates to include the "phrase" concept, with phrases=xxxx to be listed/indexed as hidden text inside a source citation template, then another tool could count and report the coverage of those phrases within an article's citations. Hence, expect several citations in an article to index the key topic "police hit her" because it is so common in sources. As articles are later edited, and censored for POV-pushing, plus removing reliable sources to make topics seem unfounded, then the proportional usage of topic phrases could be seen as being slanted. Thus, 2 revisions, far apart, could be compared to see where information was censored or added to affect the relative percentages of topic phrases in an article. To help this, article citations should, internally, list the "key topic phrases" which a tool would search. We need to have numeric data to quantify the level of POV-pushing or hopefully, NPOV-balanced coverage of major topics, compared with their source citations. Currently, we have edit-counters which reveal some users editing an article "400 times" as an indication of unusual activity. More about this later. - Wikid77 11:13, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
Am curious about this: is there an obvious way of telling our readers where an offline source (map, journal, less popular books) can be found? There doesn't seem to be a "remarks" field in the standard citation templates. -- Der yck C. 14:14, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
|postscript=
parameter is used to adjust the citation terminator where the terminating period may not be appropriate.*{{cite book|last=Doe|first=John|title=Doe's book}} Available through some obscure process.
Is WP:ASL still reliable and usable? As it was added 4 years ago, so browser question is not a problem any more... What do you think? -- WhiteWriter speaks 15:51, 12 January 2011 (UTC)
I'm trying to source a court decision using the {{ cite court}} template. Unfortunately, the title is long. Extremely long. On the order of 3,000+ characters long. Is it OK if I truncate the title myself, ex to something like Jewel, et al v Hughes Air Corp, et al? Or do I have to use the whole really long ugly title? ( see title) -- Mûĸĸâĸûĸâĸû ( blah?) 15:57, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
I thought that {{reflist}} was the current template, and replaced <references/>. But someone just informed me that the opposite is true. So which is it? This policy page uses the former one. Is it out of date? Which is the right one, or the most current one? Nightscream ( talk) 18:45, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
Policy says: 'Embedded links should never be used to place external links in the body of an article, like this: "Apple, Inc. announced their latest product..."'
In Christianity articles, editors routinely cited chapter and verse (e.g., "Matthew 17:4-7") and use a template to turn that into an external link to a Bible Lookup service. It looks like this routine use of external links embedded in text is against policy. This issue has come up on Talk:Nativity of Jesus. A little guidance? Leadwind ( talk) 15:49, 28 January 2011 (UTC)
Has anyone made a Wikipedia reference style for EndNote? This would ease referencing things considerably for those of us who use EndNote (or Zotero) already. If nobody has made one, perhaps I'll find the time to make one at some point. If so, not sure how I should upload it to share with the community?
Also, I see "You can insert a link beside each citation in Wikipedia, allowing you to export the citation to a reference manager, such as EndNote". Would it be possible/ a good idea to have a bot do this automatically? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pengortm ( talk • contribs) 00:55, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
From the WP:CITEHOW section:
I know this means if an article already has 20 refs, and you're adding #21, you should follow the established style, to have some consistency within the article. But what if one wants to change the style of all references? Does the rule above prohibit this? And if so, wouldn't this mean a certain aspect of one article can never change again? Wouldn't this put undue weight on the first editor's decision? -- bender235 ( talk) 02:58, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
I would interpret the rule to be a bit firmer than Bender235's interpretation. If an article has a nearly-consistent acceptable citation style, it should be adhered to unless one first obtains consensus (or at least no complaints after a reasonable wait) on the talk page. Of course bare URLs is not considered an acceptable style of citation, so if most of the citations are like that , have at it. But a campaign of systematically changing citation styles of articles that already have acceptable citations with the excuse "most of the time no one complains" is not acceptable.
Actually, chances are someone will complain, just because there have been so many campaigns to change "BC" to "BCE" or "colour" to "color" or whatever that any systematic style change tends to be viewed as a direct attack on the principle of national and religious diversity. Jc3s5h ( talk) 23:54, 30 January 2011 (UTC)
The concept that citation templates are preferable has been proposed yet again and failed to achieve consensus yet again this month, this time at Wikipedia talk:Citing sources/example style#why not standardize on one format?.
This needs expansion, but first: are shortened footnotes a subset of long footnotes or a separate method? ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 19:48, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
I have used Template:Cite doi for a journal reference I was having trouble with (ref 105 on Somerset Levels) & all seemed to have worked fine. However I'm doing final reference checks before an FAC nomination & I found although I added "accessdate=13 February 2011" into the citation this doesn't show on the article. This will get picked up at FAC and I was wondering if anyone knew how to overcome this problem?— Rod talk 08:35, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
|accessdate=
will only display if you have specified |url=
. When you cite a journal but not a URL no retrieved date should be needed (the contents of the journal paper don't vary by date, unlike a news story that may be updated over time).
Rjwilmsi 20:50, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
On a related note, I think we need to put all of the ENGVAR-type information in a single section, and point a shortcut like WP:CITEVAR at it. I'm getting tired of spelling it out to editors who change long-established WP:PAREN articles to WP:FOOT, sometimes even under the mistaken belief that ref tags are absolutely required by policies. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 23:02, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
If the article you are editing already is already using a given citation style, you should follow that style. Do not change the citation style used in an article merely for personal preference or cosmetic reasons. If you think the existing citation system is inappropriate for the specific needs of the article, gain consensus for a change on the talk page before changing it. As with issues of spelling differences, if there is disagreement about which style is best, defer to the style used by the first major contributor; if the style has never been stable, defer to the style used by the first major contributor. If you are the first major contributor to an article, then you may pick whatever style you think best for this article.
The above is my current proposal; I've put it in a separate subsection so that anyone can tweak it. If there are no changes or objections in a few days, then one of us should add it to the guideline (at the end?). I think that the examples are important, because it's these specific examples that editors frequently ask us about. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 05:32, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
February 5, 2011
might look less messy or confusing than {{birth date|2011|02|05|mf=y}}
, but the latter offers an additional feature (hCard microformat, that is). The output of both ("February 5, 2011" vs. " February 5, 2011") looks exactly the same, but it's still more than a cosmetic change.I very strongly object to the mandatory use of citation templates, for the simple reason that there are citations (" Natalis Comes: Mythologiae siue explicationis fabularum libri decem; translated as Natale Conti’s Mythologiae, translated and annotated by John Mulryan and Steven Brown; Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006. ISBN 978-0-86698-361-7") which will not fit a standard template, unless it have so many bells and whistles as to be less than useful to the average editor.
We can discuss the hypothetical citation-reading machine when it exists; when it does, it will probably be most useful if it is able to parse the standard format of citations without prompts and labels. Otherwise, the convenience of actual readers (even of actual editors) should not be deferred to the ease of programming a machine. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:48, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
I dislike citation templates. Not only do they encourage inputting of often useless data, as already remarked upon above, they potentially clutter the text in edit mode, often making it difficult to parse. OTOH, there are numerous editors who either do not know how to put in citations, or are too lazy to do so. I find it preferable to have more information than the bare url, and often fix these up by call WP:Reflinks, which usually fills in the whole shebang using {{ citation}}. Note that such action often goes counter to CITEVAR, but Reflinks doesn't give users the choice, AFAIK. However, the problem overall isn't the existence of citation templates, but the tendency of many editors to overpopulate these templates by mechanically and anally inserting information merely because it's available. -- Ohconfucius ¡digame! 02:09, 10 February 2011 (UTC)
I have expanded WP:CITEVAR, but left out the example involving citation templates. That example of a "cosmetic" change said:
I still think that is a useful and valid example, as I don't think that SlimVirgin should be able to force Bender to give up citation templates in an article that has been happily using them for years, just like I don't think that Bender should be able to force SlimVirgin to accept them in an article that has happily shunned them for years.
However, IMO the most important point is all the other stuff, not the one example. Accordingly, I've added the other stuff (slightly tweaking some wording to merge with existing text, in a way that I hope is clear), and hope that works for everyone. If you want to continue the discussion about citation templates vs manual formatting, perhaps we could take that up again—but maybe not until next month, and in a new section. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 22:00, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
The "A quick how-to" section says: Then add this to the end of the article:
==Notes==
{{Reflist}}
Which, historically, makes some sense -- the footnotes section is generally where quick inline citations are given in an article, but the footnotes section isn't exclusively citations, it could also include author commentary on a passage, or a tangential story which helps to explain background but doesn't really fit into the main text. For a Wikipedia article, though, this section is where the <ref> tags in an article are sent, as collated by the {{Reflist}} template. Technically, everything down at the bottom of the article is in the footnotes, the "Notes", the "External Links", it's all that stuff at the bottom of the page that's not really part of the article proper. Calling this section simply "Notes" gives it an air of impermanence, as though what's there was simply jotted down and may or may not actually have anything to do with the rest of the article. I think the section should be entitled "References" since it's where the References in an article appear. "Notes" almost implies what the discussion page is for, a place for brief remarks, marginal comments or explanations.
==References==
{{Reflist}}
Is how it should be formatted. Banaticus ( talk) 19:55, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
== Notes/References/Works cited/Sources/Bibliography/References/some other sensible section heading chosen by editors ==
in the example, then some poor confused person will actually paste that whole mess into an article. So whatever we used in any given example is not a binding determination that 100% of all Wikipedia articles must use that particular word or phrase for the same section: You can use whatever title you think works best for this article, okay?"I strongly agree that notes are not references. Notes are separate from references, see Template:Note or articles such as Juliusz Słowacki. -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 17:23, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
There is a discussion as to whether or not to include quotes in citations discussion at MOS:talk [11]. I am linking to that rather than opening parallel discussions on both this talk page and that one. PPdd ( talk) 22:34, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
On the subjects of uncontroversial edits to CITE that may be controversial, is changing "Generally considered to be cosmetic changes" to "To be avoided unless there is consensus" something that should be discussed here? I think that the previous heading was correct. -- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 20:08, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
What is the best way for me to fix a dead link that was in Aaron Schock#References? It is now behind a paywall. I quickly searched the talk archives for paywall but found nothing specific to this case.
where cite 22 was
The chicagotribune URL was dead and not in the Internet Archive. I used the tribune's site search and found the now-paywalled article at http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/chicagotribune/access/1580304701.html?FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Oct+22%2C+2008&author=Anonymous&pub=Chicago+Tribune&edition=&startpage=46&desc=For+Congress
The free abstract is just one sentence that does not support the wikipedia claim. Of course I WP:AGF and am reasonably sure the full text does support it.
The first item under Wikipedia:Citing sources#Preventing and repairing dead_links advises: "First, check the link to confirm that it is dead. The site may have been temporarily down or have changed its linking structure." Well, putting the material behind a paywall is kind of like changing "its linking structure". But should I then replace the original URL with a long paywall URL?
I was unsure so I looked at Wikipedia:Link rot#Repairing a dead link: "If you find an archived version, double-check to make sure that the material still supports the citation." Well, I tentatively decided that the paywall is a kind of "archived version" and added "|archiveurl=longpaywallurl" to the cite, which now looks like this:
My concern? I feel I have somewhat misused the archiveurl parameter in {{ cite news}}, and also that I have not followed the advice "If you find an archived version, double-check to make sure that the material still supports the citation." Normally I double-check such things, but I am not willing to pay money to do so.
There are likely several ways to deal with cases like this, but more advice would be welcome. - 84user ( talk) 22:33, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
Ok, I searched for the text from your post above and found http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2008-10-22/news/0810210269_1_foster-republican-jim-oberweis-illinois-republicans which supports the article. I then made this edit, using the new link as an aid to readers that do not have the print version. Does that look reasonable? - 84user ( talk) 03:07, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
A proposed bot would change the format of dates in selected categories. For example, an article in the category "United States military" would have a date like "July 7, 1777" changed to "7 July 1777". Some dates would be protected, such as dates within single or double quotation marks (that is, if the bot can count them correctly), or dates in the title parameter of a citation template. But the APA style is allowed in Wikipedia articles, and that style calls for the names of articles in journals and periodicals to be written without quotation marks or any special typography. Any title that contained a date with a different format than the format chosen for the article would be altered, which would potentially make it more difficult to search for the article. Jc3s5h ( talk) 03:07, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
New addition under discussion, "Text-source integrity" section:
It is important to remember that Wikipedia articles are usually edited by multiple editors, and change over time. Thus referencing only at the end of a paragraph composed of multiple sentences is insufficient, for the same reasons as general references are: because 1) they do not guarantee that a particular unreferenced sentence was not added later, and is not covered by the end-of-a-paragraph reference, or 2) that the end-of-a-paragraph referenced sentences was not added later as the only referenced sentence to an unreferenced paragraph.
In the following paragraph, for example, there is no grantee that the first two sentences are referenced by the end-of-the-paragraph sentence. Only the last sentence can be reasonably trusted as referenced:
Through the 1940s and early 1950s a wide variety of efforts were made to address the color problem. A number of major companies continued to work with separate color "channels" with various ways to re-combine the image. RCA was included in this group; on 5 February 1940 they demonstrated a system using three conventional tubes combined to form a single image on a plate of glass, but the image was too dim to be useful. [3]
Piotrus, I understand the concern you have, but the prescribed solution won't help. First, it leads us into stupidities. Consider this:
Education researcher Mary Jones says that there are three kinds of students. The first group is made up of students who do their homework as soon as they receive the assignments. The second group contains students who do their homework at the last possible second. The third group is comprised of students who didn't even realize that they were supposed to do the assignment.[1]
One citation ought to be sufficient for this entire paragraph (usually placed either after the first sentence or the last). Nobody will be left wondering whether the middle sentence is supported by the same paragraph as the first sentence or the last sentence.
But even if the original editor spammed citations after each sentence, you can still have newbies (accidentally) and vandals (maliciously) destroy the source-text integrity:
Education researcher Mary Jones says that there are three kinds of students.[1] The first group is made up of students who do their homework as soon as they receive the assignments.[1] The second group contains students who do their homework at the last possible second.[1] The third group is comprised of students who didn't even realize that they were supposed to do the assignment. This division was later rejected by Sam Smith, who proposed a four-part division of students: students who did their homework immediately, students who procrastinated, students who were oblivious, and students who should not have been assigned homework in the first place.[1]
The fact is that no amount of citation by the first editor can prevent the loss of source-text integrity. It is necessarily the duty of the subsequent editors to ensure that their changes do not introduce this problem.
And, if a timely example were needed, I cleaned up an article a little while ago in which a fact-tag had come astray of the sentence it had been applied to. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 00:34, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
Education researcher Mary Jones says that there are three kinds of students. The first group is made up of students who do their homework as soon as they receive the assignments. Independent analysis questioned whether this groups was chosen randomly.[2] The second group contains students who do their homework at the last possible second. The third group is comprised of students who didn't even realize that they were supposed to do the assignment.[1]
I bundle citations as much as I can nowadays at the end of paragraphs, because it reduces the clutter of footnotes, and it makes adding new sources easy:
<ref>For Smith's birthday, see Williams 2011, p. 1.
*For the day of the party, see Evans 2010, p. 2.
*For the quote from Butler, see Keith 2009, p. 3.</ref>
And so on, for as many points as you add to the paragraph. If you include links to specific pages on Google books, or to the articles, the reader can click straight to the words you're relying on. You can use the same system with the Harvard ref citation templates, or with any other templates. SlimVirgin TALK| CONTRIBS 03:19, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
I think it helps to keep some perspective. It is simply not possible (or at least practical) to demand that the connection between text piece and inline citation through placing only is in such a manner that it cannot be confused at all. Citation bundling is not really fixing that either, unless you explicitly comment your sources to avoid any ambiguity. But the thing that matters here is the commenting not the bundling, commenting individual non bundled inline citation achieves the same effect. So unless we would enforce commeting of individual citations there's no way to avoid confusion completely.
I don't really see all that as much of drawback anyhow. The worst case scenario is, that somebody proof reading the article might look at one more source than he theoretically had to (big whoop). The only way to (really) check whether paragraph is properly sourced is to actually look the sources. Once you've done that you know anyhow whether the source covered the whole paragraph or merely parts of it. So if you proof read a paragraoh, you simply check all its sources/inline citations and hence it ultimately doesn't matter all that much where in the paragraph they were placed. Of course that doesn't mean that editors can distribute their inline citation randomly over a paragraph, but it means extensive discussions about "the" perfect placing are probably a waste of time.-- Kmhkmh ( talk) 03:53, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
Sources of any kind are only required for quotations, challenged or likely challenged material, and some biographical information. If a paragraph has none of these things, there is no policy that requires an inline citation of any sort in that paragraph. That is intentional: WP:V is a minimal requirement, not a description of how the "best" articles might be written. The requirements of FA and GA are free to go beyond what is actually required by policy, and they often do. Pages like this guideline need to stick to what's actually required, not the FA or GA requirements. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 22:47, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
User:Piotrus recently made several changes to this page that are dramatic in scope, even though there was no previous discussion that I can see (scrolled off perhaps?), no prior agreement (ditto?), and what appears to be at least some level of disagreement.
I believe these edits were made as part of a thread I am involved in. In a recent DYK entry of mine, Piotrus gave the article a ? for several reasons. One of these was his claim that in order to pass a DYK, every sentence in the article had to be referenced. User:Nyttend quickly replied that this was not the case, and I followed this up with a post on Piotrus' talk page to the same effect. Neither comment received a response.
Instead, a refimprove tag was placed in article in question, shadow mask. When I asked why he did this, he once again claimed that every sentence needs a reference. I again pointed out this was not the case, and removed the tag. Then I received a message claiming that I should check CITE. Sure enough, CITE now included text to this effect -- text he had just entered, which used text from the shadow mask article as an example!
The changes were RVed, but only with a post on my talk page suggesting material would be removed from the article wholesale. This is all very worrying.
Maury Markowitz ( talk) 18:23, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
I'll put this at the bottom since I just read it: "First, let me point out that an article, nowadays, is unlikely to become GA (or higher) as long as it has any unreferenced sentences." I assume Piotr means every sentence within a paragraph as opposed to the end of the paragraph if one citation covers the entire paragraph? This is simply untrue. Period. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 08:58, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
If you have qualms about the beginning of a paragraph sourced only by a footnote at the end, go look at the sources in the footnote. If, when that is done, you don't find the content, then add {{ cn}} or {{ fv}}. If you do, add a sentence to the footnote explaining what is sourced where, if it seems helpful - often an entire paragraph or an entire article derives from the same two=page source. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 22:34, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
{{
vn}}
is for. If you can't get to the source, then you can ask for help.
WhatamIdoing (
talk) 18:39, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
I am against general references sections being used as citations. (see below #General references in FAs). As for the insertion of text. I assume that if that is done then the citation covers everything from the last citation or the start of a paragraph. So for example if there is a paragraph such as:
Here is my first sentence. Here is my second sentence. Here is my third sentence. [p 1]
The if a new sentence is interposed between the by "Anne Other" she would do this:
Here is my first sentence. [p 1] Anne Other's sentence. [p 2] Here is my second sentence. Here is my third sentence. [p 1]
A possibility to help remove ambiguity would be is to use a template that covers the specific text is being cited, but to date the examples I have seen change the visual look of the text which I do not think is desirable.
Another possibility, is to alter the positioning of footnotes at punctuation, {I anticipate a groan going up from some editors :-) } so that if it is to the left of a full stop (period) it means the citation is only for the information in that sentence and if it is to the right of a full stop it means from the last citation or the start of a paragraph (which ever is nearer to the citation under discussion). So in the example I gave above:
Here is my first sentence. Here is my second sentence. Here is my third sentence [p 3].
The if an Anne Other adds another sentence it becomes:
Here is my first sentence. Anne Other's sentence [p 2]. Here is my second sentence. Here is my third sentence [p 3].
In which case my first and second sentences are still not cited.
At the moment it is impossible to tell if a citation at the end of a paragraph is intended to cove all the sentences in the paragraph or if it is only a citation for the last sentence. It would also mean that if there was a reference at the end of the paragraph that was to the right of the full stop that covered the whole paragraph if Anne Other added a sentence in the middle but places the citation to the left of the full stop, there is no confusion as the sentences near the start of the paragraph seem to have no citation but a check of the history would show that all that was needed to fix the problem would be to append the final citation on the paragraph to the end of the sentence directly before Anne Others addition.
-- PBS ( talk) 02:40, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
May a bot be approved which will make alterations that would be inappropriate within quotations and titles, if the bot protects citations that use templates, but does not protect plain citations? In particular, the APA style does not use quotation marks or any other special typography to designate article titles, and thus a bot would be unable to avoid making alterations to such a title. Jc3s5h ( talk) 14:33, 20 February 2011 (UTC)
This question is inspired by Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/MOSNUM Bot. I believe WP:CITE rather than WP:MOS controls citations, and WP:CITE does not give preference to templates compared to plain text for purpose of citations. Thus I believe a bot which would protect templated citations but inappropriately alter plain citations ought not to be approved. It is possible that the proponents of the MOSNUM bot might successfully argue that the change that this bot would make, a change in date format such as "20 February 2011" to "February 20, 2011", is rare enough in titles of external articles, combined with the fairly low usage of the APA style, that the level of false positives is tolerable. I personally would not favor allowing this because of the risk of edit warring between the bot and editors. Jc3s5h ( talk) 14:33, 20 February 2011 (UTC)