Template talk:Cite pmid

Broken

This template is broken a little bit. It keeps giving red links in the reference section. Can someone help, please? Number 118 on Acupuncture is a good example. Basket of Puppies 22:03, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

See WP:DBUG; this will soon be fixed. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 22:52, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

 Fixed Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 17:27, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Centralized discussions

I believe centralized discussions of this, as well as the {{cite doi}} and {{cite pmc}} are occurring at template talk:Cite doi. Editors will probably get more discussion there than they would here. WLU (t) (c) Wikipedia's rules:^simple/_complex 17:49, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Bad "edit" link when using secure.wikimedia.org

Due to the hardcoding of "http://en.wikipedia.org" in the template the "edit" link at the end of the reference leads to a non-existent page. Example here: "Aspirine", ref 10. Is it going to be fixed somehow? BartłomiejB (talk) 19:02, 28 August 2011 (UTC)

@BartłomiejB:: I've just fixed this, using protocol-relative links (which weren't around when you wrote that message). You may already know, but secure.wikimedia.org is now deprecated – https://en.wikipedia.org should be used instead. Graham87 13:22, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

Proposal: Making no edit link the default

I don't see much point to the edit links (how often do these templates need to be edited?) and they really make our ref lists look awful. We already have enough interface clutter as it is without hundreds of tiny "edits" links floating at the end of every reference. What would people think about making no-edit-link the default and added a parameter to turn it on if people really want it? Kaldari (talk) 02:33, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

Agree - I would do this if I new how. Make "noedit" the default and make a new option "edit" for when they want the link. —Cupco 00:09, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Keep I use the edit link about 5% of the time, and would be frustrated when I needed to fix a reference and could not. Blue Rasberry (talk) 01:35, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Keep – In fact, I would support removing the "noedit" parameter entirely. Making it difficult for editors to find the underlying data is a really bad idea. An even better option is not use the {{cite pmid}} template to begin with (see below). Boghog (talk) 04:42, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

Delete and merge template

These templates are horrible. They do not work across language versions of Wikipedia. They make finding the details of the reference difficult for editors. I say we delete this one and replace it with cite journal which is much more widely used. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 06:38, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

• Support. We need a bot to move the references currently stored on subpages back into the article text. JFW | T@lk 21:18, 8 February 2014 (UTC)
• The reason why I don't like this template is that it enforces a certain citation style that often conflicts with WP:CITEVAR (see this discussion). One could add a ref name tag to provide more details about the reference and one could add passthrough parameters to allow for variations in formatting, but then the template and associated ref tag starts to become so long that it starts to defeat the purpose of using a transcluded template. Better to substitute {{cite pmid}} with {{cite journal}}. Boghog (talk) 05:08, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

  In response, the template should only be used on pages where it matches the formatting already in the page. Furthermore, we are also working on supporting more formats – coming soon, we hope. We are also working to make the templates work across all language versions of Wikipedia, and are in negotiations with various bodies as to the best way to implement this. If you are concerned that reference details are hard to find, perhaps we should enlarge the link that appears next to the template saying 'edit'? I personally find it harder to find a reference to edit it if I have to trawl the entire source code, especially if it is cited more than once.

  If a reference is listed separately in every page that cites it, how do you propose that the reference is maintained: for example with updated links, external identifiers or metadata? Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 08:48, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

  Why does subst:pmid not work as a method of getting rid of it? We can have bot do what you mention above. We could also get a bot to eliminate the template. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 01:42, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

  It would be very difficult for a bot to do this. If a user edits a parameter on one page (perhaps adding a link to a freely-accessible version of the text), should it find all occurrences of the same references (and how?) and update them in the same fashion? How would the bot know whether the editor's modification was a correction of a typo (in which case it should be propagated) or a preference that should not be propagated?

• Support. I hate to have to keep harping on this, but these have always been a tempting but bad idea. Template space is for template code, not for data. They introduce a terrible fragility to an article's verifiability. A single wrong character in a cite pmid or cite doi instance can create a plausible-looking-but-wrong citation in a reflist that goes undetected until someone re-verifies every source cited, something which usually isn't done until GAR or FAR. Even then, they may miss that the incorrectly-cited source does not support the article text. Since most articles never get there, the errors can persist indefinitely. Further, even if the correct template is transcluded, changes to the templated data occur on a timescale unlinked to changes to the transcluding article, breaking the history function. Irrespective of Martin's vision on how they should be used, editors can and do transclude these in articles which already use other formats, without paying any attention to the formatting details. The best answer I can see would be for editors looking at page code to have a one-click function that would subst the full cite journal wikitext into the article, then citationbot could on its next run match the dominant format used in the article. LeadSongDog come howl! 17:41, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

  Is the former problem frequent? How frequent?

  Would editors really pay more attention to citation formatting if they entered citations manually?

  Do you have anyone in mind to add this functionality to Citation bot? Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 08:22, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

  No way to tell how often it has happened, but bad, malformed, incorrect or corrupted ISBNs, DOIs, PMIDs are not exactly unheard of. In fact in this case citation bot replaced one bad DOI with another, then obligingly flagged it as not working ;-)

  I don't expect they would, but that's not what we're discussing.

  The ability to expand {{citation}}s and {{cite xxx}}s within articles is already in citation bot, it isn't exactly an addition. The processing of articles to eliminate {{cite pmid}} templates by whatever approach is chosen is not necessarily tied to any particular bot, or for that matter to a bot at all. A gadget something like reftools would seem a likely candidate, or perhaps even AWB. We should try not to conflate what to do with who or how to do it. Piling more and more functionality onto one program isn't necessarily the best possible idea, even if some folks in Redmond might disagree. LeadSongDog come howl! 22:16, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

  Agree. Will give this a bit longer and than if we have consensus will see what we can do to bring about replacing cite pmid with cite journal. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 04:05, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

• Comment Okay I have decided to offer a reward of $200 CAD to whoever can create a bot that replaces cite PMID with cite journal and runs it on WPMEDs 1500 most viewed articles. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 15:08, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

• Suggest Wikipedia:Bot_requests is likely the place to start. For a given pmid value, (e.g. 123456) [1] will return the basic reference, (also avail as xml). The bot operator can paste the returned content template in lieu of the old <ref>{{cite pmid|123456}}</ref>. LeadSongDog come howl! 22:48, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

• Comment: One way in which cite doi and cite pmid templates are useful is that they can be used in multiple articles while only having to maintain the citation in a single location. If I want to add the same long, detailed journal citation to five articles, I only have to add a couple dozen characters to each article, and Citation Bot will create and format the citation for me automatically. If I want to modify how the citation appears in all five (or fifty) articles, I can do that in a single location. Is there a way to maintain this usefulness while also accommodating the above stated goals? – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:48, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

We have bots that come around and adjust citations all the time. Making citations more complicated by hiding them in a template it not a plus. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 22:49, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

• oppose – I really think it smart just to write the pmid or the doi, and nothing else. It spares a lot of time Christian75 (talk) 17:21, 1 March 2014 (UTC) And before anybodu do anything, I think its best to WP:TfD it first. Christian75 (talk) 17:22, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

Doesn't work here [2], here [3] and in many many other places. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 22:50, 14 March 2014 (UTC)

Bump. Do we have agreement? LeadSongDog come howl! 04:15, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

Agreement to do what? Begin a well-advertised TfD? – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:15, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

• Support I'd think TfD is probably the way to go, but what about all that remain? - - MrBill3 (talk) 20:44, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

User:Boghog has removed many of them. Maybe we could get his bot to replace the rest. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 01:19, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Please add {{Deprecated template|Cite pmid|Cite journal|date=May 2015}} LeadSongDog come howl! 15:06, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

Not done: please establish a consensus for this alteration before using the {{edit protected}} template. Please request that the related discussions are closed (I see some seem to have consensus and others don't at first glance) and consensus is reached before reopening this request. Thank you. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c) 15:23, 15 May 2015 (UTC)

PMCID and NIHMSID?

Can this be updated to handle NIHMSID and PMCID ? -- 65.94.171.126 (talk) 13:16, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

For example, input check the input for PMC prefix or NIHMSID prefix and treat those as PMC and NIH id numbers, since their full format forms include the fixed prefix. -- 65.94.171.126 (talk) 13:25, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

Protected edit request on 5 September 2015

Add {{subst:tfd}} to the top of the template. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 03:38, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

I do not think we are proposing deletion? We are just proposing deprecation. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:24, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

{{cite doi}} is under discussion and this template is often just a redirect AManWithNoPlan (talk) 13:23, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

Not done: This template isn't mentioned anywhere on WP:TFD currently. It needs to be the subject of a discussion for us to be able to add the TfD template. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{♪ talk ♪} 02:29, 6 September 2015 (UTC)

RfC closure challenge: Template talk:Cite doi#RfC: Should Template:cite doi cease creating a separate subpage for each DOI?

Please take part in the discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#RfC closure challenge: Template talk:Cite doi#RfC: Should Template:cite doi cease creating a separate subpage for each DOI? Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 05:12, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

RFC: Should template:cite pmid be deprecated

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

---

Although the documentation was changed here, I think we should have a proper discussion on whether to deprecate this template or not. Based on prior discussions at Template:Cite doi and Template:cite isbn, and with a parallel new discussion about Template:Cite wdl, I believe that this template operates by in part searching the PMID string and checking for the full citation details at Category:Cite pmid templates so it's a wrapper for cite journal citations. I believe this template otherwise operates as a regular cite journal wrapper in the article itself if a subpage does not exist. How should the use of template:cite pmid continue in the future?

Continue as is with subpages

• Support' citations aren't text and the cleaner we can make the articles, the better off it'll be for new editors. 166.176.59.108 (talk) 03:30, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Continue with only in article uses

Deprecate entirely

• Support As discussed below. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 08:58, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
• Support. Even templates that are used more than once are unlikely to be watched, making these things hugely vulnerable to long-term vandalism. Keeping citations directly in the article makes this easier and also allows to use different (but consistent) citation formatting in an article that is not possible with these templates (see WP:CITEVAR). --Randykitty (talk) 09:05, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
• Support. We need a better way of referencing in real time. I would be delighted if an editor typed the PMID or DOI into the document and it automatically converted into a full citation based on Pubmed or Crossref data. Until that time, I think {{cite pmid}} obscures the content of the template from people editing the page, and causes unnecessary problems. JFW | T@lk 13:45, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
• Support We would be better off with articles simply referencing <ref>PMID 123456</ref>, which would at least make it clear to editors that they were only linking to the identifier. The template subpages create a false sense of security. Break that number and text-source integrity is broken, you've lost wp:V. If or when the bot is revived, it should change "cite pmid |123456" to "cite journal |pmid=123456", then do the rest of the metadata insertion. The template subpages cannot be relied upon for article integrity. This point has been made many times over several years, but convenience seems to be too attractive for some editors. LeadSongDog come howl! 20:16, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
• Support we need more consistent referencing. Ie only a few styles. We do not need more stills to make it harder for new users. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 07:10, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
• Support. LeadSongDog said everything I would have.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:26, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

Other

Discussion

• In line with every other discussion, this template's construction is (somewhat) unique in how we do citations. None of the other main citation formats do it by creating subpages and then calling them. We don't do that for books, for newspapers, for websites, for most journals, for anything but this set of citations and even then most of these citations are just wrappers for cite journal anyways. This way of citation (burying the details of the citations into hidden subpages) is not remotely helpful to editors who would have to learn how this thing worked to even begin to add or review citations on a page. Further, because these citations are rarely repeated (the ones that are extensively used could be kept), these could all be subject to very sneaky unseen vandalism. Finally, the gain from a very small subset of users with very extensive computing and programming knowledge saving a few minutes of time and bytes from articles is not work the overall difficulty and additional learning curve we're adding to the encyclopedia. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 08:58, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
• Comment Call all to the users from the above prior #Delete and merge template discussion. @Doc James, Jfdwolff, Boghog, Smith609, LeadSongDog, Jonesey95, and Christian75: and @MrBill3, AManWithNoPlan, and Mr. Stradivarius: from the protected edit request for a TFD notice. I hope that's a fair group to ask for input here. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 08:58, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
• I have never seen a single vandalized citation. Has anyone else? Does this threat exist?

Is there any evidence that the existence of a template that saves some editors a great deal of time, and means that they bother to add citations where they otherwise might not, makes it more difficult for editors to add citations to a page using a method that they are familiar with?

In any case, Cite PMID is identical to the now-deprecated Cite DOI template, except that it takes a different type of article identifier. I wonder whether there is likely to be a decision to delete Cite Doi but to keep Cite PMID. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 17:59, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

@Smith609: User:Graham87 pointed out here vandalism with Template:Cite pmid/9252594, Template:Cite pmid/12805553 and Template:Cite pmid/24308656. It's simply blanking vandalism. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 23:27, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

I've been working on getting Citation Bot up again (still looking for longer-term maintainers as well) and am blocked on dealing with anything that touches cite doi, cite pmid, etc. until there is some consensus. It looks like this discussion has been quiet for a month or so, and that there is a clear consensus to deprecate. Is it time to close it? --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 22:28, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Protected edit request on 5 December 2015

Add {{tl|Db-g6|rationale=unused and deprecated}} or just change to {{Historical template}}, since it has really gone beyond deprecation to having instances of it deleted. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 19:04, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

I've unprotected. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:43, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Template deleted

This template has been deleted, but there are still 40,000 subpages that need to be deleted (and possibly substed before that happens, if it hasn't happened for all of them yet). Was there consensus to delete this template? I see the deprecation consensus above, but no consensus to delete it yet. We may want to redirect this template to {{cite journal}} or leave the "historical" note and remove the documentation. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:48, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

There are no transclusions at all left. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 03:03, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

Personally, I don't see a reason to have deleted the main template; the deprecation warning is a lot more useful for now than a red link with no deletion log entry. Deleting the subpages should be fine, as they are substituted. Citation bot is still editing them, can we get a handle on that first? — Earwig ^talk 00:32, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Citation bot should no longer expand cite pmid templates in articles, though it may continue to edit in template space. No pages link to or transclude the template for which a diff was linked above, so that template should be deleted along with all of the other untranscluded cite pmid templates. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:14, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

there are NO transclusions at this point. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 03:21, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

the general conclusion was to not delete sub-pages that we used (ie. transcluded), but to delete all unused ones, since no one would be watching them. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 03:35, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Hmm, it's going to be about 100,000 deletions if I understand you correctly; I think a sanity check may be appropriate first. For centralization, let's please continue discussion on the village pump thread. — Earwig ^talk 07:51, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Batch deletion

As per this discussion, we're ok to delete all subpages of {{Cite pmid}} at this point. Subpages can all be found in Category:Cite pmid templates, I believe. Anomie, could AnomieBOT III take this on? ~ Rob^Talk 15:32, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Deletion is in progress. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:39, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

That Catagory does not include all the templates. Just those that include documentation page. There are still a few cite doi templates in existence still that for some reason were not deleted. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 19:52, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

I'll work on compiling a list in my userspace after AnomieBOT deletes the initial batch. ~ Rob^Talk 19:57, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

AnomieBot has those 94(?) remaining Cite doi subtemplates teed up for deletion after it gets done with a pass through the Cite pmid subtemplates. See AnomieBOT's talk page for more details. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:37, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Happy to see this go. I was never a huge fan on the {{cite pmid}} and {{cite doi}} infrastructure. JFW | T@lk 09:09, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

Temporary resurrection at wikiversity

See also Wikiversity:Colloquium

I have a request. I've just finished importing a small archive of content from http://topicpageswiki.plos.org/ over to v:PLOS. However much of it uses the old cite_pmid template so the reflists are broken (example). Would it be possible to get whatever code is necessary to get v:template:cite_pmid to work there? Even if it's temporary, it'd allow me to substitute all the templates to at least have readable plaintext references (ping possibly interested users @Quantum7, @Daniel Mietchen, @Headbomb, @Jonesey95, @Frietjes, @Randykitty @JFW @Martin). Thanks in advance for any help! T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 04:54, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

It would probably be easiest to run a bot to change all of the {{cite pmid|12345678}} to {{cite journal|pmid=12345678}} and then run another bot to retrieve and fill in the missing details of those citations. On the English Wikipedia, User:Citation bot can do the latter task. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:52, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

@Evolution and evolvability: Not sure what I can do to help, as I don't do scripts and bots. JFW | T@lk 09:11, 30 November 2021 (UTC)

@Evolution and evolvability: I replaced Template:Cite pmid with a proper Template:Cite journal on all of the article it was used on, and also cleaned up a preexisting backlog of malformed Template:Cite doi citations. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 19:24, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

@Pppery Thank you! You're a champion. Were you able to do it bot/gadget-assisted or was it manual? T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 09:06, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Semi-automatic. What I did was copy the wikitext of pages on Wikiversity to User:Pppery/Cite pmid, manually replace {{cite pmid}} -> {{Cite journal|pmid=}}, then run Citation bot on that page and copy the result back to Wikiversity. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 15:39, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

@Pppery Aha, that makes sense. Thanks again. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 22:37, 5 December 2021 (UTC)