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Should CS1 errors be restored?

Re https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LMS_6399_Fury&curid=2024630&diff=693616758&oldid=693616168

Is it better to use |title=none and remove the error (a magazine cite, where the magazine title is present), or is this "a cop out" ?

Thoughts? Andy Dingley (talk) 19:09, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Until the error can actually be corrected, the error should be emitted by the template. --Izno (talk) 20:30, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

What's the "error" though? It's likely that (given the context here) there was never any "title" used in the original source (or else it would have been added originally). It's not unusual for magazine sources to offer a publication title and a page number, but no more. Nor is there much credible likelihood of this "title" getting added. Andy Dingley (talk) 21:00, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

The article title should be inserted. Since articles in that publication do have titles, it is incorrect to state that they do not have one. DrKay (talk) 21:16, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes, the article should be inserted. Andy, your section title is misleading: this is not a matter of restoring an error, but of restoring the message of an error. The error being the lack of a title. I don't know where it is "not unusual" to not provide the title of article (aside from journals), but if there is a nest of such mis-usage on WP it ought to be cleaned out. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:03, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Flight is just one news-heavy journal where this is a regular issue. Large articles have a title, but lots of the most useful content is in a section (which might have a section title) but the individual items are just separated by bullets. There is no title here at the article level. We should not pretend that there is. Andy Dingley (talk) 22:13, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Then use the |department= parameter. If the very specific item you cite does not itself have a title use the title of the next larger division that does. (BTW: We are not "pretending" anything. If you cite something from an article you cite its title. If you cite something from a regular department or section you cite its title.) ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:25, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

Using |department= is all very well, but it won't stop the CS1 error. The way to stop that, when |title= really is irrelevant, is to use |title=none. This is the deliberate behaviour built into the template. Yet that's getting reverted. Andy Dingley (talk) 00:56, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

The |title=none functionality was added to support certain types of academic journal citations that list only the barest minimum of information. The original discussion is here.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 01:46, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

And right at the start of the discussion that Trappist has linked to is his statement: "I think that all CS1/2 citations must have |title=." So there it is: as "title" in this context is presumed to that of an article, the implication is that only articles can be cited. A sentiment echoed by @Redrose64: where he deleted the 'title=none' with the comment "[w]hat we need is the title of the article". But perhaps he would accept citation of a department ("a regular department, column, or section within the periodical or journal").

Andy, try using 'title=none' along with 'department=', and let's see what happens. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:12, 4 December 2015 (UTC)

The error message serves to indicate those refs which do not (as yet) have a non-blank |title= parameter. What I want to see is an actual article title being added by people with access to the magazines concerned. What I do not want to see is people adding a whole bunch of |title=none merely to clear that error message (as here): that is what I mean by "a cop-out", since it does not help anybody, and gives the misleading impression that the articles have no title. A ref like "The Railway Magazine. London. 1929. {{cite journal}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)" is scanty enough as it is: besides the absence of a title, we don't know which page, or even which month; so to verify that ref, somebody needs to search through twelve issues (about 84 pages per issue, excluding the advertising pages at front and back of each issue, total about 1008). If we have an article title, then somebody with an index for the volume (included at the back of the June and December issues) can at least find out the month and page. --Redrose64 (talk) 09:58, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

I agree that generally there should be a title of some sort, and that "none" should (generally) not be used to "clear the error message", and certainly not to evade the duty of providing full bibliographic details. The problem is that in this context "title" is implicitly (and in your comments, explicitly) that of an article, and the case Andy presents is where the material is taken from a department. You "want to see is an actual article title", but that is not what is being cited. Such cases are properly handled using |department=, except that the template still demands a |title=. As Trappist is unwilling to alter that behavior, we need a working understanding that when |department= is specified it is okay to "clear the error message" using |title=none. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:54, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

Sorry for the ignorant question, but what is a "department" exactly? Is that like "Bagehot" in The Economist or "Mathematical Games" in Scientific American? Or what, exactly? If others are as ignorant as I, that could be making the discussion difficult. --Trovatore (talk) 21:15, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes. As defined at Template:Cite journal#Periodical: 'department: Title of a regular department, column, or section within the periodical or journal. Examples include "Communication", "Editorial", "Letter to the Editor", and "Review".' Also "Bagehot" and "Mathematical Games". Conceivably anything in a periodical that is not an article. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:47, 5 December 2015 (UTC)

How do you know "that is not what is being cited"? Do you have the relevant issue of The Railway Magazine? If so, please add the month and page, at the very least; if not, please do not make statements that you cannot substantiate. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:20, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

In the specific edit presented there is no way of telling what was cited, whether in the nature of an article or not-an-article, because the citation is incomplete. Which is what I initially chided Andy about. But please note his comment of 22:13 3 Dec. specifying where "useful content is in a section" (emphasis added). That is to say, not-an-article, for which |department= is appropriate. (Andy: would you care to provide us with a suitable example of a citation that uses |department=?) ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:59, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Bundling Considered Harmful

I'd like to point out that the idea of reference bundling, while not terrible per se, is being "blindly" applied in certain articles without regard to whether it's really necessary (not every instance of 2 refs in a row calls for bundling), and with no apparent consideration to what the ref list looks like after it's done (see the first example here—I'm not citing a specific "real" example so as not to call out a particular editor). As with anything, editors still need to think about what they're doing, and whether their changes benefit readers. - dcljr (talk) 05:06, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

Particular cases should be discussed on the Talk pages of the articles concerned. This page would be more suitable for discussing "bundling" generally. Anyone interested? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:23, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

Mildly differ with both the above. That is, we should have a specific example to see what the problem is. It is the edit not the editor, in question. On bundling in general: it is very useful. Especially when the footnote supports more than one sentence. I strongly prefer titled bundles (a descriptive name at the top like footnotes 1, 7 and 13

here) instead of naked bundles (no indication of what the cites have in common, like footnote 29 here). Titled bundles are especially needful on Wikipedia since text gets shifted, footnotes get orphaned. Without the title you can't be sure all the cites in the bundle still support a revised sentence or paragraph. Now, editors with habits leftover from print publications, books and articles, don't see the need for titles on bundled footnotes. The habitual assumption is the text over the footnote suffices. But Wikipedia is a different animal: footnotes on Wikipedia don't stay glued to their text. In sum: yes to bundling, and preferably titled bundles.ElijahBosley ^{(talk ☞)} 13:42, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

OK, well, what do people think about this way of bundling? (Yes it's about the edit and not the editor, but this editor has changed multiple articles in the same way.) Compare the reflist before and after the changes (in particular, see "after" notes 9, 15, 22…). I suggested a different way (yes, I know it was a naked bundle) and pointed out it doesn't work with named references. The other editor has tried doing things differently, apparently with mixed results. If someone more familiar with bundling could weigh in on this, that would be great. - dcljr (talk) 03:13, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

Competing formats for cites? Is that the issue? Rather than bundle/not bundle? I note that with naked bundles, using quotes in the cite is wonderfully helpful as in footnote 2 in the example given above. The second cite in the footnote offers the quote: "R is also the name of a popular programming language used by a growing number of data analysts inside corporations and academia. It is becoming their lingua franca ..." That tells the reader what the footnote buttresses, in a way that a naked bundle would not.ElijahBosley ^{(talk ☞)} 14:49, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

The solution you want is shortened footnotes. {{sfnm}} supports the inclusion of multiple sources in a single footnote. This style allows multiple authors and exact page numbers all rolled into one superscripted number. That same source can be reused, yet with different page numbers. The problem is that all the citations would need to be converted to the shortened footnote format, which is uncommon and would confuse most editors. So yes, there is a better solution than using {{refn | to bundle citations, however since that solution looks like {{sfnm | 1a1=Phillips-Fein | 1y=2009 | 1p=115 | 2a1=Hamowy | 2y=2008 | 2p=217 | 3a1=Perelman | 3y=2007 | 3p=64 | 4a1=Schneider | 4y=2009 | 4p=47 | 5a1=Mirowski | 5a2=Plehwe | 5y=2009 | 5p=285 | 6a1=Olson | 6y=2009 | 7a1=Lichtman | 7y=2008 | 7p=160 | quote5="… going so far as to help Mises publish his Magnum Opus Human Action …"}} , that solution also has baggage. Abel (talk) 18:27, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

Yes, EB, the issue is how bundling is done rather than whether or not to bundle (although personally, I think bundling is a solution in search of a problem, but whatever...) OTOH, the issue is not simply "competing formats"; I think the {refn} way of doing it is actually fundamentally confusing to readers, since it is unlike any other common method of footnoting in use around here. (IOW, the objection is to a footnote containing merely a list of bracketed numbers, which are references to other footnotes — that's just crazy [and these numbers are also shown in the tooltip when hovering on the note number, which is even worse]). The shortened notes approach, if bundled as above, would be confusing to more editors, but I care a little less about that (unless, of course, it leads to many bad edits). Finally, the objection to naked bundles seems to me to be merely an aesthetic one (it doesn't bother me, but I would not object if someone wants to take the time to add "titles" to such bundles). - dcljr (talk) 20:22, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

Again, the solution you want is shortened footnotes, for example: "... and individual lectures." Abel (talk) 03:38, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

Notes

References

• Phillips-Fein, Kim (2009). Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan. New York: W. W. Norton. p. ii, 27, 52, 60, 86, 101, 115, 116, 124, 149, 167, 265, 270, 285, 286. ISBN 978-0-393-05930-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hamowy, Ronald, ed. (2008). "The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism". The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Cato Institute. pp. 62, 217, 221, 335, 416, 417. ISBN 978-1-4129-6580-4. LCCN 2008009151. OCLC 750831024. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Perelman, Michael (2007). The Confiscation of American Prosperity from Right-Wing Extremism and Economic Ideology to the Next Great Depression. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 64. ISBN 978-0-230-60046-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Schneider, Gregory L (2009). The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 47. ISBN 978-0-7425-4284-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Mirowski, Philip; Plehwe, Dieter (2009). The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. pp. 15, 19, 21, 53, 156, 190, 196, 243, 281, 284, 293, 387, 397, 410. ISBN 978-0-674-03318-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Olson, Wayne (September 28, 2009). "An Inside Look at the Foundation for Economic Education FEE" (Interview). Interviewed by Pete Eyre. {{cite interview}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |city= ignored (|location= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |program= ignored (help)
• Lichtman, Allan J (2008). White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement. New York: Grove Press. pp. 160, 171, 173, 206. ISBN 978-0-8021-4420-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Okay, someone please clarify for me: what exactly do we mean by "bundle" and "bundling"? Is a string of footnote links in the text (e.g.: ^[1][7][13]) itself a bundle? Is "bundling" putting all of the same citations into a single note? And (EB?) what are naked and titled bundles? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:56, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

Yes: bundling lists several cites in one foonote, usually with bullet points. Instead of a separate footnote for each cite which leaves text looking something like this^1234567. Examples of bundled footnotes are footnotes 1, 7 and 13 here. Each has a descriptive name at the top. That is the title. And while I am at it let me give a pat on the back for the excellent answer by Abel above.ElijahBosley ^{(talk ☞)} 13:24, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

Thank you. I see several variations here:

• the basic bundling of multiple citations,
• bundling in a list format (versus "serial", see below),
• a list format with or without bullets, and
• a list format with or without titles.

There is also a very basic variation of whether what is bundled are the full citations (as seen in the example fn. 1) or the short cites (aka shortened footnotes). Here is an example of a serial (non-list) format, which also uses short cites:

• Lictman 2008; Phillips-Fein 2009; Mirowski & Plehwe 2009.

So there is basic bundling, and there are a number of variations. All of which merit discussion. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:48, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

Yes, there are many ways to bundle citations. The rub comes from none of those variations being wrong. All of those methods are equally correct. All editors are free to prefer one method over the others, but there is no policy mandating one method be used beyond respecting the method already in place if that situation exists. Abel (talk) 01:36, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

I don't know about "equally correct", or even useful, but I'll allow that none is mandated or prohibited. Yet the contrast of these styles is so jarring that concurrence towards a more standard style would seem for the better. At the very least editors could be more conscious of what they are doing, and why, rather than sticking with whatever they have always done solely because they have never considered the alternatives. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:20, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

Simply wrapping existing references in a {refn} template is wrong, and should be prohibited discouraged in this guideline. - dcljr (talk) 01:57, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

We understand that you do not like how that one style looks, however, that does not change the fact that all of those styles are valid choices. I agreed with JJ that the style options are radically different and having all of Wikipedia pick one style would be a large improvement, however, that does not seem likely to happen anytime soon. You might as well accept that regardless of how much you dislike how that one style looks, there is currently nothing wrong with that or any other method.

"While citations should aim to provide the information listed above, Wikipedia does not have a single house style, though citations within any given article should follow a consistent style."

So yes, the shortened footnotes example above does everything you want and looks the way you like, but it is not okay to just go around changing other methods to that method as it is no more valid than the existing method regardless of how much you prefer how it looks.

If and only if you gain consensus for the change on the article's talk page may you then change the citation style to the method that you prefer, for that one article. So if that one style method bothers you that much, just start a new topic on the talk page and once you have consensus, convert the article to shortened footnotes. Abel (talk) 16:46, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Hear, hear. Though I should clarify that what I favor is not picking one style, but moving towards a more standardized usage with fewer bizarre variations. At the very least we should be more aware of the advantages and disadvantages of different "styles". ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:42, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Interesting viewpoint you express there, Abel, given that you are going around changing consecutive refs in articles to {refn} bundles with no prior seeking of consensus. In any case, you'll notice if you look through my edits that I have not been changing the referencing style in any articles, so I'm not sure who your latest remarks are actually directed towards. More importantly, though, I must push back on the idea that somehow the {refn}-bundled "style" is an equally "valid" one. Where in this guideline or, indeed, anywhere else in Wikipedia's policy or guideline pages, does it mention that simply wrapping multiple consecutive refs in a {refn} template is an acceptable "style"? - dcljr (talk) 09:05, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

The refn bundles maintain the existing style rather than changes the style, which would require consensus. Abel (talk) 16:20, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

I reject the idea that bundling (generally) is invalid, or harmful. Still, "style" tends to be applied broadly. And bundling, especially when done in a list format, is not a minor change. Where anyone objects I think it is quite inadvisable to proceed without obtaining consensus. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:31, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

Having seen people wholesale delete valid sources just because they find^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]} unsightly, I have to agree. Bundling is the only thing that I have seen that makes those people happy. Is bundling still a giant mess with a whole host of its own problems? Absolutely. That does not change the fact that bundling allows people to maintain verifiability while appeasing people who demand readability. Ideal solution? No. Best we have at the moment? Yes. Seems like a "never let the perfect be the enemy of the good" kind of situation. Abel (talk) 14:02, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

I think I generally agree with you. While allowing that some editors think a long line of note-links is quaint, I think bundling in some form is beneficial. (Details obviously TBD.) But there is no advantage to riling up others with mass changes they are not ready to accept. It would be better to sort out the objections, and what a generally acceptable form would be. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:18, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

What you describe is the current policy, stick to whatever style exists until someone asks for a change on the talk page. Abel (talk) 01:00, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Just learned that you can link directly to the References sections so for anyone placing a request on a talk page the following might be helpful: "Please chime in with your preference for the current or the proposed formatting."

Please chime in with your preference for the [[Special:Diff/690200494#References|current]] or the [[Special:Diff/690200296#Notes|proposed]] formatting.

Abel (talk) 01:13, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Continuing

Am I crazy or has no one actually directly addressed the objections I have raised about merely wrapping multiple refs in a {refn} template? (Note that I am not talking about naked vs. titled bundles, shortened refs, changing "citation styles", or whether bundling should be banned in all its forms. Other commenters have raised these issues, not me.)

The objections are:

1. it results in odd, potentially confusing footnotes (see footnote 9 in the References section here),
2. it defeats the usefulness of "mouseover" checks of the citations (e.g., mouseover the ^[9] in the article text here), and
3. it does not follow any example of bundling given here or on any other guideline or policy page that I know of.

It's fine to discuss better ways of doing things, but I keep objecting to a specific thing and Abel keeps replying in a way that seems to avoid addressing the specific thing I am objecting to. So, Abel, do you still think that the way you changed the refs in the first link in this comment is a valid, acceptable way of bundling refs, and if so how do you respond to my objections listed above? (And if anyone else has responses to these specific objections, of course, I am interested in hearing them.) - dcljr (talk) 06:26, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

We all understand that you do not like how some bundled citations look. The part that you leave out of the example was how, to humor you, I went to the trouble of changing the bundled citations to the bulleted format that you prefer, yet could not be bothered to do yourself. That does not change how everyone agrees that there is no one correct method for bundling citations aside from maintaining the current citation style until editors agree to a new style on a talk page. Abel (talk) 21:46, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

I "could not be bothered to do [it myself]" because (1) I literally did not have time to spend on it, and (2) it would be undoing changes you had just made. If an editor makes problematic edits to an article, they really should take the responsibility to fix the problems they have introduced. And might I point out that you still have not addressed any of my objections in any substantive way. - dcljr (talk) 06:22, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Bulleting the bundled citations did not undo anything, which is the point. All it did was change the appearance of the citations. Abel (talk) 17:42, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Both of you, cool it. If you two want to sort out some "problematical edits to an article", please do so at the appropriate Talk page. Or if you have some interaction issues, try each others' Talk page. (Though I would suggest finding a moderator, lest you just wind each other up.) Abel, I gather dcljr objects to your bulleting the bundled citation. If that was done just to illustrate some point, would you object to undoing that, at least for the duration? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:58, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

The opposite is true. The bulleting was to appease dcljr, yet was not enough. dcljr does not like how [4][5] looks when inside [3]. The solution to this is {sfn} and {sfnm} which bundles citations as a part of how the template works, so the unwanted appearance cannot happen. Abel (talk) 01:44, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

A solution for what? So far all I see as any kind of problem is the suboptimal interaction between two editors. So I'll put to you the same question I put to dcljr: what is your issue here? Can you two come up with a mutual statement of what problem(s?) or issue we should be addressing here? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:27, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

I do not have an issue. I have never claimed to have an issue. The sfnm template is one solution to how dcljr does not like what you called "a ref within a ref" and I called "how [4][5] looks when inside [3]". Your "a ref within a ref" label makes more sense as it is more clear. I think dcljr called that a "naked citation" or something. Abel (talk) 02:10, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

(interpolated comment) No, someone else brought up naked bundles. In my "20:22, 5 November 2015 (UTC)" comment I called it "a footnote containing merely a list of bracketed numbers, which are references to other footnotes". More importantly, though, I cited and linked to specific examples of what I'm talking about in my comment of "03:13, 5 November 2015 (UTC)" and "06:26, 16 November 2015" (more about which in my comment below, posted at the same time as this one). - dcljr (talk) 12:14, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Okay, I am glad to hear that. It seems to me that the two of you were more into "who did what" than the general merits and applicability of bundling. It might be useful to have an article in hand as an example, and even your specific edits as specific instances. But hopefully that is past, and we can discuss bundling without fighting about it.

You mentioned a solution. Should we look at whatever problem or issue you think it solved? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:31, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

Happy to supply one. So, due to the nature of how the sfnm template works you cannot get a ref within a ref. Abel (talk) 06:53, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

The exact same citations in sfnm format look like this. Abel (talk) 06:53, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Notes

References

1. Lopez, Mary Stachyra (2014-06-16). Centreville and Chantilly. Arcadia Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4671-2023-4. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
2. Brent, Chester Horton (1946). Descendants of Col. Giles Brent, Capt George Brent and Robert Brent, Gentlemen. Priv. print. by the Tuttle Pub. Co. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

But {{sfnm}} is not intended to put a ref within a ref. (Nor, for that matter, does talkquote.) It creates a footnote (implicitly within ref tags) containing short cites, which link to full citations provided elsewhere. With {{refn}} you are putting the full citation into the footnote (ref in a ref). Same citations, but totally different approaches. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:33, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

---

Sure, let's address your objections. But appears you are not concerned about bundling as such, but this particular form of bundling "multiple refs in a {refn} template", where the footnote contains links to other footnotes. That seems excessively clunky. Does anyone have any points in support of such an arrangement? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:47, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I thought I had made it abundantly clear that my objections concerned this particular way of bundling. (In fact, I have said it five times.) Does anyone else have any useful commentary in favor of or against this particular method of bundling, especially in light of the 3 objections about it raised above? - dcljr (talk) 06:29, 19 November 2015 (UTC) [Thank you, JJ, for your specific comment about it. - dcljr (talk) 06:31, 19 November 2015 (UTC)]

I am not really interested in how many times you have previously discussed something, and certainly not in debating it. And, no, your objections are not "abundantly clear" when you mix them up with complaints about others' edits, and are not adequately specific. E.g., from Abel's comments I would think the issue is about bulleting. So tell me (I'm new here): Is that your issue? Or is your issue just "refs in a ref"? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:59, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

(interpolated comment) How can you ask that when I just answered your Nov 16th question about what I was objecting to? (And BTW, the "times" I have "previously discussed" this are all on this very page, in this very dicsussion — in which you have been involved from the beginning.) - dcljr (talk) 12:14, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

@Dcljr: I am interested in hearing from you. Can you identify the issue that concerns you? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:29, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

@J. Johnson: Look, I hate to say this, but I have a hard time believing you have actually read my comments and followed the links I have provided. If you had, you would have seen from the very beginning that my "issue" is having "refs in a ref", as you say. (And BTW, my objection could not be about bulleting, since I cited — in my comment of 03:13, 5 November 2015 (UTC) — one of my own edits where I used bulleting. This is why I have been getting progressively more frustrated here, because every time I cite specific examples of what I'm talking about, the replies either talk about completely different issues or — in your case, JJ — ask for an explanation, example, or answer to a question, when I have just provided same.) So, before we go any further, please reread my comment of 03:13, 5 November 2015 (UTC), which begins "OK, well, what do people think about", paying special attention to the first 3 links; then read my comment of 06:26, 16 November 2015 (UTC), which begins "Am I crazy", paying special attention to the 1st, 3rd and 4th links. That is where you will find my explanations of and specific examples of what I am objecting to. - dcljr (talk) 12:14, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes, I read your comments, and followed your links. It made my head spin then, and all your underlining and all your bolding does not make anything clearer. Please pause a moment and listen: bitching about how many times you have said something (your prior comment, on the 19th) is not an explanation, nor any kind of "points in support" (as I requested). Likewise, your comment of 03:13 5 Nov. is mostly waving your hand around without any definite statement of what we should make of what you point to. Your following comment at 20:22 is more substantive, but you flailed away at so much it still makes my head spin. And now, when I asked a simple question ("Can you identify the issue that concerns you?"), which could be answered very simply (as simply as "yes" or "no"), you tell me to scroll back to a previous comment and find the 1st, 3rd and 4th links (does that include the note-link?), which don't really explain, and even suggest that you object to the R programming language. While you may think you were abundantly clear, sorry, you were not. Your frustration arises because your explanations, etc., are not clear and definite. Allow me to help with this.

What would help here is if we could lose all this prior history and start afresh with a simple statement of what issue (or issues) you have in regard of bundling. Even if it is incomplete, fine, we can incrementally improve it to a point where a simpleton like me can understand what you object to. Then we can work on why. Okay? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) 23:31, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

It appears we are restarting at your new section, #Bundling revisited (below). ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:12, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Bundling revisited

Starting over. Having unexpectedly had quite a bit of free time on my hands over the last two days, I have composed the following description of exactly what bundling is, how it can be done, and how it should not be done. I hope this is clear to everyone.

What is "bundling" in the context of references?

Bundling references is taking something like this:

In this first example, the references are not bundled.

References

and turning it into something like this:

In this second example, the references are bundled.

References

(Yes, I know these references are ridiculous.)

What are some other ways of bundling?

The last example used a bulleted list and "labels". Variations include not using a list:

In this third example, the bundled references take the form of a paragraph.

References

or not using labels, which results in a so-called "naked bundle":

In this fourth example, the references are listed in a naked bundle.

References

Whether to use a bullet point for the first citation in a naked bundle is a matter of taste, but omitting it might offend some editors (and it may — or may not — be confusing to people using screen readers).

In this fifth example, the references are listed in a naked bundle but the first citation lacks a bullet point.

References

Of course, the list format can be retained without using bullet points:

In this sixth example, the references are listed in a naked bundle without any bullet points.

References

but that can get confusing when the individual citations are long enough to be "wrapped" into multiple lines.

What is the purpose of bundling?

As far as I can tell, the two "legitimate" purposes of bundling are:

1. To avoid having a series of (bracketed) footnote numbers all in a row in the article text.
2. To clarify which source supports which piece of information.

Is bundling necessary?

It depends on how important you think it is to accomplish these goals. Note that purpose #2 can usually be accomplished by simply placing the references in the right places in the text:

In this seventh example, the references are not bundled.

References

Granted, some people dislike having multiple footnotes spread across a sentence just as much as having several in row at the end — and to be fair, it is sometimes difficult to choose the "right places" for the various references, given that each source can support multiple facts.

Personally, I don't place much value on purpose #1, so merely doing that for it's own sake seems useless to me. Purpose #2 is much more important, but like I said, it can often be accomplished without bundling. In my opinion, bundling should only be used if it is not clear which of multiple sources support which fact and it is not possible to clarify this by proper placement of footnotes. (Obviously, such a case would not be fixed by a naked bundle, so only a "labeled" bundle would be appropriate.)

Note that the second and third examples fulfill both purposes, the fourth through sixth only #1.

How should bundling not be done?

One should not simply wrap a {{refn}} template around the existing series of references without removing the <ref> tags (and without formatting the references in some manner shown above), because then we get this:

In this eighth example, the references are bundled by simply wrapping them in a {{refn}} template.

References

Why do I have a problem with this way of doing it?

1. While it avoids having a series of footnote numbers in a row in the article text (purpose #1), it merely pushes this problem to another place on the page; now there's a series of footnote numbers in a row in the list of references. And while it is not impossible to figure out that this means the information at footnote 4 is supported by the sources listed in footnotes 1 through 3, I believe this places an "unnecessary cognitive burden" on readers (it doesn't match what references typically look like in Wikipedia nor in any printed source I know of).
2. Obviously it doesn't clarify which source supports which piece of information (purpose #2).
3. The footnote numbers (1 through 3) for the three bundled references do not appear anywhere in the article text, which again is unexpected and might confuse some readers.
4. The "mouseover" mechanism (which is not enabled in these examples because I'm using {{reflist-talk}}), whereby a reader can "hover" over a footnote number in the article text and see a "tooltip" containing the citation, merely shows "^[1][2][3]" in the tooltip, which is very odd and definitely unexpected (and hovering over the 1, 2, or 3 in the tooltip doesn't bring up any additional information). You can see an example of this "in the wild" by hovering over footnote 9 in the lead section of this revision of the "R (programming language)" article.
5. The "return-link" mechanism (which is likely to not work too well here because everything is so close together in the example), whereby a reader can follow a link back to the article text from a note in the references, does not work for footnotes 1 through 3: clicking on the "^" in front of footnote 2 in the reference list, for example, would bring the reader to footnote 4 in the references section, not to the place in the article text that the source in footnote 2 is related to. Again, you can see this effect "in the wild" in the "References" section of the same article revision: the "return links" on references 5, 6, 7a and 8 all lead the reader to reference 9 instead of to the article's lead section.

Conclusion

References should not be bundled by merely wrapping an existing series of references in a {{refn}} template, as done in this edit (for example).

Does anyone take issue with any of this? Can we agree that the eighth example shows what should not be done when bundling references? - dcljr (talk) 02:39, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

Good work! This warrants a careful consideration. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:15, 9 December 2015 (UTC)

More could be said about bundling (the nice exposition above misses some points). But I think that does not matter, as the issue dcljr raises here is not on the merits of bundling, but on whether bundling should be done by means of wrapping individual "references" (notes, the stuff in the <ref> tags) within a {{refn}} template.

I am inclined to say no, that {{refn}} should not be used in this manner, as 1) there is no need for it (bundling is readily done without it), 2) it has no value other than saving a "bundling" editor the trouble of removing existing ref tags, and 3) it has all of the objections cited above. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 05:43, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

Putting citations in the lede sections

I've seen some other editors saying that it's Wikipedia policy to not put citations in the lede sections. I can't find anything in the policies - am I missing something?Timtempleton (talk) 18:58, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

WP:LEADCITE. --Izno (talk) 19:03, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks - and now I also see a small section in the citing sources article [[1]]. My takeaway is that it's up to consensus to decide if the lede should be sourced, but not explicitly forbidden. In the rare cases where citation-needy lede material isn't repeated in the body, such as with short articles or stubs, then citations should definitely go in the lede..Timtempleton (talk) 23:11, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

I think the lede is intended to summarize the article, and, generally, should not include material that is not found elsewhere in the article. However, clear exceptions come to mind, such as where the topic, or some immediately relevant aspect, needs to be defined. It seems less a matter of whether citations should (or not) go into the lede, as whether content that requires citation should go into the lede. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:50, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Good points - thanksTimtempleton (talk) 19:28, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Question about URL error in citation

I saw a red URL reference error on the Eden ahbez page, and can't figure out how to get it to go away. It's reference #10 and the full text of the reference is this:<ref>{{cite book|title=Nature Boy|url=http://books.google.pt/books?id=DEYEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA131| title = Life Magazine May 10, 1948, pp. 131-135}}</ref> It shows up as this: Life Magazine May 10, 1948, pp. 131-135 Nature Boy Check |url= value (help). Is it because the Wiki code doesn't recognize the .pt domain? If so, can a request be made to fix that?Timtempleton (talk) 19:38, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

@Timtempleton: It should be valid. Send a complaint to Help talk:CS1 errors for the attention of Trappist the monk (talk · contribs). --Redrose64 (talk) 20:14, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks - will do.Timtempleton (talk) 20:26, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

The |url= should only contain a url, not the linked title. You need to insert |journal= before the title. Boghog (talk) 21:14, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Better yet, use {{cite magazine}} and format it something like {{cite magazine | title = Nature Boy | url = http://books.google.pt/books?id=DEYEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA131 | magazine = Life Magazine | date = May 10, 1948 | pages = 131–135 }}. Boghog (talk) 21:31, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Quotes in Reference name - new?

All of a sudden I am seeing these annoying quote marks in my reference names again. Can these be permanently not used again. They were blessedly missing for a very long time. They are very unnecessary in my opinion. Not sure why they are making an unwelcome comeback. Adding this here too as well as Note talk page, not sure which is best area of discussion -- Erika aka BrillLyle (talk) 22:31, 30 January 2016 (UTC)

@BrillLyle: You posted the same message at Help talk:Footnotes#Quotes in Reference name - new?. Please see WP:MULTI. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:41, 30 January 2016 (UTC)

Notice of relevant proposal at WT:MOS

Please see Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Allow a more structured, orderly listing of references. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:07, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Print on demand?

Should there be a signifier for Print on demand (POD) titles in citations? These works may be normally hard to find (out-of-print, small runs, vanity press editions etc.) which could affect reliability and/or verifiability. To quote from the lead of the POD article,

Many traditional small presses have replaced their traditional printing equipment with POD equipment or contract their printing out to POD service providers. Many academic publishers, including university presses, use POD services to maintain a large backlist; some even use POD for all of their publications. Larger publishers may use POD in special circumstances, such as reprinting older titles that are out of print or for performing test marketing.
— Print on demand (lead section)

I have also noticed that Amazon may list the work type as "Print on demand (paperback|hardcover)" in such cases. Any thoughts? 72.43.99.130 (talk) 19:37, 15 February 2016 (UTC)

Tech Talk on Zotero and citations

Some of you may be interested in this:

There is a Tech Talk next Monday, 29 February at 20:00 UTC (12 Noon Pacific Time) about Zotero and the mw:citoid service.

The main subject is how to extract accurate, automated bibliographic citations from websites. This talk is mostly about Zotero, which is a free and open-source citation management tool. Zotero is used on the Wikipedias through the automagic citoid service. Citoid is currently an option in the visual editor and will (eventually) be used for automated citations in the wikitext editor at some Wikipedias. Zotero is also used by many academics and researchers, and most of the information presented will be useful to people outside of Wikipedia as well.

Please share this invitation with anyone that you believe will be interested. If you have questions, then please leave a note on my talk page. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 03:46, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Yes! This would be so awesome! I'm disappointed that they've rolled this out as part of the Visual Editor first, as if that's going to force us to adopt it where it cannot practicably be used, but at least we'll get it eventually.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:54, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

I understand that enabling the mw:citoid service in the wikitext editor here at the English Wikipedia would require not only some technical changes to the wikitext editor (which are planned) but also removing the existing ref system, which might not be popular. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:38, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

It would be helpful to understand what you mean by "removing the existing ref system". It could range from "altering the existing referencing aids in the wikitext editor" to "doing away with WP:CITEVAR and only allowing some entirely new method of citing sources." The former might very well be unpopular; it's hard to imagine how the latter could be done without massive violations of WP:V which might result in community bans against all involved. Jc3s5h (talk) 19:47, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

I apologize for the confusion. It would presumably require removing the Wikipedia:RefToolbar (the "‣ Cite" tab in the wikitext editor, assuming you're using the default). Most Wikipedias don't have that installed, but it is used here. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:53, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

On to a new point about dead links and forensic, post hoc sourcing

A new point to make, here, about the content of the "Citing sources" article. Appearing in the text is content that argues, that if a dead link exists, a series of steps should be taken to replace that source. I would, as an experienced editor and professional content expert, make the following observations:

• Replacing a citation with a new one always means reviewing the text against new source, for rigorous consistency of text and source;
• It is never acceptable to affix a source that appears through its title or superficial skimming to support the text, generally;
• Rather, the new source must clearly, unequivocally support both the specific and the general meaning of the sentence(s) to which it affixed;
• Otherwise, that text must be edited to the new source, so this foregoing standard is met;
• That such citation assignments and edits to source are measures of editorial integrity, see for instance Charles Lipson's Doing Honest Work in College;
• Hence, the opportunity cost of doing remedial, forensic sourcing work, replacing an old source with a new one, if it aims to be deeper than cosmetic, is high;
• Said another way, cosmetic improvements are generally fast and easy; steps truly, fully resolving sourcing or other issues are generally time-consuming, if not tedious;
• Regardless, cosmetic improvement for its own sake, though much the WP norm—look to tag vs de-tag battles for evidence—is never the intellectually rigourous way;
• Hence, while sourcing issues must truly be resolved (text content sourced, text and sources copacetic, etc.), one must say that in terms of the economies that operate, practically, the article and text in question must be of sufficient quality to deserve the expenditure of cost that an editor invests to make the final product rigourously correct.

Sometimes, on principle, one might spend significant time on an article or subject where one is not an expert and so time is hard to justify, to interrupt an editing trend or to call attention to an edit that violates clear WP policies. (I spend far too much time, given my priorities and expertise, on all too common copy-paste kinds of hidden plagiarism, because it is widespread and in my view cancerous, and because plagiarism of that or any other sort is serious business, e.g., see here.)

However, sub-par or marginally notable article text that violates policies and guidelines, including text with deadlinks, is often best dealt with quickly, especially in BLP or other clearly defined cases—by removing the offending text, or, at least, by placing a tag and querying the original editor to make the correction. Whether it is plagiarism or poor sourcing, one accomplishes little, long-term, for this or any other written work, by post hoc fixing the mistakes of others, without addressing the root cause (by inviting those making such mistakes to make fewer of them).

To mix proverbial sayings badly, better to teach a person to fish, then to commit to forever deal with the laundry of such editor's overflowing laundry hampers. I say / editorialize more about forensic sourcing at my User page, should anyone care to read (or know the basis in experience for these opinions). Cheers, Le Prof Leprof 7272 (talk) 15:36, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

For the same reasons expressed above, I often prefer to leave a deadlink so marked, and simply add citation to additional authority. Deadlinks can be annoying, but the original, in many cases, still exists in libraries, or commercial databases. --Bejnar (talk) 02:13, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Instruction creep in WP:CITEVAR

WP:CITEVAR begins "Editors should not attempt to change an article's established citation style..." The phrase "established citation style" isn't clearly defined, but I believe that it has been taken primarily to mean the visible style of the citations: CS1/CS2/Vancouver, etc.; how they are arranged in the sections of the article, whether in a single references list or separate Notes and Sources/Bibliography sections, etc.

This edit on 4 November 2015 made a significant addition to a long-standing and important source of guidance (it was subsequently substantially edited, but the same point remained).

I do not believe that a sufficiently wide discussion was held to produce a consensus for a change of this kind, which represents substantial instruction creep, telling editors not only what citations should look like to the reader but how they should be written in wikitext. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:08, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

It doesn't tell editors how they should be written in wikitext any more than it tells them what they should look like to the reader - rather, CITEVAR including that edit advises against arbitrarily changing either, since there is no required standard for either (beyond the obvious provisions of avoiding bare URLs, etc). The issue was discussed, support was expressed for this point, the change was made, and the change stood for months. While you may disagree with the change, you have no grounds to require a new discussion to retain it - per BRD, it's the status quo. Nikkimaria (talk) 12:54, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

• Arbitrarily changing citation styles is bad practice, it causes editors to waste time getting acquainted with a new format in an article — with the risk that someone else comes along and changes it back in a few weeks time. Anyway, removing something that has been stable for months is not done on a whim. CFCF 💌 📧 13:01, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

• It does not only refer to the visible style of the citations. It has long been interpreted to also include, for example, whether citation templates are used. This is one of the main purposes for CITEVAR, actually, because of strong feeling about citation templates. List defined references are the same kind of issue as templates: the affect how references are entered in wikitext, rather than the visible formatting of citation text. They were already covered by the general clauses CITEVAR before the edit. It is unfortunate that more and more detailed instructions have to be included for what should be a relatively clear idea: enter new citations in an article using the same method that was used to enter the existing ones. Is there a more clear way for the general clauses to make clear that both visible and non-visible aspects of the citation style should be preserved? — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:46, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

@CBM: what is meant by the "non-visible aspects"? If existing citations are mainly laid out using a template with one line for each parameter, then must everyone else follow that format? How about if I say that since I prefer parameters in a cite/citation template formatted with a space before the | but none after, then if I created and expanded an article, there needs to be an explicit discussion leading to consensus before anyone is allowed to put spaces after the |? Peter coxhead (talk) 15:13, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Other people can always improve your edits, and for a single edit there is no "must". But, yes, if all the other citations are laid out in templates with one line per parameter, you should follow that - even without CITEVAR it would represent normal collegiality and politeness! Since the style you mentioned is perfectly acceptable style, I don't see the problem with following it. Unless we have a standardized style for all articles -- which we do not, and will not, for many good reasons - editors who come to an already-developed article will need to follow the cues from those who have already been working on the article. But that is not actually difficult to do. — Carl (CBM · talk) 15:19, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

• Agreed that CITEVAR not only includes how the citations are rendered, but also how citations are formatted in the raw wiki text. Hence modifying an article to use or not to use list-defined references would clearly fall within the scope of CITEVAR. I also note that list-defined references are already mentioned elsewhere in this guideline (see avoiding clutter). Boghog (talk) 13:59, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

That interpretation isn't actually possible without transgressing multiple policies, sorry.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:50, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Sorry, the only violation of policy here is your deeply flawed interpretation of it. There are several widely accepted styles (e.g., templated vs. without templates, in-line vs. WP:LDR, horizontal vs. vertical alignment, etc.) and changing from one of these styles to another without first obtaining consensus may create conflict. In these situations WP:COMMONSENSE would dictate that an editor that wishes to change a previously established format should first gain consensus for that change. There is no community wide consensus for how citations should be formatted and hence there is nothing that a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS would override. Boghog (talk) 10:50, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

• Peter... you say the edit is "telling editors not only what citations should look like to the reader but how they should be written in wikitext". I don't read it that way at all. My understanding is that the edit is explicitly doing the opposite... intentionally NOT telling editors to how citations should be written in wikitext... and instead saying: There are lots of ways to do this, and we don't have a preference... but once a way of doing it has been establish, either conform or discuss and seek consensus to change it. That seems to be in line with the other provisions in CITEVAR. If I am missing something, perhaps an example would help to better explain your concern. Blueboar (talk) 14:04, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

@Blueboar: it clearly tells editors that they must conform to an existing way of setting out citations in wikitext. We've already seen elsewhere editors claiming that if they have set out citations using a separate line for each parameter, everyone else editing the article should conform. This is both instruction creep and blatant WP:OWN – one or more editor(s) "own" the internal format of citations if they created or expanded the article. Peter coxhead (talk) 15:08, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Not quite... it tells editors to either conform to an existing way of setting out citation in wikitext... or to raise the issue on the talk page, and gain a consensus to do things a different way. That is fully in line with the rest of CITEVAR. When there is a difference of opinion about how to do citations, seek consensus (and accept that sometimes consensus will not go your way). Blueboar (talk) 16:00, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Ok, let's consider a concrete example. I created a reasonable length article at Lilioid monocots. Michael Goodyear has expanded it further and got it GA status. However, he completely changed the way the references are set out internally. So your view is that when he first did this, I could have changed them back unless he got consensus on the talk page? (In reality, I wouldn't dream of doing this, even though I don't particularly like the way he does it.) Far from promoting harmony among editors, this is a recipe for friction: "I own the way references are set out internally in this article and you can't change it unless you can find some other editors to back you, even though you are greatly improving the content of the article". Is that really what people want? I guess it is. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:45, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

First I would like to point out that Peter and I get on extremely well and see eye to eye on most things. We have frequently discussed citation style, agree none is ideal, and have both evolved our individual preferences, which just happen to be different. I am just not persuaded yet that any is clearly superior. In this particular case Lilioid monocots was relevant to the general area I was working on and had many similar pages, including GA. I noticed the page and expanded it to fit in with some of the pages that linked to it and vice versa. One of those changes was to get the citations into a form that was consistent with the related pages to facilitate editing across the field. Very soon after I started Peter asked me to ensure that the citation style was consistent, at which time I looked through the history and realised the article was largely his work, and was happy to comply, even though it took more work since I was working in a style I was unfamiliar with. In many ways we would be better off with a rigid policy such as academic publishing houses and scientific journals impose, and which many of us have had to work with. The point was raised here recently about "asking permission", which I don't think is very practical and rather WP:OWN. In most cases it is not immediately obvious that any page is largely the work of one person, and often one finds outmoded citations styles with deprecated parameters etc. However one should also be respectful. My main guidelines are to optimise usability for readers and editors, readability, ease of maintenance and ease of portability. For instance many related pages have citatios in common. --Michael Goodyear (talk) 17:34, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Quite to the contrary, the purpose of CITEVAR is to minimize friction by encouraging editors to seek consensus before making major changes to citation styles. CITEVAR is merely etiquette and common sense. Boghog (talk) 17:54, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

If you did object, there would be no objective way to determine which style to use, since the MOS allows both. In settings like that, CITEVAR (and ENGVAR, and the lede of WP:MOS) set up a makeshift rule that the existing style is maintained. We could presumably come up with some other arbitrary rule, but the rule would always be arbitrary, and there is a benefit of stability in staying with the established style when editors disagree. But this really is not specific to citations, it applies to all optional styles, per WP:MOS. — Carl (CBM · talk) 18:06, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

RE Peter's monocots example... given that Peter had already set a style, Michael should have asked first. That said, I acknowledge that there is such a thing as "silent consensus"... BRD is a legitimate way to assess consensus (I make a BOLD edit, and see whether anyone objects - if so, I need to acknowledge that objection, go to the talk page and discuss further - if not, I can claim there is consensus for my change and move on). So, going back to the example, the fact that Peter did not state an objection when Michael BOLDLY changed the style could be seen as a form of silent consensus. However, if Peter (or someone else) had stated an objection, (and simply reverting back to the established format counts as an objection), Michael definitely would have had to go to the talk page to discuss the change more fully. CITEVAR does not say "never change"... it says "don't change without consensus". That is an important distinction. Blueboar (talk) 18:39, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

• This was discussed as far back as 2010: Wikipedia talk:Citing sources/Archive 29#Consistent style. The result was a guideline change similar to what the guideline means today: the style of markup used for references should not be changed without consensus. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:35, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

@Jc3s5h: I can't see a consensus there for what was added to this page, and it certainly wasn't in response to the goals User:WhatamIdoing set out at the start of the thread. Peter coxhead (talk) 15:08, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

Well, certainly the discussion didn't go WhatamIdoing's way, but at the end of the discussion DESiegel summed up the result and made this pair of edits. I looked through the page history for about a month after that and didn't see any sign of DESiegel's edit being reverted. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:32, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

I think people need to know why CITEVAR was introduced in the first place. It came into existence be an editor was using a bot to change citations (I forget what style (s)he was changing but it was to or from one of the long disused tagging methods no longer used). I think it is reasonable for a prohibition on bots enforcing homogenised citation styles on pages, by mass changing them is reasonable.

Style as defined in WP:CITESTYLE has nothing to do with formatting, and I agree totally with what what WhatamIdoing, it is appearance that matters not the underlying format. The addition of anything other than style being: "footnote long", or "in-line parenthetical with long in a references section" or "footnote short, long in a reference section", is in my view less than helpful. As to the format used in long references/citations, I think they should be the same as those in templates whether template are in use or not, as that means templates can be added or removed without changing the look of the long references/citations.

The number of people involved in these discussions is always very small (for example the number in the 2010 discussion was ~10) and to impose prohibitions as consensus based, when the number of editors is so small, is I think a mistake. -- PBS (talk) 19:42, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

@PBS: yes, I think that we need a much more widely advertised RfC on this issue. If the consensus here so far is indeed a genuine one among a wider spread of editors, then of course I will go along with it, but at present I don't believe that it is. Peter coxhead (talk) 10:23, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

"I think people need to know why CITEVAR was introduced in the first place." Yep. Many of us thought this solution to the bot problem was a bad idea and would be WP:GAMEd; history has proven this correct, and we now have WP:COSMETICBOT which actually makes WP:CITEVAR obsolete.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:50, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

You seem to be arguing that editors should be able to convert articles from using templates to not, and also between Chicago and APA, as long as the article always has long references in footnotes. That would be a recipe for a nearly unlimited amount of argument on thousands of article talk pages. The goal of CITEVAR is to prevent that, and it has generally worked quite well. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:48, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

No I am not that is why I used "long references/citations" and wrote of "footnote long". What I mean is that if the templates use "author, (year), title" then none templated citations ought to use similar formats rather than an arbitrary "title, year, author" or what ever, so that visually a reader can not tell if the format was done with a template or hand crafted. This has nothing to do with whether this citation inside ref tags, in an list embedded in {{reflist}}, or placed in a references section. I have underlined arbitrary per SMcCandlish comment on including Vancouver in "mode" as a model that can be developed further for other general citation styles. -- PBS (talk) 09:53, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Re: "convert articles from using templates to not" – Doing that would be invalid for other reasons, covered in detail below (see #Extended discussion).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:50, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

No, actually. if it was OK to add templates to articles that don't use them, then it would also OK to get rid of them. CITEVAR exists to prevent both actions. I know from following this page that there are many editors who would be happy to get rid of templates as a first step when they begin to edit an existing article, if CITEVAR did not prevent it. Remember that there is no official guideline either supporting or discouraging the use of templates - there has never been a consensus that they are an improvement over non-template referencing. So there is no guideline to appeal to in support of keeping templates, apart from CITEVAR. — Carl (CBM · talk) 18:20, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

• It is my view that CITEVAR did and does cover both the visible aspects of citation style, and the format of the wiki markup used to achieve those appearances. Use or non-use of templates, use or non use of LDRs, and similar choices are aspects of citation style, and should not be changed from a consistent style to a different one without local consensus, even if the rendered article is exactly the same. This is in large part to avoid edit wars and other friction over such formatting, and to promote consistency within an article. I stand by the edits from 2010 linked above, and by their general principle. As the markup is often at least as important to editors as the displayed results, all the reasons that support CITEVAR's rule for a change in displayed citation formats apply just as much to achnge in the format of the markup used. People sometimes write as if CITEVAR prevented any change in formats and thereby gave something like OWNership rights to the first or early contributors. It does not and should not. It merely requires a discussion that achieves a local consensus to make the change, or even a silent consensus as part of BRD, although i strongly prefer an explicit consensus after discussion. Obtaining such a consensus need not be onerous or impossible, although of course circumstances will vary. DES ^(talk) 20:42, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

  Your view conflicts with multiple policies, though, as I explain in detail below.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:50, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

• "Established citation style" has been widely interpreted as including at least some "styles" that are invisible to the reader. IMO it shouldn't, but I know WP:How to lose. However, CITEVAR doesn't actually require the person adding a new citation to conform to the pre-existing style. It really exists to stop people from "attempt[ing] to change" all the existing citations in an article. If you're adding a new source, and you don't do it "correctly" according to some other editors, then these important sentences from the lead still apply: "While you should try to write citations correctly, what matters most is that you provide enough information to identify the source. Others [i.e., any editor who objects to the format you used when adding a new source] will improve the formatting if needed." WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:26, 6 March 2016 (UTC)
• Agreed with Peter_coxhead, PBS, et al.. WP:CITEVAR does not apply to technical matters to begin with; code is not style; style is the human-understood output of code (and of various other decisions). "Established citation style" means one of two things, already consistently applied in an article: 1) WP:CS1 or WP:CS2 (citation styles standardized on Wikipedia itself for our own use), or 2) an externally standardized citation style that Wikipedia recognizes as valid (i.e. reliably sourced as one), such as MLA, APA, Harvard, MHRA, Chicago/Turabian, Vancouver, etc. (some of which can be auto-generated by switches in the CS1 citation templates). It does not mean either of a) citation coding and formatting (which tags are used, where, with what syntax), nor b) made-up, idiosyncratic citation "styles" that are not established in any reliable sources.

  It absolutely cannot be the intent of WP:CITEVAR to violate WP:EDITING and WP:OWN policies by creating some system by which an individual or a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS / WP:FALSECONSENSUS at some article can invent their own citation formatting "rules" and force other editors to comply with them. In this regard, please see also WP:COMMONSENSE, WP:LAWYER, WP:GAMING, WP:VESTED, and the WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY policy (add WP:NFT and WP:NOT#SOABOX when it comes to made-up "styles"). It is not correct that CITEVAR "has long been interpreted to also include, for example, whether citation templates are used". Rather, a handful of editors have latched onto and advanced this misinterpretation, and the rest of Wikipedia happily ignores them and continues to change untemplated cites to templated ones, because the latter provide many features that the community wants. Anyone who disagrees is welcome to take the citation templates to WP:TFD and see how far that gets.

(see Extended discussion)

 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:50, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

• That entirely misses the point. This isn't about using non-standard citation styles, but about arbitrarily jumping between different accepted styles (visible ot the reader or not) because it creates problems, wastes time and is disruptive. CFCF 💌 📧 11:31, 6 March 2016 (UTC)
  • Beg to differ. I addressed two points, including but not limited to the one you care about; I just didn't address it in a way you like. The key points to me: A style being "accepted" to be used at all does not mean it is preferable in all circumstances, and not every change from one to another is "arbitrary"; few of them are, in fact, in my experience, but maybe I'm just lucky. Given that we're all pretty smart here, I do not for one second believe that the only possible, or even the most practical, solution to dealing with the problem of occasional actually arbitrary (or perhaps even rare bad-faith) changes from one style, or one coding practice for that matter, to another, is for us to erect some WP:OWNership system that panders to the absolute worst childish and territorial behavior on Wikipedia. If the best we have done so far is to just glorify "don't touch my article!" bullshit in ways that violate multiple policies, we are not trying very hard.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  16:43, 7 March 2016 (UTC)
    • SMcCandlish, I feel like you are having problems differentiating between what you believe this phrase ought to mean, in a perfect world, and what it actually does mean. I'm telling you "what it actually does mean". It happens that "what it ought to mean, in a perfect world" and "what it actually does mean" are not identical.
      So let's back up a little bit and start with some facts: I wrote this thing in the first place. If anyone on the entire planet has the right to say what was intended, it's me (e.g., not you). And I'm telling you that "established citation style" includes, and was always meant to include, whatever style has been used consistently in an article, even if that style is made-up, ghastly, arbitrary, idiosyncratic, etc. Whether it should encompass the use or non-use of citation templates was controversial; for example, some people wanted to make it acceptable to convert to citation templates but not to remove them. The first explicit mention that this applies to the use or non-use of citation templates was added the next day. Subsequent discussions have demonstrated consistent support for applying this more broadly, e.g., to LDR vs non-LDR internal formatting.
      And once again, just to be clear: you are not being forced to use the established style in any article. You are being prohibited from deliberately changing the formatting of all of the pre-existing citations without checking for consensus first. If you want to add a source, then do so. Anyone who objects that you didn't match the existing style is encouraged to clean up after you. Just don't go deliberately changing the formatting on dozens or hundreds of citations, e.g., like this mess, without talking it over first. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:10, 7 March 2016 (UTC)
      • @WhatamIdoing: I applaud your honesty in spelling out what the existing guideline means: "established citation style" includes, and was always meant to include, whatever style has been used consistently in an article, even if that style is made-up, ghastly, arbitrary, idiosyncratic, etc. I find it very difficult to believe that if it were put to them, a majority of editors would accept a guideline that deliberately protects made-up, ghastly, arbitrary, idiosyncratic, etc. [styles]. How is this consistent with building a quality encyclopedia? Peter coxhead (talk) 13:51, 8 March 2016 (UTC)
        • "Building a quality encyclopedia" has very little to do with the formatting of a citation. As with all questions, it depends upon how you ask it; if you say, "Let's get rid of ghastly, made-up styles", then most people will favor it; if you say, "Let's get rid of the style that you have been using, which everyone else says is ghastly and made-up," then you will get no support.
          • If "'Building a quality encyclopedia' has very little to do with the formatting of a citation", then there is no rationale for a guideline that approaches this level of proprietary, anti-policy territorialism to begin with. I'm skeptical anyone's concerns in this debate were tied to what your personal intent was in injecting this pseudo-rule, but your "I wrote this thing in the first place" stance-takingg does nothing at all to clear the air about how this logically must be interpreted within our policy framework, and it serves simply to highlight the nature of the underlying problem. It's clear that few other editors take it the way you take it, other than an editor here and there trying inappropriately to prevent other editors from changing "my" article without "permission". Editors like myself and Peter who regularly make citation coding changes (not changes from one actual citation style, like Harvard and Vancouver, to another) rarely meet any form of resistance when doing so, and when we do it's almost always this kind of un-wiki "hands off!" sentiment, not a rational defense of the existing coding.

            Subsequent discussions have emphatically not "demonstrated consistent support for applying this more broadly"; it has led to repeated conflict for a long time, including the present discussion and the broader ones at WT:MOS. It always divides along lines of "allow people to act in good faith to do what's best for the article" vs. "do what people who feel proprietary about the article demand, just to get their way". I doubt any of us have any difficulty understanding which of these approaches has policy support and which does not, nor that "getting my way" tends to draw out a bloc vote from people who feel this way, resulting in WP:FALSECONSENSUS in some localized discussions. We have a policy about that, too, at WP:CONLEVEL: No amount of insular fiefdom behavior trumps our basic editing policies. Some of the editwarring in this regard has been so petty and childish it looks like elementary school squabbling over playground equipment, and the principal uses to which this particular interpretation of CITEVAR seems to be put are: a) the perpetuating of extraneous interpersonal conflicts (editor X is angry at editor Y over something, so reverts actually useful citation coding changes by Y in other articles); and b) "slow-editwarring" against the acceptance or existence of citation coding that some editor has a pet peeve about.

            One has only to look at the responses posted to this thread so far and see what it's drawing out: Personal attacks, by editors who refuse to use citation templates, that those who use them are "idiots" who should be "revert[ed] on sight" and "blocked". This is precisely the kind of WP:BATTLEGROUND behavior guidelines exist to prevent, but this bogus interpretation of CITEVAR is a breeding ground for it instead. I smell a WP:RFARB in the making here, if this is not resolved.

            I note that zero of the points I made about policy have been refuted, and the only defense offered for your interpretation of this fake rule is that you prefer it that way and intended it that way. That's not sufficient. Just as a basic WP:COMMONSENSE matter, it is not possible for the over-broad interpretation of CITEVAR as covering all aspects of citation coding to be legitimate.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  02:26, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

• SMcCandlish, you say that "it is not possible for the over-broad interpretation of CITEVAR as covering all aspects of citation coding to be legitimate." But it is possible, and indeed it is actually true. It is true because the community consensus, at each of several discussions of this very point, has held this to be the proper interpretation, albeit not without strong dissent. Your claim that this violates WP:OWN simply falls to the ground, because anyone can add new citations in any format at any time, and anyone can change citation formats (coding style or appearance) simply by obtaining consensus to do so in that article. Your claim that a "citation style" must mean only one of the "house styles" CS1 or CS2, or some externally defined style that is "recognized" by Wikipedia has no basis in policy or practice. Indeed CS1 is basically a made up style (loosely based on a mix of externally defined styles, and not closely matching any of them) that stated with no particular design and has gradually congealed into a self-consistent set of rules. There is no page I am aware of where Wikipedia "recognizes" particular styles, and there is no need to source the style in use at a particular page. Sourcing is about article content, not formatting. DES ^(talk) 04:27, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

• Um, yeah, except I've already laid out a detailed policy analysis of why your interpretation is not viable. The OWN analysis is only a small part of it, but your attempt to show that even this part "falls to the ground" fails. WP:OWN has nothing to do with whether anyone can literally add something or not; aside from page protection, there is no way to prevent that. It's about whether another editor can effectively prevent change by reverting anything they don't like, either directly or by changing it to "WP:THERIGHTVERSION", and that's precisely what your incorrect interpretation of CITEVAR would not just permit, but encourage constantly. OWN also has nothing to do with whether a protracted discussion on the talk page about something may eventually overcome the insistent preference of a particular editor or faction of editors; we already know this will work, per WP:CONSENSUS policy.

  The problem here is that there is no provision in policy anywhere for "locking in" any aspect of anything at any article such that it requires anyone to seek permission first before changing it. Even WP:ENGVAR, on which CITEVAR is poorly based, doesn't work this way, and only discourages change when a style (which is not code detail, it's rendered style) is already established, is appropriate, and there is no valid reason for such a change. There is very often, if not almost always, a valid reason for a change of citation coding markup, most often to move full citation details out of the paraphrase of content and into the references section, either by switching to WP:LDR (which is not a style change in an article just using <ref name="...">...</ref> and <ref name="..." /> markup) or to WP:SFN (which arguably is a style change, because it splits the the citations up into two sections and increases both editor and reader work). Switching from SFN to LDR would also arguably be a style change and vice versa, like imposing on SFN on an article with a more compact presentation of citations. Making such a change will often be controversial for a reasons of legitimate differences of viewpoint regarding citation efficiency and the needs of editors vs. readers. A change to LDR (and various other code changes, e.g. to using templated citations instead of manually cobbled-together ones, to using vertical template formatting in LDRs and horizontal in in-text citations, to clearing out bot-generated noise, to bypassing template parameter aliases for the real parameter names, to human-parseable name= labels, etc., etc.) is not controversial, except when someone is being a WP:JERK and attempting to misuse CITEVAR for obstinate, unconstructive WP:STONEWALL purposes.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  05:00, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

• Strongly agree with the change mentioned at the top. Editors should not forced to switch to some ghastly style they don't know just because some idiot with a bot likes it. Revert on sight - I wish such people were blocked. Johnbod (talk) 18:14, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

  But it's ok if editors are forced to continue with "some ghastly style they don't know" just because it's there already? Peter coxhead (talk) 13:37, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

  You're misrepresenting the actual guideline. You are not "forced to continue with" anything. You are forced to leave the existing style alone. CITEVAR does not say, and has never said, "Editors must use whatever ghastly style has been established in the article". It only says that you must not unilaterally remove said ghastly style (assuming one is established) without talking about it first. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:11, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

  Exactly. There are many situations, especially where styles are mixed, where a talk page consensus can be established for one style or a new style. Or where nobody turns up to discuss it, so after a while consensus can be assumed. But cite-bandits rarely have the patience for that. Johnbod (talk) 04:35, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

  And there is no basis in policy for one editor's over-broad interpretation of vague and controversial guideline wording to force any editors to ever leave anything alone here. The entire idea is contrary to what a wiki is and how Wikipedia works.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  02:26, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Extended discussion

Some further points, as a followup to what I posted above: Made-up citation styles should be normalized on sight to a recognized one (whichever someone wants to normalize it to, and if others prefer a different one, a regular consensus discussion will determine which to use).

Citation markup (code) is most often a matter of practical considerations, and when it comes to anything subjective (rather than a matter of code correctness or other technical issues which must be fixed), a normal consensus discussion will determine which approach to use again, when necessary. And not all such matters are as subjective as someone with overly proprietary feelings about their contributions might think. Example: Vertical layout of citation templates is more practical when the full citations are grouped at the bottom of the page in the code (either in LDR format or footnoted short-inline-references format), since it makes editing their details easier, with no impact on content of the article. Meanwhile, the horizontal layout is more practical when full cites are inline in the article text, since doing them vertically creates a serious a usability problem for content editors, interfering with the ability to even get a single paragraph in the editing viewpoint at once.

No guideline on WP can force editors, much less new editors, to learn any complicated citation style; we're happy if they cite at all, even with a copy-pasted URL and nothing more. Citation formatting is principally a WP:GNOME and experienced editor matter, like all of our style and formatting details. But a guideline also does not permit anyone to prevent other editors from properly formatting citations in the templates we have for them. These templates produce useful metadata, do basic data integrity checking (missing title? invalid date?), allow us to pre-archive Web sources that might disappear at any time, and provide many other features that the community wants. No one gets to "forbid" all this functionality in "their" article (see WP:5P – everything you submit here may be "mercilessly edited" by others). The belief that CITEVAR allows someone to forbid conversion of raw-data citations to templated ones is false, and the entire editing community performs this conversion routinely, every single day. In over a decade of editing here, I've had people revert me on that two times, and both of the articles now use citation templates of course.

About the only CITEVAR conflict that can legitimately arise in this area is if an article a) has an established citation style (that is a real one), b) CS1 templates do not yet handle it, and c) consensus at the article's talk page is not reached to change to a style that CS1 templates can handle. This is rare, and the solution is to go to Help talk:CS1 and have the additional citation style handled by CS1. The last time I recall this arising was for Vancouver style, and CS1 now accounts for it. Any time there's a problem on WP, the solution is to work collaboratively to solve it, not dig your heels in and WP:BATTLEGROUND until you WP:WIN. These articles and their citations do not belong to you.

Even the existence of an established citation style at an article cannot prevent consensus from forming to change any aspect of citations there, and people also mis-cite CITEVAR as if the old citation style at an article cannot be changed simply because someone who claims to be the first major contributor objects. The FMC (or now we're moving to "first non-stub edit that established the style" at many of these *VAR and *RETAIN guidelines because the FMC idea has proven to be a GAMING festival for OWN players) has no more say than anyone else; we simply default to that status quo when and only when consensus cannot be reached as to what the style should be, and this is often a temporary state of affairs, e.g. pending an RfC.

 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:50, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

This is completely off the point — noone is saying that we should not use citation templates, or that we may not improve citation styles. What is being said is that citation style should not be subject to arbitrary changes — and the wording should be avoided makes this absolutely clear. CFCF 💌 📧 11:38, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

It's not at all off the point; the addition to which I object extends the meaning of "citation style" to include the way the visible effect is produced, so it can mean banning citation templates in some articles. Peter coxhead (talk) 12:30, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Indeed, and at least two respondents above quite explicitly said their interpretation of CITEVAR is that they get to prevent people from converting to templated citations, so "no one is saying that we should not use citation templates" is clearly not correct. Neither is "no one is saying ... that we may not improve citation styles", since the same parties and others have made it very clear that they are certain they're entitled to control all aspects of citation coding and prevent any thing that they don't like or that simply is different from how it was before. CFCF, it appears to me that you are on the wrong side of the fence here. You're passionately arguing for an interpretation that might be reasonable, but it is not the argument others are making, and the reason is because the wording is poor, LAWYERable, and GAMEable. With correction, it will no longer be mistaken to support such off-the-wall, "you can't change anything about my citations" approaches, but your own points would remain valid. No one wants to see arbitrary (in the negative sense of that word) changes to citation style or to anything else here. The objected-to wording is not restricting arbitrary changes; it's being mis-employed to restrict any changes.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  16:51, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

The guideline does prevent editors from doing many things (well, they can do them, but if they do them to excess, the guideline will be used to point out why they need to stop.) Keep in mind that, without CITEVAR, many editors would go around removing citation templates, or converting articles to Harvard-style cites (getting rid of footnotes along the way), etc. CITEVAR does not only prevent people from making changes you like - it also prevents people from making changes you don't like. Keep that in mind before you try to get rid of it. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:04, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

@CBM: what I object to is instruction creep, as I said at the start of this thread, from visible appearance to coding. Saying that the visible style of citations should not be changed without consensus is fine; telling editors how to achieve this appearance in wikitext is not. A point I should have made earlier is that preventing changes to coding stifles innovation – we badly need more tools to assist editors, especially new editors, in adding references. If such tools were forced to analyse and reproduce every last detail of the existing coding of citations, there would be a huge block on progress. Peter coxhead (talk) 13:41, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

As I was saying, remember that your argument would equally well allow editors to go around removing citation templates. Also keep in mind that many others have argued that templates make articles more difficult to edit, rather than easier (this is one of the most common arguments put forward against the use of citation templates). So your belief that templates are beneficial is not universally accepted. I don't really care about templates, myself. But this is not "creep", it has been what the guideline intended for years, because templates were always one of the touchstones for CITEVAR. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:48, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

It may or may not be what the guideline intended for years, but it isn't what the guideline said for years. Whether or not there's a consensus to extend the guidelines, it is instruction creep. Peter coxhead (talk) 13:57, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

The guideline has specifically prohibited adding citation templates to a non-template-using article since February 2011. That's "what the guideline said for years", not just what was intended or implied. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:26, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

The fact that a small number of people have been misinterpreting this for a long time is all the more reason to fix it. I also have to note that you and the other handful of fans of an overbroad application of CITEVAR are actually directly contradicting each other. They're all saying the guideline does not at all prevent adding citation templates to an article that doesn't have them, since anyone can write however they like and this is just a guideline. Here you are saying the exact opposite, and phrasing it in "prohibit" terms, as if this were some kind of policy. The fact that those misinterpreting the guideline as if it were some exception to WP:OWN, WP:EDITING, WP:BATTLEGROUND and various other policies cannot even get their story straight on the most basic idea central to the dispute is proof enough that a) there is no consensus about or for the extant wording; and b) it needs to be replaced with something that means the same thing to everyone reading it, a it is a conclusion that doesn't contradict any real policies.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  05:24, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

A long time ago I tried to get the guideline modified to say something akin to SMcandLish's "Made-up citation styles should be normalized on sight to a recognized one (whichever someone wants to normalize it to, and if others prefer a different one, a regular consensus discussion will determine which to use)." My proposal failed. This means SMcandLish's statement is contrary to the guideline.

All this blather about being allowed to introduce citation templates into articles that consistently use some style without templates is nonsense. The templates only support a few styles; they will not be able to mimic other styles such as APA or Chicago. Oh, by the way, I regard the metadata in templates as affirmative statements about the source. Anyone who knowingly and persistently inserts false information into templates (e.g. author = ''The Color Purple'') so that the visual appearance of the rendered citation looks like some unsupported style is telling lies and needs to be shown the door. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:29, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

@Jc3s5h: there's no reason why citation templates should not support more styles. Now that the core is coded in Lua, which makes string processing much easier and more efficient than the template language does, it's entirely possible to extend them. The right way forward, I believe, is to separate the metadata that makes up a citation from its presentation; ultimately the metadata could be held in WikiData, for example, with citation templates presenting it differently in response to |mode=, as {{citation}} currently does for CS1 and CS2. Legislating how citations are coded in wikitext blocks further automation and hence its advantages for the majority of editors. (Which is why I'm sure that any such attempt to legislate will ultimately fail.) Peter coxhead (talk) 13:57, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Yep. And why on earth would anyone put the title in the |author= parameter? Jc3s5h's objection in that regard doesn't seem relevant to anything.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  05:24, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

The present guideline requires articles with a consistent style and no citation templates to remain without templates (unless there is a consensus for a change). It also specifically allows new articles to use styles that are not supported by templates, and existing articles that use such non-template-supported styles to keep using them. Changing this would require a well-advertised RFC, which has been tried on several occasions and always failed.

Further, speculation about future developments, such as storage of citations on WikiData or citation templates that can produce a wide range of styles by setting a parameter, cannot influence the present interpretation of the guideline. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:46, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Oh, we clearly do need an RfC here, since those who favor a "you cannot ever change anything about citations in my articles without my permission" approach are contradicting each other, and the underlying idea violates something like 5 policies at the same time; whether these observations agree with how the guideline is worded or how certain people want to interpret it doesn't do anything to change the data or the conclusions drawn from it. A guideline that flouts policy is not an actual guideline. This wording has to be replaced with something that is compatible with established policy and clearly understood as conveying a single meaning.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  05:24, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Anyone who's followed these discussions over the last five years knows that I care about "what the reader sees" and not "the exact wikitext I used to produce that effect". They'll also know that I support people being able to use any citation style that works for them, even if it's not a style recognized by English-speaking academics (or CS1/CS2, which exist only on wiki).
But we've had these discussions over and over and over and over again, and the fact is that the community cares deeply about avoiding messy diffs and stopping edit wars and having wikitext pages that are easy to read. Therefore, CITEVAR prohibits things that might be objective improvements (from some POVs) but which will increase the number of messy diffs (e.g., wholesale, undiscussed changes to internal formatting of citations), encourage edit wars (e.g., by discouraging changes between citation templates and manual formatting), and allows different systems of wikitext formatting for each citation on a page. This consensus has been established through many discussions, all of which have come to the same conclusion. Perhaps we should pot this to WP:PEREN, but seriously: you are wasting your time in trying to make this be "logical" from your POV. The community overall does not want this changed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:20, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

The same half-dozen people stonewalling for years is not the community overall expressing a desire that nothing change.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  05:24, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

CITEVAR should be constructed to emulate WP:ENGVAR, i.e. to a) promote intra-article consistency and b) defuse stupid fights over style. It should not be allowed to promote ownership-like control, and most importantly it should never block improvements from being made to articles (especially for the sake of newbies). In particular, Peter coxhead's Lilioid monocots example is good: ignoring CITEVAR in the name of article improvement was clearly the right choice. That sort of behaviour should be explicitly encouraged. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 21:14, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Reasonable people can disagree with your belief that converting an article to use the unpopular {{sfn}} template is "clearly the right choice" or "should be explicitly encouraged". IMO it would make more sense to explicitly encourage people to have a chat on the talk page about this first. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:00, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

That's not what I said. I'm encouraging tolerance: putting article improvement ahead of citation preferences. Don't make this about particular citation styles, or this debate won't go anywhere. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 22:29, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Consider that "WikiData" has been mentioned in this discussion. Some people seem to think WikiData is the wave of the future and everyone who doesn't welcome it with open arms is obstructionist. Others might observe that it was hastily designed; for example, dates don't really work. Still others might observe that vast amounts of unsourced data has been imported from the various Wikipedias into WikiData, and some non-English Wikipedias have committed the horrible sin of creating infoboxes that link to the very same unsourced WikiData junk. Hence proposals that would force greater automation are viewed with suspicion, and vague comments are suspected of being a less-obvious way of forcing automation. Jc3s5h (talk) 22:44, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

@Jc3s5h: sidepoint, but I agree with you about the general state of WikiData, and the undesirability of linking to it (and indeed other projects, like WikiSpecies, that are usually less patrolled and hence less accurate than our articles). The general point stands though: a citation is defined by a limited set of metadata and a method of presenting that metadata. Many citation storing and generating tools exist and are used every day by academics and others. Using such a system would benefit the 90-whatever percent of Wikipedia editors who find manually adding citations difficult. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:59, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

I fundamentally disagree with "a citation is defined by a limited set of metadata" (emphasis added). The most fundamental aspect is that it must be possible to cite any reliable source, and provide sufficient information to locate the source. Not only that, it must be possible to cite any reliable source without taking 6 months off to update some software so that an unusual source can be described. So citations without templates (or any future equivalent) may always be added to an article if the source being cited cannot be described with existing templates. This means it will never be possible to create some new wiki editor that prevents the entry of hand-written citations, and it will never be possible to write a bot that can transform the existing citations into some new standard. Jc3s5h (talk) 12:01, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

@Jc3s5h: I don't disagree with you that there are some citations that are unusual and will need to be treated specially, and of course we should never prevent the entry of hand-written citations, most of which can be tidied up later by others or by tools. You're attacking a straw man; the vast majority of citations – to books, websites, journals, etc. – can be handled by the existing templates and hence can be automated. Peter coxhead (talk) 13:31, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Returning to Nihiltres's original point: whatever wording is chosen for WP:CITEVAR – and I accept that at present I'm in the minority over removing the November 2015 addition – it should always prioritize article improvement over internal wikitext consistency. Surely that's beyond dispute? Peter coxhead (talk) 09:04, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

The problem is that what is an improvement for you may be a mere annoyance for me. Improvement isn't easily defined, and these edits are by definition on the edge of even possibly constituting improvement. In lieu of the things that are quite obviously improvements for everyone we shouldn't be changing things because we feel like it. I am certain that the editor who made this change felt it was an improvement, but it just isn't. Having policy on your side when restoring such nonsense lets us concentrate on real improvement, and avoids wasting time patrolling the entire diff for any tiny difference in content that may have been snuck into a massive "stylistic only" edit.

The current wording also allows us to act against this type of behavior: see "ref maintenance" — with >50 extremely minor and inconsequential edits used to hide a controversial edit from the recent edits view. (The edits themselves consist almost entirely of this nonsense [2]). I am also strongly in favor of moving this stuff to Wikidata precisely because it is easier to patrol and doesn't allow for this type of WP:GAMING. CFCF 💌 📧 09:23, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

@CFCF: I really don't understand how you can be in favour of moving to Wikidata and in favour of disallowing changes to the internal coding of citations. Quoting obviously pointless, harmful or sneaky changes is irrelevant; no guideline or policy will deter editors who act like this. I'm concerned that the wording added in November 2015 deters editors from genuinely improving citations, including future increased use of automation. Peter coxhead (talk) 13:43, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

@Peter coxhead: — Maybe I should clarify — I don't support moving everything over to WikiData all at once, but it is a platform with immense potential and it will be where we hold this type of information in the future. That said, I agree it isn't there yet, but we shouldn't be obstructionist — and we should weigh benefits against potential problems and not just blindly oppose anything that will bring even a smidgen of extra work. I agree it needs to be improved and needs better integration, but if we don't allow it to integrate it will never be useful — much as VisualEditor, it won't be improved much until people actually start using it. But this is off-topic. CFCF 💌 📧 18:11, 8 March 2016 (UTC) 

Not to mention, "this nonsense", as CFCF put it, is a good example of a fix to an objective problem (incorrectly parameterized data, with formatting tweaks to make it display in a correct-looking way) that has no real effect on how the page is rendered. It's a sort of change that CITEVAR should explicitly allow. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 16:18, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

I'm going to venture you didn't miss the fact that it was only one of maybe 1000 edits in the same fashion, some of which only go back and forth changing and later reverting the same thing?
If it doesn't impact the page rendering how can it be considered a fix?
All I see is a pointless editing practice that allows gaming — it is disruptive and distracts from real issues. It is a waste of time for both the one who does it and even more so for all the editors who have to spend time reviewing a myriad of pointless edits on a controversial article. If there is no benefit (and not just fringe potential benefit) then it should be avoided — which is what current guideline says. CFCF 💌 📧 18:02, 8 March 2016 (UTC) 

It's semantics. If something changed how the templates were rendered, then there could be a difference that would highlight how Bloomberg Businessweek is the work, not the publisher (which would be Bloomberg L.P.). That edit is a concrete fix, at least per se, and it's not reasonable to judge it solely on the basis of its context. {{Nihiltres |talk |edits}} 20:22, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Nihiltres recommended modeling it after ENGVAR. I'm happy to say that's what we did. Specifically, we modeled it after the MOS:RETAIN section – the part of ENGVAR that prioritizes not making "stylistic" changes in the name of alleged "article improvements" – which has the same rule as CITEVAR: Don't unilaterally change the {citation style | spelling}. If you have an idea for improving the articles {citation style | spelling}, then find the talk page. It's really not that hard. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:23, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Also see the lede of WP:MOS: "Where more than one style is acceptable, editors should not change an article from one of those styles to another without a good reason." CITEVAR just repeats that advice for citations (although the general language of WP:MOS already applies). — Carl (CBM · talk) 18:09, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing and CBM: I'm happy to concede that my view is in the minority here, but not to see it misrepresented. CITEVAR is not modelled after ENGVAR. ENGVAR is concerned with visible style; as amended in November 2015, CITEVAR also includes the invisible wikitext that produces that style. I have not objected to CITEVAR's position on visible style, only to the instruction creep to cover how that style is produced. Peter coxhead (talk) 18:25, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Peter, I wrote this thing, remember? I therefore believe that I'm exceptionally well-qualified to tell you which guideline I used as a model for it. And CITEVAR has explicitly included some forms of "invisible wikitext that produces the style" (e.g., use or non-use of citation templates) since the day after I posted the very first version to the guideline. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:09, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: my last word on this point (I promise!): what is written now under "To be avoided" is clearly beyond what is written in this Oct 2015 version. As I wrote above, if that's what people want, so be it. But it is instruction creep, which I would have preferred to remove. Peter coxhead (talk) 19:20, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Agreed. And what one editor intended back when, no matter how great their faith, is essentially irrelevant. "I wrote that part" doesn't make anyone a WP:VESTED editor with regard to it. I've written lots and lots and lots of parts of these guidelines and policies, but they change to suit where consensus shifts, especially when their original wording and some people's interpretation of it proves to be long-term problematic, which is very clearly the case here. "I want no one to ever touch my precious citation coding details" is not a valid rationale on this site. Not today, not ever.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  22:10, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Claiming that CITEVAR blocks people from "genuinely improving citations" is inaccurate. If there is consensus that something is an improvement, we can put it directly in WP:CITE, at which point CITEVAR won't apply. But many things that are touted as "improvements" would not gain consensus to be recommended by WP:CITE, and are really only "improvements" in the minds of the minority of editors who favor them. List-defined references are a perfect example of this: we would never get consensus to put in WP:CITE that articles should all be converted to use LDR, because there have never been a consensus that LDR is actually an improvement over ordinary referencing (and that has nothing to do with CITEVAR). — Carl (CBM · talk) 18:07, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

The rub is: The exact same thing can be said of piss-poor citation formatting improperly defended by "status quo stonewall" tactics, mis-relying on CITEVAR as enabling OWNership of every tiny detail of citation formatting. This cannot continue.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  05:24, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

An illustration

I'd also like to point out an important problem with changing styles in a more specific way. It might make a good illustration of how CITEVAR works in practice.

I wrote Breast cancer awareness a few years ago. I chose classic WP:Parenthetical citations for a specific, encyclopedic reason (to make it more obvious to the reader that I was leaning heavily on a single excellent author) and also in the hope that any brand-new editors would figure out how to add a source (because you just type it in plain text, exactly like everyone did back in the time of typewriters).

Occasionally, someone added a source with ref tags; I converted those to match the established style. (Per the lead of CITE, making things "match" is the job of anyone who notices, cares, and knows how to fix it, and for this relatively unpopular article, that task always fell to me.) Occasionally, someone would add {{unref}} to the article on the grounds that there were no blue clicky numbers. That was sloppy of them, but it's trivially easy to revert that kind of honest mistake.

Almost two years later, a few editors – editors who have contributed almost nothing to the article's contents, but who did complain at length that NPOV was not the same as "man-in-the-street POV" – decided that they didn't like parenthetical citations. I believe that one of them said that mentioning the author's name in parenthetical citations was "promotional", but in the end, I suspect that their actual complaint was that it did not follow the Official Wikipedia House Style of having blue clicky numbers. They voted to change it to {{sfn}}.

Like most, but certainly not all, editors, I don't particularly like {{sfn}}. It's a bit brittle (only certain citation templates can be used and parameter values must match exactly), it's unfamiliar to most editors, it confuses new editors, it doesn't work well in the visual editor, etc. – all the usual reasons. On the other hand, it's not a wildly inappropriate style for this article, since the article largely cites books. I (and several other experienced editors) opposed the change, but its proponents won.

This is how CITEVAR works: as the main author, I established a consistent style for use in the article. That style was Harvard citations inline with CS1 templates in the bibliography. Other people didn't like it, so they had a discussion and voted to change it. I'm not very happy about the outcome (and perhaps, if your main goal is article improvement, then you might want the editor who wrote >95% of a GA-quality article content to be happy about the citation style, in the hope that I would continue improving the article), but I'm bound by the "have a discussion and abide by the outcome" rules of CITEVAR every bit as much as they were bound by the "have a discussion instead of unilaterally changing the style" rules of CITEVAR. This is how CITEVAR works in actual practice: talk first, change later, and everyone's equal in the end. I really cannot imagine a better or more collegial approach for a Wikipedia article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:56, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: your example is not relevant to the current issue, which is not about the visible citation style, but whether the "under the bonnet" coding of that style should be covered by WP:CITEVAR. Peter coxhead (talk) 17:58, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

Since the "under the bonnet" aspects of {{sfn}} formed part of my objections to that conversion, I think it is relevant. One of my alternate proposals was to not use that template to produce the same effect.

This example is also an easy way to disprove these unverifiable claims that CITEVAR promotes ownership (I wrote that article, and I didn't get what I want), that prevents people from improving citations (assuming you believe that this change is an improvement, of course), or that it prevents changes to either visible or invisible styles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:12, 8 March 2016 (UTC)

I have been mostly ignoring this discussion (too much grief), but I support WhatamIdoing on this. In particular, I thoroughly disagree with the view that CITEVAR applies only to "visible" citation style. In the first place, it is wrong, as how citations are done does affect appearance ("visibility"), so strictly speaking it is a distinction without a difference. Second, how citation is done "under the bonnet" does make a difference because the different "styles" (modes?) often conflict, and it simply is not reasonable for each editor on an article to do their own way. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:50, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

@J. Johnson: how citations are done may or may not affect appearance. If an article contains manual citations which more-or-less conform to CS1 but are not entirely consistent (the situation I usually encounter), then there's no difference in appearance between (a) correcting them manually to be consistent CS1 (b) correcting them to CS1 by using cite templates. I think that treating (a) as a "good thing" and (b) as a "bad thing" is silly, but this was already covered at CITEVAR and so not relevant to the Oct 15 addition.

Your second point is also irrelevant to the discussion of the Oct 15 addition: neither the long established nor the new wording encourage mixing different ways of creating references within an article. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:27, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

"Manual" formatting of a citation is the one case where different methods may present similiar results. But that is irrelevant here, as the example presented involves ref tags (etc.), which do make a difference. And I think you misunderstand my point. I wasn't addressing what wording says or doesn't say, but the view that CITEVAR applies only to "visibility", not method. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:03, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

In re: "Editors should not attempt to change an article's established citation style," etc. I concur with all of the foregoing discussion that reflects WP guidelines and policies. Always good to discuss, when individuals have questions. I would note as a relative outsider and professional, that in each field of academic study, there are norms for the way these things are done, i.e., there is no single acceptable way, but a small set of acceptable ways within each discipline (humanities, social sciences, business, natural sciences, etc.). Styles of each discipline are to be respected: when I read a WP article in the classics, I do not try to modify what I find to be their nearly impenetrable shorthands into formats we use in the sciences (though I will occasionally create a Talk entry to say that their use of classics shorthands does not serve the young or general reader). If I understand correctly, this respect for discipline stands alongside the other types of respects aimed at in Wikipedia policy—respect for article stability (that the pattern of practice in place at an article, according to the precedent set by earlier editors) and respect for the hard efforts of ones editorial colleagues—unless there is a clear policy- or guideline-based reason for taking the article in a new direction. This said, I am fully aware that some editors, in particular, those who promote particular citation tools/templates, will come into articles and completely revise the sources to a new style/format, using their tools. About such, one can do little. There is generally never a consensus to deny such well-intentioned but insensitive individuals from having to make their mark through the use of their preferred tools. In that regard, I attempt to mimic the at least the appearance ("visible style") of the now-uniform and acceptably styled result of that individual's effort (for sake of article stability, and to avoid warring). A ready example in the sciences is the use of a particular template, whose proponent uses the ref field to label sources as "primary" or "secondary", and who will routinely replace my use of the format field (where I would say, more verbosely, "print, online review," or "online, primary research article"), even if the article is uniformly to my style at his arrival. About such own tool-style promoting, there is little use to argue, especially if the opponent is dedicated to their cause. Leave the well enough alone, and let ego-only matters go (I say). Cheers, and thanks all for discussion (and hard editorial work). User:Leprof_7272 50.179.252.14 (talk) 14:59, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Cleanup and normalization

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see centralized discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Cleaning up and normalizing MOS:ENGVAR, WP:CITEVAR, WP:DATEVAR, etc..  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:56, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Centralizing discussion on normalizing CITEVAR, etc. with ENGVAR

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see centralized discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Cleaning up and normalizing MOS:ENGVAR, WP:CITEVAR, WP:DATEVAR, etc..  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  11:55, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Please discuss CITEVAR here if you want to propose changes to it. This guideline has nothing to do with the MoS. SarahSV ^(talk) 14:20, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

I fully agree. DES ^(talk) 14:24, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

• The decision to come back here and only discuss this here has, predictably, forked the discussion. Some of what is being discussed below is also being discussed at the thread linked above (including specifically with regard to CITE [3]), and much of what's discussed below applies directly to ENGVAR and DATEVAR. This never-the-twain-shall-meet thing is being objected to by others [4]. Don't shoot the messenger. I'm trying very honestly to mend bridges here. Consensus can form anywhere, and if there were a CITE discussion happening at VPPOL, you wouldn't refuse to participate, surely. Maybe I should have put it there, but I think not, at this stage, because of too much involvement by people who don't think hard about this stuff.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  20:50, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Consistent citation style

Before

Editors should not attempt to change an article's established citation style merely on the grounds of personal preference, to make it match other articles, or without first seeking consensus for the change. As with spelling differences, it is normal practice to defer to the style used by the first major contributor or adopted by the consensus of editors already working on the page, unless a change in consensus has been achieved. If the article you are editing is already using a particular citation style, you should follow it; if you believe it is inappropriate for the needs of the article, seek consensus for a change on the talk page. If you are the first contributor to add citations to an article, you may choose whichever style you think best for the article.

After (BRD-reverted)

As with spelling differences, editors should not change an article's established citation style merely on the grounds of personal preference or to make it match other articles. If you believe an established style is inappropriate for the needs of the article, seek consensus for a change on the talk page. If discussion does not resolve the issue, default to the style used in the first post-stub revision to introduce a consistent citation style. If an article has no consistent citation style, an editor may use whichever style seems best for the article.

Revised (based on similar editing session of MOS:RETAIN)

As with spelling differences, editors should not change an article's established citation style merely on the grounds of personal preference or to make it match other articles. If you believe an established style is inappropriate for the needs of the article, seek consensus for a change on the talk page. If discussion does not resolve the issue, use the style found in the first post-stub revision that introduced a consistent citation style. If an article has no consistent citation style, an editor may use whatever style seems best for the article.

After recent edits WP:CITEVAR lays some stress on a "Consistent citation style" as something that should not be changed without consensus. I would like to make an addition that says that use of bare URLs is not a consistent style, or else that it is an exception, and changing from a "style" consisting solely or primarily of bare URLs to one including proper metadata for citations does not need explicit consensus. Would anyone object to such a change? DES ^(talk) 12:39, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Oh HELL yes. I forgot; I'd meant to include that. It actually should't be limited to just bare URLs; the cites have to provide enough information to positively identify sources in a way meaningful to the average reader, and it has to be an actual style (i.e., programmatic and consistent, whether it's following one of ours or a published external standard or not).

Another thing I'd intended to add but didn't get around to: Need an anti-WP:GAME footnote that: Recent changes to insert citations not compliant with an established style does not make for lack of a consistent style that can then be "normalized" to a new style without consensus." But ENGVAR needs the exact equivalent rule, and so does MOSVAR, illustrating why I'm trying to centralize this to the extent possible.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  13:04, 22 March 2016 (UTC)</p).

Please don't make extensive changes here without consensus, especially not to CITEVAR. It has prevented lots of disputes over the years (as has ENGVAR, STYLEVAR, etc), so it ought not to be changed lightly. SarahSV ^(talk) 14:14, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

I didn't change it lightly, I just forgot to include the "dumping URLs is not a 'style'" point. This stuff's been on my mind a long time. The thread at the top of WT:MOS has been open for over a month, and is not the first such one. Sometimes WP:BOLD action is necessary to stir the pot a little, and people on both pages appear to be working with the revisions rather that feeling the urge to revert them en toto, so I think it was a correct action among various possible correct actions. I'm aware you like bold edits to guidelines less than I do; people are different.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  18:08, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

@SlimVirgin: Guess I spoke to soon; I see you wholesale reverted it (I didn't get a revert notice for some reason). Why not improve it? At MOS, where I made similar edits, others worked with it, and we have something rearkably better than it was yesterday.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  18:25, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

DESiegel, using bare URLs isn't a citation style. I have no objection if you want to make that explicit. SarahSV ^(talk) 14:19, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

• (edit conflict) I will object strongly to any suggestion that citations must follow "an actual style". It is perfectly acceptable for an editor to invent a new cation style for a particular article, provided that it is consistent and supplies the needed metadata. Any edit that attempts to say otherwise will need very clear consensus here, or I will revert it. DES ^(talk) 14:21, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

DESiegel, I wouldn't say a citation needs to supply any metadata, it only needs to supply data. Metadata is data about data. In the citation templates, the parameters serve as metadata. For example, in "title=George Washington" George Washington is the data and title is the metadata. Citations that don't use templates don't supply metadata, and this is allowed. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:03, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

By metadata, Jc3s5h, I mean such information as the author, title, publication date, and page numbers. If you want to call that "bibliographic data" instead, I don't object. I call it metadata because the actual data is the words of the source being cited, in my view, so the bibliographic information is metadata. But that is a detail. I trust my meaning is now clear, Jc3s5h. DES ^(talk) 15:11, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

@Jc3s5h and DESiegel: a good citation does have to supply metadata, in that we need to know what each element of the data is. Whether or not this is done explicitly via parameters is a secondary issue. Thus in a journal citation, we don't accept something like Journal of Odd Results 12, 3, 15 because it's not clear what the numbers are. Journal of Odd Results 12 (3): 15 or Journal of Odd Results 12 (3), p. 15 or Journal of Odd Results, vol. 12, issue 3, p. 15 are all acceptable precisely because they supply both metadata and data. Peter coxhead (talk) 18:53, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Journal of Odd Results 12, 3, 15 has no less metadata than Journal of Odd Results 12 (3): 15. The difference is that the latter uses a formatting convention that allows you (a human reader of a particular background and knowledge level) to infer the metadata. If you were unfamiliar with citation practices you would not be able to tell from either that "15" is a page number. Nikkimaria (talk) 19:54, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

If an article contained an explicit statement about which style manual it was following, I would regard the style manual as metadata. If the article contains enough consistent citations, with enough different kinds of sources cited, to make it obvious which style manual was being followed, I'd reluctantly consider that style manual metadata too. But just because something is written in a way that people who've read lots of academic articles can figure out what it means, that doesn't mean there is metadata. In my mind, metadata is written down somewhere and can be clearly linked to the data; tenuous inferences and lucky guesses don't cut it. Jc3s5h (talk) 21:13, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

The point of the edit was not to imply that the style had to be CS1/2, or something published, like MHRA or AMA; just discernible as an actual style and not random mess. I concede that word like "identifiable" or "recognizable" would be ambiguous this regard; some of that came up over at the MoS discussion, in drafting of a note (or footnote, even) to clarify what a "consistent style" is.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  18:08, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Going back to the "Revised" proposal at the top of the thread, I'm afraid this part isn't quite right:

If you believe an established style is inappropriate for the needs of the article, seek consensus for a change on the talk page. If discussion does not resolve the issue, use the style found in the first post-stub revision to introduce a consistent citation style.

If there is an established style, and a proposal on the talk page for a different style fails, the style remains as it was before the proposal. Going back to the first non-stub style would apply if a style was established way back when, and then the article descended into a mish-mash. Ideally, editors would look through the edit history for the last period when an established style existed, but this is probably too much to ask. The practical reality is that editors would look for an established style that existed within the last few months, and if none is found, go back to the beginning. Jc3s5h (talk) 19:05, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

We almost need a flowchart here. There seem to be different starting points: (1) the article has a clearly established style, either entirely consistently or with minor departures (2) the article has a mixture of styles that would separately be acceptable but are not when muddled up (3) the article has no acceptable style (e.g. nothing but bare urls). We disagree as to what CITEVAR should cover, but I agree that in case (1), no consensus = no change in whatever is covered by CITEVAR. Usually case (3) means that there never was an established style, and an editor is free to create one. The difficult situation is case (2). Peter coxhead (talk) 19:39, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

EC'd with Peter, but agree with him. I would add that it sounds like Jc3s5h is also suggesting that first non-stub/first major contributor (FNS/FMC) should never be invoked if any prior stable style existed (and it wasn't the FNS/FMC). There's a lot to be said for that. The FMC idea was just an idea we agree to try, and simply never bothered to stop trying it.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  20:16, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

I wouldn't say there was any conflict between the guideline as it exists (not the revised proposal a the top of the thread). A style can be changed by consensus. If someone comes along and cleans up the style to something consistent, but different from the FNS/FMC, and that clean-up is allowed to stand for a reasonable period of time, we can infer consensus. Indeed, there might have been consensus on the talk page, and the most recent editor interested in cleaning up citations just didn't find it. Jc3s5h (talk) 21:03, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Not entirely sure how to parse the first sentence, but I take it to mean that current wording and the revised proposal are consistent. That was certainly the goal.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  02:26, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

The revised proposal says in part "If discussion does not resolve the issue, use the style found in the first post-stub revision that introduced a consistent citation style." So anytime there is an issue that does not reach consensus, go back to FNS/FMC. The existing guideline says "it is normal practice to defer to the style used by the first major contributor or adopted by the consensus of editors already working on the page, unless a change in consensus has been achieved."

So the first major contributor wrote the article in the early days of Wikipedia, even before <ref> tags were available, and used footnotes by typing the characters [1], [2]... after each claim being supported, with a corresponding hand-edited reference section. Then in 2010 an editor came along and introduces <ref> tags and cite templates. Last week an editor on the talk page asked if it would be OK to use list-defined references. Arguments ensued and no consensus could be reached. So the existing guideline says stick with the article's existing style. The revised proposal says go back to [1], [2] and hand-edited endnotes. Jc3s5h (talk) 12:41, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

That would not be a desirable result, and isn't a plausible one, but we could write to prevent anyone trying to WP:GAME that, as outlined here.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  19:50, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Adding inconsistent citations

• Something that may already be in the guideline... But is worth adding to this discussion: individual editors may not know how to format some citation styles... And it is OK to add a citation using a different style (that you do know how to format). You just have to have an expectation that someone else will follow up and conform your citation to the consensus style. The same is true for ENGVAR ... If you are editing a UK based article, but don't know UK English style, go ahead and add text using US style... And let someone conform it later. Blueboar (talk) 12:45, 23 March 2016 (UTC) Blueboar (talk) 12:45, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

  Blueboar, I don't see that specifically in the CITEVAR section, and if it is elsewhere in the guideline, I have not spotted it. But it is normal practice, and should be in the guideline. I will add it. DES ^(talk) 13:53, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

  I've removed it for the moment, as I think we need to talk this through a bit more. If a newbie adds a bare URL and leaves it to someone else to format, great - I think that's what we're going for, with emphasis on "if you don't know how, that's okay, someone will fix it". I don't think the wording as originally added conveys that point. Nikkimaria (talk) 18:59, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

• My wording, included in the "generally considered helpful" bulleted list, was:

  "Adding additional appropriate citations in any style; a later editor can modify them to conform to the existing consistent style. A good citation in any style is usually better than no citation."

Of course improved wording is welcome. my point was, if anyone, not just a newbie, adds an appropriate and useful citation not in the style in use in the article (not just a bare URL, but say using a template when the article does not use templates, or the reverse, or whatever) it is better that we accept that addition and reformat it than that we reject it for not being in the current style used in the article. How can that be better expressed? DES ^(talk) 20:31, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

• I think we need to acknowledge that an experienced editor, who is able to follow the existing citation format, should make an effort to do so rather than just expect that people will clean up after them. Nikkimaria (talk) 20:57, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

• I disagree. If an experienced, or moderately experienced, editor who always uses citation templates adds a ref using such a template to an article that does not use them, because that is the editor's habit and it is much quicker/easier for that editor to do it that way, the guideline should not be written in a way that encourages other editors to revert or to imply that such an edit is unwelcome. Any addition of an appropriate and useful citation should be welcome, no matter what style or lack of style it is in. We could ask such an editor to make the format conform in future, or even to convert the format, but not in any way which implies that we would prefer that the edit had not been made at all. DES ^(talk) 21:04, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

• I agree that we should ask such an editor to make the format conform in future, the first time. But the wording proposed would encourage them to do as they please every time, even when they are perfectly capable of conforming, putting a burden on whomever's left to clean up the inconsistencies they create. Perhaps it would be easiest to leave out this point, and leave the "if you don't know quite how to do it don't worry" thrust to pages more targeted at new editors. Nikkimaria (talk) 21:18, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

• I strongly disagree. I think it is vital to make the point in this guideline, that having good citations is more important than the format or style in which we have them. As long as adding them is being done in good faith, and not as an attempt to WP:GAME an overall change of citation style, we need to accept them and keep on accepting them. There should be no point at which we tell an editor "We know that you are adding appropriate and needed citations. But we are so tired of cleaning up the formatting that we want you to stop." DES ^(talk) 21:25, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

Now my view and that of Nikkimaria are each pretty clear, I think. Does anyone else have a view here, please? DES ^(talk) 21:25, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

I agree with DES... There are three important parts to this whole issue... 1) if an article has a set style, don't be a dick ... Don't insist that your preferred way is better... Try to maintain the set style as best you can. 2) If you don't know how to maintain the set style... go ahead and edit, but don't be a dick when others follow up and conform your addition to the set style... Don't insist that your addition keep your style 3) If someone else adds something, and doesn't use the set style... Don't be a dick about it... Don't make a big scene... Thank them for the addition and quietly conform to the set style.

If there isn't a set style... And you think there should be one... Don't be a dick ... Discuss it with other editors and jointly choose one. Don't insist on getting it your way.

it really is that simple. Blueboar (talk) 22:00, 23 March 2016 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish, SlimVirgin, Jc3s5h, and Peter coxhead: Pinging editors in the larger discussion from which this sub-thread grew. Do any of you support my edit (as corrected) (supported by Blueboar above), or do you prefer Nikkimaria's revert, or some third option? I would like to form consensus on this. i think the point is important, but my exact wording is not. My comments above should make my views clear. DES ^(talk) 16:39, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Actually, I think Blueboar's point is a good medium between ours: "if an article has a set style, don't be a dick...try to maintain it as best you can". Nikkimaria (talk) 16:46, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

• Strongly opposed to adding any burden on any editor to comply with any other editor's notions of a citation style. This is a great example of why trying to WP:POVFORK the style guidance in this page as "not MOS" is a terrible and counter-productive idea, and not long-term practical. These are all guidelines, they are optional, compliance with them is intended for polishing and gnoming, not interference with content (including citation) additions, and there is a very long-standing consensus that style guidelines – whether you want to pretend you have your own anti-MOS or not – cannot be required or enforced. The decision to permit any assertion of a supposed citation style also means that we're permitting alleged styles that exist in no one's mind but a single editor's and which no other editor can be expected to figure out and memorize. Can't have it both ways. Either we have one or two styles people can be expected to learn and know, or you get your chaos. If WP:V policy is being complied with, that is sufficient. Adding sourced content is the goal, not formatting it just-so. The horse pulls the cart, the dog wags the tail. And why do we want chaos again? No one has ever explained this, and I'm pretty sure that after a few moments thought, we don't. Here's a simple proof of this: My citation style henceforth takes the following format, and I expect everyone to comply with it in any article at which I'm the first major contributor:

publisher location all lower case {date in curly braces and underlined} \\\ _{Last name of author in subscript} Middle name if any ^{First name in superscript} /// "Title of major work in quotes and sentence case" * Title of Minor Work In Italics All Words Capitalized, Even A And An ||| page(volume):issue ||| Publisher Name in Smallcaps

Now that I've written the spec out for you, you have no excuse not to comply with it, according to the reasoning above, and furthermore, you can't change it without having a big discussion on the talk page of every single article I choose to use it at. Let's get real here. The point of permitting any citation style was to not interfere with ability of people to add content and sources. Over time this has mutated into a "rule" that others can't change unknown, unhelpful, idiosyncratic citation style, and now you want to mutate it further into a rule that others must comply with it or cannot contribute? That's 180 degrees backwards, and against WP:EDITING policy.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  18:22, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

If an established style is so unique that no one else can follow it... It should be very easy to gain a consensus to change it. Raise the issue on the talk page and discuss it. It all come down to "don't be a dick". Blueboar (talk) 19:31, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

It would not at all be very easy if the writer were prolific. It might necessitate several hundred discussions, especially if the editor in question were habitually being a jerk about it. This is important because there are in fact editors with idiosyncratic personal ways of doing things, who refuse to do anything consistent with aught but their own preference, and who in fact become extremely "difficult" if you dare touch their citation code in any way whatsoever. The amount of pushback you see here from editors like me, Peter Coxhead, etc., against this cite WP:OWNership bullshit is not coming out of the blue from imaginary scenarios, but is based on direct experience. I've had people fight me to the RfC level to prevent changing the value of name in <ref name="..."> to be something that made sense, as just one example. People like this need a block, not bogus guideline wording that rewards tendentious, WP:NOTHERE, battlegrounding behavior.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  20:19, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

The deeper challenge with inconsistent citations is that some editors use them as an excuse to "standardize" an article. For example, if an article had 20 templated citations, and then over time a couple random editors add three or four non-templated ones, the article is now "inconsistent", so someone might go through and either convert the 4 new citations to use templates, or convert the old 20 to not use templates. (The same applies equally if the article has 20 non-template citations and someone adds 4 template citations!) Ideally, each editor would check the history of the citations and then go with the originally established style, but that doesn't seem to happen very often. Similarly, AWB treats the existence of just one named reference as an excuse to convert *every* reference to named references - without considering the article history. Frankly, I would be glad to have more flexibility to convert articles I work on to styles I prefer, and if everyone else also has that flexibility then I ought to make use of it too. I'll keep an eye on it from a distance to see how the policy falls out. — Carl (CBM · talk) 19:42, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Already covered at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#To-do list, 2nd bullet. Centralized discussion was opened for a reason. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  20:19, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

No, that does not really address the issue, because it still says "without consensus", which gets back to the same issue of editors who change styles based on personal preference. I think I am done arguing for the traditional viewpoint, which was that the existing style should be respected for its own sake, and should not be changed unless the new style is specifically required by MOS or other guidelines or policies. If we are going to be free now to change the style based on "local consensus", or via WP:BOLD edits, etc., even if we are changing between different styles about which the guidelines are agnostic (such as templates/no templates, Harvard/Footnotes, ISO dates in citations), then I'm ready to get with the new program. Sign me up! But those who write the new language should be careful about what boxes they open. Once preserving the existing style is no longer the rule, there is no guarantee that people will pick the style that the writers of the new language favor. — Carl (CBM · talk) 20:40, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

I for one, Carl, don't strongly favor any particular citation style. Oh, most often I prefer CS1 using citation templates and list-defined references. But that isn't in effect on most articles (mostly the LDR part), and i don't normally bother to try to obtain consensus for a change. I can work with harv and other formats.

However, the current guidelines do NOT endorse 'boldly changing citation styles. Please obtain consensus first. It need not be onerous or involve an overly long discussion. But it does have to be done in advance of the style change. Nor did the edit under discussion here change that in any way. DES ^(talk) 21:09, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, of course, the previous/current guidelines do not favor bold edits to change styles. I was speaking of the new guidelines that certain editors above appear to be arguing for. The goal of the current guidelines, though, was not that editors should just "ask first". That would have been viewed as equally bad. The goal was that editors should just leave the style alone unless there was a specific policy that said otherwise - as you say you were doing, and as I have been doing. Of course, if the style was completely unsalvageable, people find a way to resolve the problem via IAR. But starting a discussion with the sole purpose of changing from one optional style to another would have been viewed, historically, as no better than making a bold edit for that purpose. If that rule is going away, I'll be fine with it - I'm willing to play by the same rules as everyone else - but I wanted to point out to those arguing in favor of the change to realize that a general policy that allowing editors to change styles based on a local consensus, disregarding the established style, will apply equally to styles they prefer and those they don't prefer. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:27, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

No the previous guidelines did not say "don't change unless the MOS or some policy requires it" they say (and have said for years) "don't make a change without first obtaing consensus to make the change". That doesn't mean just "ask first". It meant "ask and get a Yes answer first" but at least as far back as 2010, obtaining local consensus for a change in citation style was acceptable, and at least sometimes occurred. I have done it, when I thought it was worth while. Often I didn't bother, or estimated that I wouldn't obtain consensus. I don't know of any version of WP:CITEVAR that said "never change citation style unless a policy requires it". Can you link to a version which said that? Such a guideline would violate WP:OWN, as the one that says "get consensus first" does not. Carl. DES ^(talk) 21:43, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

I've followed this page for many years, so I remember both the language and the various intentions. If you check the language in late 2010 you'll see more of the original intent. In any case, the current language only says editors need to "seek" consensus, not that they must have an affirmative "Yes" answer (getting a "yes" answer is not how real editing works anyway, on articles that are not heavily edited). The proposed changes aim to weaken this further - e.g. to allow BOLD changes. For example, [5] [6]. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:12, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Wording at WP:Citation needed

Opinions are needed on the following matter: Wikipedia talk:Citation needed#Apologies, but object strongly, to content in article here based on decades of experience. A WP:Permalink for it is here. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 23:18, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

What are the benefits of preferring full citations over short citations?

Nowhere had a guideline or even an essay mentioned benefits of adding full citations and not just short ones, so what are they? Gamingforfun³⁶⁵ (talk) 05:06, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Not sure why you ask Gff365, but if you mean the case where When an article cites many different pages from the same source, the use of short citations in footnotes is recommended to avoid the redundancy of many big, nearly identical full citations. The only reason I can think of not to do that would be that it entails a more indirect process of tracking down the full reference: say you come across a ref marker [23] in the text of an article, so to find who said that and where, you jump to the numbered ref list and it only says "Bloggs, 2013, p. 343", then for full detail you have to scroll further down (or sometimes up) to another end section "Sources" or similar, hunting for something credited to a Bloggs and written in 2013. Not saying I would support a wholesale change of practice, mind...: Noyster (talk), 11:12, 12 March 2016 (UTC)

Of course if the editor uses the harv templates for the short enties, it is just a single click to the full entry. @Gff365: If Gff365 is asking the question about instances where the full is not given, the answer is to minimize possible confusion, ambiguity and extraneous searching. --Bejnar (talk) 00:59, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

And if you use {{rp}} to provide page numbers, even that step is unnecessary; all the ^[23] or whatever citation markers go directly to the full citation without any intermediary stages in a second section of shortened citations.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  01:43, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

A poorly formulated question, though the documentation on all this is indeed deficient. Each source in an article should have a full citation that includes all of the bibliographic information useful in identifying and finding a source. The issue that arises is when a source is used more than once, as it is not useful to repeat a full citation. There are two principal ways of handling this: a) "named refs" (the "<ref name=...>" construct), which allow a footnote (presumably containing the full citation) to appear in more than one place, or b) short cites ("Smith 2001"), usually implemented with Harv templates which provide a link to the full citation to where ever it is placed.

Use of short cites also arises when editors want to get all the clutter of bibliographic detail out of the text by moving the full citations into their own section. This also makes it easier to find and edit the full citations (one doesn't have to search through a lot of text). ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:48, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Each style of referencing has its own advantages and disadvantages. It's just a matter of taste which one each person prefers. However, for existing articles, you should simply follow the existing style, rather than trying to worry about it. The question of which style you prefer is really only relevant when you start new articles, or add references to articles that don't have them yet.

The use of short citations is neither required, recommended, or prohibited by the MOS; nor are "duplicated full" citations required, recommended, or prohibited. None of them is viewed as any better than the others from the point of view of the MOS. — Carl (CBM · talk) 21:09, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Sure, short citations are not required, no more than named refs. But duplication of full citations really should be avoided. So where the editors working on some article agree to, say, use of short cites with all of the sources listed alphabetically in a "Sourcss" section it is NOT "just a matter of taste" if,say, someone adds citations using {sfn}. It is NOT that "none of them is viewed as any better"; it is matter of consistent practice. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:08, 14 March 2016 (UTC)

Of course, if an article already uses a style without duplicate full references, it should be preserved. But, until/unless the MOS has a recommendation, the duplication of references, or lack thereof, is just one more optional matter of taste. There is no support in the existing MOS for "duplication of full citations really should be avoided". So if an article already uses some other system with duplicated references, that system should also be respected. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:03, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

WP:CITE is not part of the MOS, so why refer to the MOS? -- PBS (talk) 15:25, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

CITE is part of MoS, just not all of it; it's half style guideline and half content guideline. Like WP:SAL (which a three way MoS/content/naming convention guideline), it was determined that it was more utilitarian to group it topically than functionally; we might need to do more of this.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  12:32, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish when where is the discussion showing that there was a consensus that this guideline is part of the MOS? -- PBS (talk) 23:37, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

The WP:IBID section says: "When an article cites many different pages from the same source, to avoid the redundancy of many big, nearly identical full citations, most Wikipedia editors use one of three options:..." which sounds like at least advice that duplicated or near-duplicated citations should be avoid, albeit not a mandate to do so. DES ^(talk) 23:10, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Duplication of full citations is something most editors would naturally avoid, even without being told, so they do search for ways of handling that. Perhaps the MOS should say something stronger, as it really is not a good thing. Certainly not something we should find acceptable. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:02, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

As DES mentions, it is covered in this guideline, and an option is to make it more explicit in this guideline, why do you suggest "the MOS should say something"? -- PBS (talk) 06:53, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps I should clarify that as "should say something stronger". The current wording (as DES has quoted) only suggests alternatives, and remains permissive in allowing duplicated citations. I think such duplication should be expressly deprecated, with an admonition that alternatives should be used. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:37, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't think the overhead of using one of the methods to avoid duplicate full citations is justified if there are only a few duplicates. I do think duplicates should be avoided if there more than a few. I would count the total number of extra full citations when deciding; if five books were each cited in two places, that would be five redundant full citations. Jc3s5h (talk) 21:49, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

Duplicated citations can be confusing for the reader, and particularly in evaluating relatively new or challenged articles on a quick scan, cna make it appear that the article has more supporting sources than it actually does. I suggest that this guideline be amended to say that it is strongly encouraged to combine duplicated citations, and that it is always acceptable for an editor to use one of the described methods to avoid duplicated full citations, and this is not a change in citation style that needs consensus under CITEVAR. We don't want to prevent relatively inexperienced editors from adding proper cites just because they create duplicates, and the editor doesn't know how to combine them, or doesn't have time to do so. (cites are better than no cites.) But we want to strongly encourage the 'best practice' of combining them in a way appropriate to the overall citation style of the article. I would want to encourage combining even when there are only two occurrences of the same citation. That is my view. DES ^(talk) 22:27, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't believe the overhead is significant (and don't we have a statement some where not to worry about that?). Part of my antipathy to duplication of data comes from the database principle that every datum should have a single (and authoritative) instance, to avoid inconsistency. While this isn't too important for us, still, it is a sign of sloppiness. When citations are collected in a list (and sorted) duplications are obvious, and tend to be eliminated. But not so obvious in the text, where duplications just add to the clutter. If we really want to reduce processing overhead we should pull all of the citation templates out of the text (i.e., put them in their own section). ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:46, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

P.S. Yes, I like DES' idea of encourage a "best practice". We might tolerate the temporary existence of duplication, but should encourage correction. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:52, 17 March 2016 (UTC)

I too agree with DES' idea of encouraging a "best practice". However, I strongly disagree with J. Johnson's suggestion of always pulling the full citations out. What JJ is talking about is only a problem in articles with a great deal of citation, and where individual sources are cited multiple times with variant pages numbers. Most of the time citations can be combined using the name function and one or two short cites. There is no need for draconian duplication in those cases. I.e., having both a short cite and a full cite for a bunch of single cites. --Bejnar (talk) 00:43, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Benjar, I believe you have misunderstood, and even over-interpreted, what I said. What I said was not to always pull out the full citations, but, if we really wanted to reduce processing overhead (DES' concern), to pull out all the templates. Note also that even where sources are cited only once there are benefits to moving the full citations (templated or not) to their own section: it greatly reduces clutter in the main text, makes the full citations easier to find, permits sorting (e.g,, alphabetization) of the sources, and makes clean-up (etc.) over the entire set of full citations easier because they're all in the same place.

Now you say all this is "only a problem in articles with a great deal of citation". But consider this: if an article with a handful of full citations in the text gets expanded to the point that citations are getting duplicated, does CITEVAR preclude moving those citations out of the main text? To the extent that this (used with short cites) is a good practice, should it not also be a good practice to encourage this even before multiple cites make it necessary? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:11, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

J. Johnson, Bejnar, you have misunderstood my concern. I am not even slightly concerned with "processing overhead" here. I am concerned with reader confusion. It is my view that having duplicate full citations in the Notes list can lead to reader confusion, and to a misleading appearance of more sources being cited than there in fact are. This could be fixed by combining cites using named references, (and perhaps the {{rp}} template), or by using shortened cites, either with or without the harv templates (there are several ways to do short cites, all acceptable. If an article has a more or less stable citation style not using short cites, then i would advise using named refs to combine duplicates, and possibly using named refs and rp to combine different cites to the same source, or else to discuss on the talk page to establish a consensus to change the citation style. as for "pulling full cites out of the text" that can be done with List-defined references as well as with short cites -- personally I prefer LDR, but the guidelines properly do not prefer one of these methods over another. My only suggestion at this time is that this guideline advise that duplicate citations be combined by some method, and that much seems to have consensus. DES ^(talk) 00:38, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Also, when Jc3s5h wrote of "overhead" above in this thread, i think he or she meant the work of doing the editing to combine the cites, not processing overhead. There I disagree; if I am editing an article I would always combine even two duplicate cites using whatever method is consistent with the existing cites, most often named refs in my experience, as I tend to work on less-developed articles. DES ^(talk) 00:49, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Re: J. Johnson's "does CITEVAR preclude moving those citations out of the main text?" – Of course it does, according to the interpretation of the few above convincinced that no one may touch any aspect of their citation coding. This is a nice proof that their interpretation is wrong (both in the sense of incorrect, and the sense of counter to WP's interests).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  05:43, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

So when all of the slight misunderstandings are sorted out I think we are all pretty much on the same page as far as deprecating the duplication of full citations, for whatever reasons. Opinions vary as to the best ways of dealing with duplicated cites (uses of) a source. I think we could say something like each source should have a full citation, but it is not necessary nor (generally) useful to duplicate it. I say "generally" to allow for things like suggested reading lists. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:12, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Always good to discuss, when individuals have questions, and I concur with foregoing discussion that reflects WP guidelines and policies. I would note, in closing to the above, that there are various means by which duplicated citations can be avoided, and various accepted forms of short versus long citation. In each field of academic study, there are usually are a small set of acceptable ways within each discipline (humanities, social sciences, business, natural sciences, etc.). Duplications of citations in the sciences often use the {{ rp | pg. }} markup; in the humanities and classics, it is often a bibliography followed at each point of citation by an acceptable abbreviated form of the source. The variability of accepted forms within and between disciplines, the need for consistency of presentation, and the demand for editor mutual respect are what underly the Wikipedia policy that the pattern of practice in place at an article (the precedent set by earlier editors) should be followed. That is, unless there is a clear policy- or guideline-based reason for taking the article in a new direction (or, unless the article defies all acceptable styles of its discipline, or has no consistency of style, in which case it is acceptable to establish order from the chaos). User:Leprof_7272 50.179.252.14 (talk) 14:59, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

Actually, the method of citation used in a particular field is of almost no significance. It may be the reason why editors favor one style over another, but what counts is the consensus among editors. If the editors involved on a page cone to a consensus to more away from the standard format used in a particular field, and toward some other format, they may do so. Contrawise, changing an established format because "the article defies all acceptable styles of its discipline" should not be done without first obtaining consensus on the article talk page. A consistent citation style that satisfies the requirements of verifibility including text-source integrity, should be changed only after obtaining consensus. DES ^(talk) 01:13, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict)The "the article defies all acceptable styles of its discipline" concept is totally inoperative here, per WP:NOT. WP is not written like, and does have its style of anyhting dictated to it, by the AMA, PLOS ONE, the Royal Historical Society, or Chicago and Turabian. WP is not even bound by the citaton or other style conentions of other encyclopedias, FFS.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  05:52, 22 March 2016 (UTC)

Citing a blast email

If a reputable source (the creator of the content in question) sends a blast email to thousands of people, can that email be cited as a source? I'd like to add some detail to facts on a page, but the only source of this information is a blast email that the well-known creator of the content sent out to announce a new episode of the web series. No reputable online source has commented on this particular fact directly, but the current Wikipedia article states "It seems that ...", when in fact the content creator confirmed the assumption made in the Wikipedia article completely. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.80.102.52 (talk) 04:50, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

If there isn't a place Wikipedia readers can go to view the email, even if the place is behind a paywall, it can't be cited. Jc3s5h (talk) 11:44, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Actually that's not true. In the age of the Internet people sometimes assume that a source isn't a source unless anyone ("I") have access to it somehow, but that is just not the case. If you check WP:SOURCE it says: "Source material must have been published, the definition of which for our purposes is "made available to the public in some form"." So something that was published, but is no longer available to Wikipedia readers to go check, still counts as a source. An obvious example of this is a book that was published, but that is now out of print and not held by any library. The book was published and copies of the book do exist, so it counts as a source. Another example would be radio broadcasts that are not recorded or archived anywhere the public has access to. The broadcast itself is publication.

To the specific question about the blast email, if the email is sent to thousands of people and anyone could have signed up to receive the email, then that is a publication. The email was made available to the public. The fact that many people in the public did not sign up for the email does not mean it was not available to them. Some primary source documents only exist in one location in the world (like an archives for historical print documents), so technically there is a place people can go to check it if they want to (and, more importantly, have some way of getting to that archive to check). With an email there might be thousands of people who have a copy of it in their in boxes who could show it to you if you go visit them (the logistics of which might be a lot simpler than visiting an archives), so even in this case there still might technically be "a place Wikipedia readers can go to view the email". But like I said, Wikipedia does not even require that. It just requires that something must have been made available to the public in some form, and allowing just anyone to sign up for an email blast fits that definition. 99.192.55.195 (talk) 13:09, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

It qualifies as a "source"... But not as a Reliable source. A reliable source must (at a minimum) be located in an archive that is open to the general public ... So anyone could gain access to it (As long as they are willing to spend the time and money to do so.) A private archive does not meet that standard, because it is not open to all.

About the only way we might allow it if someone said "yes, I have a copy... I live at such and such address, and will show it to any random stranger who shows up at my door and asks to see it." Not likely. Blueboar (talk) 13:33, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

But that's not the policy. A lot of people don't seem to understand the policy or how citing sources works in general, so that's understandable. Like I said before, a lot of people think a source isn't a source unless they personally have some access to it. That is not the policy and has never been how citing sources has worked The policy is, as I quoted above: Source material must have been made available to the public in some form. An out of print book is something that was made available to the public in some form. The policy does not say the source must currently be available to the public, just that it once was. If you don't like the policy, you are free to lobby for a change, but that is the policy and it is how citing sources has pretty much always worked. 99.192.78.176 (talk) 15:57, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

ADDENDUM: Jut to be doubly clear, the passage I have quoted comes from a section of the policy entitled Reliable sources and the subsection What counts as a reliable source, so your claim that it is a source but not a reliable source is just plain false. Reliability has to do with whether or not the source can be counted on to be accurate. Whether or not you, I, or people in general have access to the source has nothing at all to do with how accurate it might be. 99.192.78.176 (talk) 16:01, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Not quite, 78.176. WP:RS also says, in the "definition of Published" sub section: "Additionally, an archived copy of the media must exist. It is convenient, but by no means necessary, for the archived copy to be accessible via the Internet." (emphasis added). So an out of print book not held by any library is probably not a reliable source any more, but if OCLC or a similar resource shows even a few libraries with copies, that is sufficient. If the email blast was in fact not archived anywhere, it is not a reliable source and should not be cited. DES ^(talk) 16:07, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Blueboar, not quite correct either. Three must be an archive, but it can be restricted. For example, archives at some university research libraries are only accessible to "qualified researchers" or "Legitimate scholars". Such restrictiosn would not prevent citing a source, if an editor has verified the source and another could do so by obtaining the needed qualifications. This is similar to the rule on sources behind a paywall. DES ^(talk) 16:14, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

DES, (and call me 99.192. I have a dynamic IP address so the last two numbers change a lot, but the first two are always the same) You have quoted the definition out of context. The statement that an archived copy must exist is specifically a statement made in reference to "audio, video, and multimedia materials", not text. The contrast to published text is made clear in the first two sentences of the section. So if I own the only remaining copy of a book that was published and made available to the public in book stores years ago, it counts according to the policy. Text need not be archived. 99.192.78.176 (talk) 16:24, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

99 - we can not be sure you actually own the book/email/document you claim to own (Assume Good Faith only goes so far, and you could be making it up). Someone else has to be able to verify that a) you own an authentic copy of the source, and b) it says what you say it does. Blueboar (talk) 17:29, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

99.192 you are correct that I cited the guideline out of context, and that it doesn't now say what I thought it did. But I think that perhaps it should. I am very uneasy about citing a source that no one (or no one but the citing editor) can verify. To take an extreme example Aristotle is a very reliable source for what Aristotialian philosophy held. But if an editor were to cite Book 2 of his Poetics, which as far as anyone knows has not existed since the destruction of the Library at Alexandria, it would not be accepted, i think. An out of print book can be cited, but i think it is at best ill advised to cite an out of print book not held by any library at all, nor otherwise available to a diligent searcher (copies not routinely available on the used book market, say). As to the email blast, if it was not archived anywhere, and no one who didn't originally receive it can verify it, I don't think it should be given much if any weight as a source. Perhaps we need an RfC to cover this situation. DES ^(talk) 18:13, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Blueboar, you might have reason to think someone is just making it up if no one else has access to the book, but (1) that does not change the fact that the policy says what it does so (2) in a case where someone does not doubt that the book exists and says what it does it would be both against policy and kinda shitty to remove a source or piece of information just because you don't like the policy.

DES, if someone said they know what Book 2 of Aristotle's Poetics says (or that he has a copy of it) despite it being believed to no longer exist, that might in itself be reason to think the person is lying and so to contest the claim that the source exists. But suppose that it were determined by whatever experts you like that exactly one copy of the book did exist and was privately owned by Bill Gates. Then the fact it is not available to anyone is not a reason to think it cannot be valid as a source.

It is also worth considering just how much protection adding an "availability" criterion to books would actually have. If being available just means that one library somewhere in the world has one copy or that an exclusive archive somewhere in the world has one copy or even just one used bookstore somewhere in the world has one copy for sale then changing the policy to add an "availability" criterion for books would have no effect. All I would have to do as the owner of the only copy of the book is to list it as for sale online and make my asking price $1 million. Then PRESTO! the book is now available to anyone in the world who wants to check it!

As for the email blast, if it was sent to anyone in the world who signed up to receive emails and thousands of people got it and hundreds of them still have their copy of that email, then it clearly exists. And for those worrying about availability, if any one person who has the email says, "I'm willing to meet up with anyone with my laptop and I can show them the email. Just pay me $50 and buy me a coffee" then the email is publicly available. If there is some reason to think the person is just making it up, then there can be a discussion about whether or not the source actually does exist, but once we agree it does exist then according to current policy, it is a reliable source. 99.192.53.220 (talk) 19:29, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

99... Please name the one person who has the email and is willing to show up with their laptop. How does someone contact him/her? If you can not answer that, the source is not verifiable. Blueboar (talk) 20:54, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Blueboar, you have misread. I was offering a hypothetical about how the "availability" criterion could be satisfied if someone needed to do so. But as I have pointed out (and DES now agrees I am correct about) text sources do not have an "availability" criterion for use. That criterion only applies to "audio, video, and multimedia materials". 99.192.55.221 (talk) 00:38, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

and you are missing my point... We can play "what if" for a year... But in the scenario you present, The email isn't verifiable. Blueboar (talk) 01:05, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

You still don't get it, but whatever. The fact still remains that Wikipedia policy says the email is ok. If hypotheticals to explain why trying to change that policy would be pointless confuse you, then just ignore them. Because as it stands, policy says the email is a valid source. 99.192.55.221 (talk) 02:46, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

While I now agree that there isn't a specific availability/archive requirement in the guideline for text sources, i think that probably there should be. In any case, if this email blast were actually to be cited in an article, i would be inclined to revert and take the matter to the reliable source notice board arguing for removal of such a citation as unreliable. DES ^(talk) 09:57, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Editing based on what you think the policy should be when you agree it is not the policy is bad faith editing. If you think something is accepted by the policy, but you disagree with the policy, the appropriate step is to try to change the policy. I'm sure you can think of a number of times encountering editors who, when informed they are editing contrary to the rules, will try to argue what the rules "should be" and insist on their edits standing. People who edit based on what they want the rules to be just make Wikipedia editing more difficult for everyone. 99.192.75.131 (talk) 11:42, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

99.192, while it may be that under the current guideline there is no archive requirement for text, that does not eman thqat all published text is reliable, nor is there a precise definition of what is reliable in a given context. it is not at all bad faith editing to revert the use of a so7urce that one considers dubious per WP:BRD, and then to take the matter to an appropriate noticeboard for additional input and decision. DES ^(talk) 15:21, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

The discussion has got a bit bogged down in detail. WP:RS says: Articles should be based on reliable, third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. In what way does Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources#Definition of published say that an e-mail is a published source, let alone one by a source with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy? Peter coxhead (talk) 12:14, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Peter, I think you misunderstand the context of the question the person who started the thread was asking about. The question is not about any old email that goes from one person to another, but an email that is sent as a part of an official mailing list to thousands of people all at the same time. This is an email that essentially functions as a press release. If you check the only other edit that was made by the person with the IP address who started the thread, you will see that the question is likely in the context of emails Louis CK sends to people who subscribe to his email list and the content of the email in question is something about his web series Horace And Pete. So if, for example (this is just a hypothetical) he sends out an email to his list saying: "Episode 4 of Horace And Pete is now available for download. People have been asking me how many episodes of the series there will be. I will be making X number of them only. I hope you enjoy them" - then that looks like a pretty reliable source that there will be X episodes. Remember that anyone can sign up to get the emails and people who do get them include professional writers who have reviewed his work and sometimes quote from them, so they are clearly public documents. If anyone knows how many episodes there will be, It's Louis CK. So if he says there will be X of them then that is as reliable a source as you could ask for. So yes, I agree that there is not general rule that emails are reliable, but when it is an email from a public figure sent on to a list of thousands of people and anyone in the world can sign up for the emails and the content is about his own work, reliability and fact-checking is not an issue. 99.192.75.131 (talk) 13:55, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

I do understand the context. I can only repeat that an e-mail is not a "published source" as per the definition at Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources#Definition of published, as well as any normal use of the term. I don't dispute the accuracy of the e-mailer, but it's not the point: the point is that it wasn't published, however many people it was sent to, and the accuracy that matters is the accuracy of anyone that publishes the e-mail, e.g. by putting it on a blog. Peter coxhead (talk) 14:06, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Peter, we went through this in the discussion above. The page you link to is a guideline that partially quotes the policy, but is not policy itself. The policy, which I quoted above, is here: WP:SOURCE. The part of the policy that the guideline quotes is (as DES and I discussed above) about what counts as "published" for "audio, video, and multimedia materials", not text. And the part of the policy that the guideline page leaves out is this: Source material must have been published, the definition of which for our purposes is "made available to the public in some form." If you substitute the definition given for the word "published" you get a simpler reading that says: Source material must have been made available to the public in some form. An email to a list of thousands of people that anyone in the world can sign up for is as much of a publication by that definition as a print newspaper that anyone can subscribe to. In both cases only people who sign up for it get it, but anyone can. The email is arguably more of a publication, since there is no fee barrier or geographical location barrier. 99.192.75.131 (talk) 14:35, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

• 99 may have a point here... I think it may help if we use a different term to describe what we are talking about. The documents that 99 refers to are really "news letters"... Not email communications.

A news letter that was distributed the old fashioned way (printed on paper, and sent to subscribers via the post office) can be considered reliable (in limited situations)... It would qualify as a self-published, primary source). The question is... Does that limited reliability change if the news letter is distributed via email? Blueboar (talk) 14:54, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

• Yes, 99.192 does have a point, Peter coxhead. Such an "email blast" or "electronic newsletter' probably should be considered as having been "published". Whether it was "reliably published" is another matter, of course, and whether it is suitable for use as a source may be yet another matter. But the definition of "published" is probably not the weak point in 99's argument. DES ^(talk) 15:21, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
  • Note that Wikipedia:Published includes "A broadcast email, including email-lists if they are archived and public..." as one of its examples of things that do count as published. But note that there is some attention in that statement to the concept of archiving. DES ^(talk) 16:28, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

And the qualifications are important: "archived and public". Can I now access this e-mail? Where is it archived? Peter coxhead (talk) 17:29, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Of course if you read that closely, it appears that "archived and public" is being applied to email-lists, but perhaps not to other sorts of "broadcast email"s. And of course Wikipedia:Published is an essay, not a guideline. Mind you, i think that the "archived and public" requirement should apply, but i'm not sure that it does. however, Wikipedia:Published also says "Sources that are ... not accessible (e.g., the only remaining copy of the book is locked in a vault, with no one allowed to read it) are never acceptable as sources on Wikipedia.". This is relevant to some commetns about out-of-print so8urces above, and to the new discussion linked below. DES ^(talk) 17:49, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, the fact that that page is just an essay is a limitation on its applicability, but even then the essay does not seem as helpful as you might think. On the issue of vaults, the point being made is that if no one has access to a source it cannot be used. In the previous paragraph it says a source needs to be "accessible to at least some people." An out of print book that no library holds is not unavailable to those who own a copy, so it is available to at least some people. Same for an email that thousands received and many did not delete. On the issue of emails, the full sentence reads as follows: "A broadcast email, including email-lists if they are archived and public—but not email messages or other forms of personal communication sent only to you or a small number of people." Ok, but an email sent to subscribers of an email list that includes thousands of people is not a "personal communication sent only to you or a small number of people" and if there is no public archive of the email then it covered by neither part of the sentence. In short, the essay does not seem to say anything about whether or not to count non-archived non-personal emails. But that is where the word "including" is important. The sentence is saying broadcast emails count, including archived ones but not including personal ones. So if an email is neither archived nor personal, it counts as acceptable. 99.192.48.16 (talk) 18:10, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

• I have started a discussion on the broader point at WT:RS#Archive or availability requirement for text sources. DES ^(talk) 17:08, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

It's tautological (in the proof sense, not the criticism-of-wording sense) that the source must be available at some effort or other cost. No amount of lawyering about "private archives" or "published but no longer available to anyone anywhere" will get past the fact that it's the verifiability policy. If the source does not make it possible to verify the content, then it does not qualify. A possible solution in a case like this would be to post the blast e-mail to some site for discussion of spam or whatever, archive that page via archive.org, then cite the e-mail as a primary source and the forum as a |via=, and archive.org as the |archive-url=. Forums and other WP:UGC are not themselves reliable sources, but if you're using one as a carrier for the original content, it's hard to see what the issue would be (archive.org itself is a user-generated carrier of original non-user-generated sources; all this would do it add another carrier so that archive.org has something to archive).  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  18:35, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Just consider where this leads. Editors are discussing the interpretation of a source. One e-mails the author of the source, receives a reply, and posts this on a page on their own web site, which they then archive. (This has actually been suggested as a way of resolving a dispute; it's not just an idea I made up.) Would this be acceptable? The counter-argument is that it's not a broadcast e-mail, but the distinction seems a fine one to me. The problem is that in neither case would we know whether the e-mail had been accurately copied to the web site, only that whatever was there had been archived accurately. E-mails are not reliable sources, period. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:38, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

An email quoted by a reliable source, such as a newspaper, is surely at least as reliable as id the sender had posted the same text on his or her own web site. (And when the fact being supported is "X made Y statement on date Z", that is reliable enough.) Many email lists are automatically archived at the time of sending, and such archives are often publicly accessible. Would that be any less reliable than a post by the sender on the sender's own blog? Or an interview with the sender quoted by a reliable news source? If we are depending on manual archiving there would be room for doubt, although little room if multiple receivers confirm the accuracy of the archive. I think you are being too quick to dismiss all emails, and with them Wikipedia:Published, Peter coxhead. DES ^(talk) 21:19, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

An email reported by a source is as reliable or unreliable as the reporting source, just as anything else it reported would be. If the e-mail is automatically archived in some way that is publicly accessible, then it surely counts as "published". If not automatically archived, I don't see how a third party can verify that other people have received the same e-mail, whereas it's easy to verify a blog posting. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:20, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

We do regularly cite e-mail archives; it's just a website like any other, and the fact that the content on it originated in a different medium (e-mail) doesn't seem to be material. We cite newsgroup archives, etc., the same way.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  05:06, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Extracting referencing and citation information from articles for evaluation

Recent discussions, especially Instruction creep in WP:CITEVAR and RFC: Is a change in citation markup method a change in citation style?, got me wondering if there could be a tool that might aid editors in evaluating the coding part of citations. To that end I've hacked up a proof of concept template that takes a stab at doing that.

The template is {{ref info}}. It can be saved in an article so that the referencing information is automatically available to any editor who clicks the Show preview button or as the examples here show, can take a single parameter that is the title of an article of interest:

examples of ref info

{{ref info}}	{{ref info|alzheimer's disease}}	{{ref info|Barack Obama}}	{{ref info|aristotle}}
	reference info for Alzheimer's disease unnamed refs 115 named refs 174 self closed 148 cs1 refs 316 cs1 templates 325 refbegin templates 1 use xxx dates dmy cs1|2 dmy dates 39 cs1|2 mdy dates 1 cs1|2 ymd dates 8 cs1|2 last/first 7 cs1|2 vauthors 250 List of cs1 templates cite book (23) Cite journal (2) cite journal (228) cite news (5) cite press release (4) cite report (1) Cite web (10) cite web (52) explanations	reference info for Barack Obama unnamed refs 397 named refs 128 self closed 69 cs1 refs 592 cs1 templates 748 uses ldr yes refbegin templates 3 webarchive templates 4 use xxx dates mdy cs1|2 mdy dates 611 cs1|2 last/first 450 cs1|2 author 58 cs2 mode 2 List of cs1 templates cite book (22) Cite book (6) Cite journal (15) cite journal (6) Cite magazine (1) cite magazine (9) cite news (437) Cite news (48) cite press release (6) Cite report (1) Cite web (16) cite web (181) explanations	reference info for Aristotle unnamed refs 34 named refs 8 self closed 0 R templates 3 Refn templates 1 cs1 refs 32 cs1 templates 212 cs1-like templates 12 cs2 templates 1 harv refs 1 harv templates 3 sfn templates 258 rp templates 1 refbegin templates 2 webarchive templates 1 use xxx dates dmy cs1|2 dmy dates 27 cs1|2 ymd dates 2 cs1|2 last/first 166 cs1|2 author 17 List of cs1 templates cite book (109) Cite book (5) cite encyclopedia (2) cite journal (24) cite magazine (1) cite news (6) Cite web (5) cite web (60) List of cs2 templates citation (1) List of cs1-like templates cite CE1913 (1) cite IEP (1) cite LotEP (1) cite SEP (9) List of sfn templates sfn (258) List of harv templates harvnb (3) explanations

This is just a hack that requires improvement if it is to be useful. I would like your opinions. Does the concept have merit? Should it be pursued? What information should the template provide? How should the results be displayed? What else?

Please comment at the template's talk page.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 19:52, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

That is really cool, and useful! Only things I can think of right off-hand to add to it are: noting if the page has citations divided into two short and long sections; the article class(es) assigned on talk page; a |sidebar=y to wrap it in something like {{archive box}}; count of citation errors (of the red alert kind); detect citation dispute/cleanup templates (dead URL, unreliable source, failed verification, etc.); maybe detection of some variant templates in Category:Footnote templates and Category:Citation templates and subcats thereof (but not Category:Specific-source templates – the general consensus at TfD is converging on the idea that all of these need to substitute cleanly and be subst-only templates so that they generate standard CS1 (or 2) citations, or they're liable to be deleted; I'm in process of working this out, but the amount of actual work to implement that solution is daunting, since it's over 600 templates to convert in very fiddly ways).

• I agree, Trappist, this is cool and potentially very useful. One thing I would like to suggest, an additional parameter taking a revision ID. Then when there is a talk page discussion about how citation markup has changed in a particular article, the output for two specific revisions could be compared side by side. This might even eventually be a tool used at GA or FAC reviews where consistency is valued. Thanks. DES ^(talk) 17:18, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Indeed. It could also obviate the "someone could add a few citations in a different style, then claim inconsistency, and impose a new style" WP:GAMING concerns that some have had, since it could easily show that a particular style was largely consistent before and after the change. We could even have a specific cut-off, e.g. 75% consistent = "consistent" or whatever. This could also obviate countervailing concerns I and Curly Turkey and Peter Coxhead have about ossification of style (i.e., if the article expands by more than 50% or whatever in number of valid citations due to someone's recent work, old citation bets are off, and normal WP:BOLD would apply, with a necessity to justify keeping the old one on its actual merits not on "local tradition". Putting actual numbers to this should forestall a lot of disputes, and bring CITEVAR back into common sense territory and resolve many of its conflicts with WP:EDITING, WP:BOLD, WP:OWN, etc.

It still does not address the clear distinction between code and content, and I think we're arriving at a tripartite distinction between: 1) actual citation style (CS1, Vancouver, Jim-Bob's made up one, whatever) seen by the reader; 2) coding standards like LDR and SFN, or vertical vs. horizontal templating, or mass-conversion to/from using templates at all; and 3) trivial coding tweaks like using canonical not alias parameter names of templates, using <ref name= values that are human-readable, or using a particular footnote template that provides an additional feature. Regardless of those questions, {{Ref info}} is a major step in the right direction.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  17:36, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

I had thought about using an id to look at older versions of an article. I've just spent a bit of time trying to get that to work, but alas, no success. I've posted at WP:LUA to see if there is a solution.

I'll take the suggestion portions of the above comments and make a list of them at Template talk:Ref info.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 19:25, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

I agree it's cool. One bit of info for articles with templates that's nice to know is the date format of publication dates and the set {accessdate, archivedate}.

A tangential matter: it would be nice to have an agreed-upon way to record which (if any) external style guide an article follows, such as MLA or Chicago. But that would be separate from this tool.

It's also worth noting that the tool does not distinguish between an article with no citations at all versus an article that has parenthetical citations but no templates. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:11, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Example of that last case?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 22:35, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Depends on what Jc3s5h meant by "parenthetical citations but no templates". Does "templates" refer to properly formatted footnotes? Does "parenthetical citations" refer to the kind one might see in print books where "(Keene 1999 : 165)" appears inline but one would need to look closely to find them? If the answer to both is "yes", then I have seen such articles around, but I can't name them off the top of my head, and they would be difficult to locate on request, except by memory. These articles have their own problems that are largely unrelated to verifiability (they were probably written by new users unfamiliar with Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and, worse, may have been copy-paste jobs). Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:52, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Tropical year. Jc3s5h (talk) 09:55, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, that's exactly what I thought. I actually don't see a problem with not making the distinction, though, since the citation style in that article is much less practical for an online encyclopedia article than the more standard footnote style, and if I had unlimited time and resources and get rid of it across the board. Once the articles are improved thusly, the shortcoming in the tool would no longer be relevant. Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 10:29, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Use of "Locations" in citing Kindle e-books?

Hi!

Background on why I'm asking this

I was recently TBANned from the topic in which I am most interested and on which I have access to the best print sources. I don't want to go around English Wikipedia adding a bunch of citations to Japanese-language print sources to which most other editors don't have access to articles on, say, Chinese literature and the Bible, but I also don't want to pay and wait for international shipping on print books in English from American and European publishers. So I've been using my Kindle a whole lot more. But I'm not sure about something.

I read Wikipedia talk:Citing sources/Archive 32#How do you cite E-Books from Kindle?, but it might be out of date. User:Kmhkmh said use whatever description works to narrow down the content in question for that "Chapter 5, Section 2, Paragraph 8" ais fine, but now (perhaps not true back in 2011?) I can provide much more precise "Loc"s to give almost the exact line I'm citing, but this is only useful if one has the Kindle version, and I'm worried that providing a unique and original citation format that includes something like "Kindle edition. Locs 22405-22417." would be especially unattractive. It's also tedious trying to locate these exact Locs, as I don't know how to do it beyond zooming in to the max and scrolling around...

Thoughts?

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 06:43, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

See also my recent hack job on Xiaopin (literary genre). Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 08:50, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

I think I can answer why I don't believe this solution is feasible, as least for now.

As I see it there are couple problems/questions I'd want sorted before anyone tries to create anything like this:

• Do kindle-locations work on other formats such as .epub or .mobi as well or are they different?
• Is there any way to convert these locations to something applicable to a .pdf version of the book?
• Does each version i.e. bought from Amazon, Barnes & Noble; borrowed from Overdrive, Proquest, Adobe Digital editions, Elib, etc. have different ISBNs? Are they identical with identical location info?
• Do similar locations work for content that is in audiobook format?
• Should we ever allow only a kindle location without page, chapter, section, paragraph?
  My opinion is no, this would create a dependence on a single distributor and promote monopoly/require having to buy ebooks to verify content as opposed to just popping by your nearest library.

In addition to these questions there is a different way to handle locations — namely with hashes of the content, which can direct right to the content in question in a way that can be converted across formats. This is for example applied by the Hathi Research Center https://sharc.hathitrust.org.
P.S. Can't find any source for how to cite with hashes right now, will get back to you if I find anything
CFCF 💌 📧 10:32, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

• There's nothing wrong with simply citing "|loc= chapter X", though it's less than ideal. Commercial .epubs also tend to have Adobe pagination (though not all), but it has to be turned on (on my Kobo the hard-coded page numbers then show up in the margin). I don't know whether there's a Kindle equivalent. Electronic versions should have different ISBNs from print versions. I wouldn't cite line numbers or paragraphs, as it's not a standard many people would recognize. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 12:36, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Electronic versions should have different ISBNs from print versions. They should, but seemingly they don't... I learned in college to get what I need from the title page and bibliographical information just after that. In the article I linked above I was consulting the Kindle edition, but when I checked the third "page" it said "ISBN 0-231-10984-9 (alk. paper)"... Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 13:00, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

And even if they have separate ISBNs to physical books, it's also relevant to know if they have separate ISBNs between different ebook versions. CFCF 💌 📧 13:08, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Well, all the more reason to stick to "|loc= chapter X" if you don't have page numbers. It's no worse than citing a long unpaginated web article. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 21:39, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Well, yeah, except that if someone else has a paper copy of the book and wants to check up on my cites, they can't Ctrl+F their paper copy like they can a long unpaginated web article. ;-) Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 03:59, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Well, if you think they'll count the paragraphs, go right ahead—there's no rule against it. I'm just letting you know that "|loc= chapter X" is just fine, and will even pass FAC. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 04:05, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Meh. I've seen people claim it was okay to just name the book they read it in, and you and I both called CurtisNaito out on his massive page-range citations... Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 04:10, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

He had access to the actual pages, and the ranges were sometimes absurd. But if that was the only problem with his editing, it wouldn't have been a real problem, just irritating and lazy. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 06:30, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

It doesn't help to discuss what passes in FAC if the aim is to improve citations beyond that. Also there are good tools out there which can add paragraph and line information to web-pages. CFCF 💌 📧 15:29, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

"Request admin assistance" in the "Dealing with unsourced material" section

Why does Dealing with unsourced material say "If an article is unreferenced, you can tag it with the {{unreferenced}} template, so long as it is not nonsensical or a biography of a living person, in which case request admin assistance"? What is it that an admin would do that we would not expect any editor to do? I can see that an admin's assistance might be needed in a dispute over biographical material, but if that's the intention it needs to be a little clearer. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:31, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

If the article is nonsensical, it is eligible for quick deletion, which can be done by an admin. If a particular version of an article has a passage about a living person which is seriously inappropriate, an admin can hide that revision so only other admins can see it. Jc3s5h (talk) 10:53, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Good points, but neither is clear from the current text. How about changing the text to suggest a CSD tag for the first point, and to make the second point clearer? Perhaps "If an article is unreferenced, you can tag it with the {{unreferenced}} template. If the article is nonsensical, it may make more sense to tag it for speedy deletion. If the unreferenced material relates to the biography of a living person, and is seriously inappropriate, it may need to be hidden from general view, in which case request admin assistance"? With appropriate links, of course. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:06, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Unreferenced article: If it's nonsense tag it for G1 speedy deletion. If it's a BLP and gives no sources of any kind it qualifies for a BLPPROD tag. If, in addition, it amounts to an attack page, it qualifies for G10 speedy deletion (placing the tag will automatically blank the article). In any other case try to talk to the page creator, find references yourself, or, failing those, place the {{unreferenced}} template and consider sending it for AfD. I see no place for vague advice to "seek admin assistance". Can we agree to change the text in this way?: Noyster (talk), 12:24, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Looks good to me; perhaps add mention of the need for hiding revisions in some cases, and how to request that? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:38, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

OK, here's a proposed rewording of the section, based on Noyster's comments above.

If an article has no references at all, then:

• If the entire article is nonsense, tag it for speedy deletion using criterion G1.
• If the article is a biography of a living person, it can be tagged with {{subst:prod blp} to propose deletion. If it's a biography of a living person and is an attack page, then it should be tagged for speedy deletion using criterion G10, which will blank the page.
• If the article doesn't fit into the above two categories, then consider finding references yourself, or commenting on the article talk page or the talk page of the article creator. You may also tag the article with the {{unreferenced}} template and consider nominating it for deletion.

For individual unreferenced claims in an article:

• If an unreferenced claim is doubtful but not harmful, you may remove it from the article or, alternatively, use the {{citation needed}} template, which will add an inline tag. If you choose to use the tag, please go back and remove the claim if no source is produced within a reasonable time.
• If a claim is doubtful and harmful, remove it from the article. You may want to move it to the talk page and ask for a source, unless it is very harmful or absurd, in which case it should not be posted to the talk page either. Use common sense.

Comments? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:44, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

Mike Christie Agree with separating "unreferenced article" and "unreferenced claim in an article", and with your "unreferenced article" text. The problem with the wording in the "unreferenced claim" part is that any false information could be regarded as "harmful". So again it may be better to distinguish BLPs and say:

For individual unreferenced claims in an article:

• If the article is a biography of a living person, then any contentious material must be removed immediately: see Biographies of living persons.
• If the material added appears to be false or an expression of opinion, remove it and inform the editor who added the unsourced material. The {{uw-unsourced1}} template may be placed on their talk page.
• In any other case consider finding references yourself, or commenting on the article talk page or the talk page of the editor who added the unsourced material. You may place a {{citation needed}} or {{dubious}} tag against the added text.

: Noyster (talk), 11:40, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, that's an improvement. I just realized we should add something about the possible need to hide revisions; I'll do another draft this evening if you don't. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:58, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

@Noyster:I suggest adding the note about hiding revisions to your first bullet. The whole section would then read like this:

If an article has no references at all, then:

• If the entire article is nonsense, tag it for speedy deletion using criterion G1.
• If the article is a biography of a living person, it can be tagged with {{subst:prod blp} to propose deletion. If it's a biography of a living person and is an attack page, then it should be tagged for speedy deletion using criterion G10, which will blank the page.
• If the article doesn't fit into the above two categories, then consider finding references yourself, or commenting on the article talk page or the talk page of the article creator. You may also tag the article with the {{unreferenced}} template and consider nominating it for deletion.

For individual unreferenced claims in an article:

• If the article is a biography of a living person, then any contentious material must be removed immediately: see Biographies of living persons. If the unreferenced material is seriously inappropriate, it may need to be hidden from general view, in which case request admin assistance.
• If the material added appears to be false or an expression of opinion, remove it and inform the editor who added the unsourced material. The {{uw-unsourced1}} template may be placed on their talk page.
• In any other case consider finding references yourself, or commenting on the article talk page or the talk page of the editor who added the unsourced material. You may place a {{citation needed}} or {{dubious}} tag against the added text.

Is this ready to go? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:38, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Mike Fine to make the change as far as I'm concerned: Noyster (talk), 18:47, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Done. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 19:02, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

• I have changed "nonsense" to "Patent Nonsense" with a link to WP:PN, as the CSD is intentionally limited to the latter, and is much narrower than many people's common understanding of "nonsense". PN is a term of art on Wikipedia, and should be used as such. Sorry i didn't spot the above before it went live. DES ^(talk) 19:41, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Citing sources with spelling mistakes in their titles

The article Sabah Chinese Association is referenced using this source, the records of the Sabah state government. The title of the page in question is "Govermental Records", i.e. with a spelling mistake.

Parkywiki corrected the spelling of the reference, but I reverted on the basis that the title of the source is effectively a quotation, and we should leave it as it is. Parkywiki then reverted to the correct spelling on the basis that it's clearly an error (which I agree with) and that correcting it will avoid spell-check issues in future.

Is there an agreed way of dealing with this? Cheers, Number 57 23:32, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

@Number 57: It depends how "significant" you consider the error to be. The relevant guideline is MOS:QUOTE. I would argue that this qualifies as "trivial spelling and typographic errors" and so should be corrected, but alternatively you could denote the error with {{sic}}. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:44, 10 April 2016 (UTC)

If the title is clearly established, not just a printer's error, i would use {{sic}}. DES ^(talk) 19:42, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

Handling collective coauthors

So how do we cite something attributed to "Edward H. Field and members of the 2014 WGCEP"? (This is analogous to cases like "Smith and 14 others".)

For the citation template, something like "|first1= Edward H. |last1= Field |author2= members of the 2014 WGCEP" might work. But how should Harv be done: {{Harv|Field|2014 WGCEP}}, and add a suitable CITEREF to the citation template?

I suppose all that might work, but would be interested in any other ideas. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:46, 14 April 2016 (UTC)

Use {{sfnref}}, also known as {{harvid}} to create the CITEREF to match whatever you put in the Harv fields. It works for any reference that doesn't have a standard last name and year available. StarryGrandma (talk) 06:53, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

|collaboration=2014 WGCEP

{{citation |author=Edward H. Field |collaboration=2014 WGCEP |title=Title |date=2014}}

Edward H. Field; et al. (2014 WGCEP) (2014), Title

{{harvnb|Edward H. Field|2014}}

Edward H. Field 2014

—Trappist the monk (talk) 09:36, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Hmm, yes, I forgot about |collaboration=. That should work. (And of course 'last=' instead of 'author='.) ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:51, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Quoting passages written in bad English

What do the rest of you think of this? Should I have just not included the quotations? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 13:32, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

It isn't obvious that you are quoting anyone. This for example:

Yoon, Chang Sup. "A Brief History of Korean Architecture: 2. Ancient Architecture". Atelier Professor KOH Architectural Design Lab, Gyeongsang National University. Gyeongsang National University. Retrieved 3 May 2016. Since the introduction of the Chinese culture of the Han Dynasty the basic system of wooden building frames has been passed down to recent years, Such structures coincidentally blended with other indigenous architectural details.

That quote doesn't appear in the referenced web page. |quote=, because it renders its assigned value in quotation mark indicates that the quoted text can be found in the source material. As an aside, since the source is available and not hidden behind a paywall, there isn't really any need to quote material from the source in a reference.

I can find nothing that uses the term "Atelier Professor KOH Architectural Design Lab" in any of the source pages I looked at. Where does that come from?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:56, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

"Atelier Professor KOH Architectural Design Lab" comes from the "main" page here. It contains no significant information, so it never occurred to me to link it (sorry!).

As for the quote that doesn't appear on the page, that was an error on my part and only applied to two of the quotes. It's fixed now.

Anyway, you think I should drop the quotes?

Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 14:17, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

You would never know that from the section pages so perhaps the cites should be rewritten:

{{cite web |author=Yoon Chang Sup |work=A Brief History of Korean Architecture |title=2. Ancient Architecture |url=http://nongae.gsnu.ac.kr/~mirkoh/ob2.html |publisher=[[Gyeongsang National University]] |access-date=3 May 2016}}

Yoon Chang Sup. "2. Ancient Architecture". A Brief History of Korean Architecture. Gyeongsang National University. Retrieved 3 May 2016.

I used |author= because typical Asian names should render 'Surname forenames' not 'Surname, forenames' (this particular source notwithstanding); I used |work= to hold the overall title because that is something seen on all of the section pages. And, yes, I think that quotations should rarely if ever be used and when they are they should be extremely brief. If it is necessary to quote a source, quote it in an end note ({{efn}} and the like) and add citations to that.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:33, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

How large a download is reasonable for a linked citation?

At what size do we give up on linking to an online version of a source that can be verified offline? I am referencing one page in a 500 (or-so) page book, and there is an online PDF version of the book. Unfortunately in this case, at more than 200 M, it does not make sense to link it. Is there a rule of thumb for how big a linked source can be before we don't link to it?

To forestall possible asides on the particular case that raised this question:

• No, this is not a case of linking to a copyrighted document since the book has been posted by the publishers' themselves on their own website.
• No, they don't provide any means to see just one section or page. It's download all 500 pages or nothing.
• Yes, the media data directories are hidden (so there's no looking for alternate versions that are not currently displayed).
• Yes, I know how to tell compliant PDF readers to display the desired page. It does not effect the size of the download.
• Yes, I know references don't have to be online to be perfectly valid. As long as they are verifiable they are acceptable, as in my case.
• Because someone is likely going to ask, here is the linked version. Meters (talk) 02:56, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

References

I wonder if a "large file" warning is appropriate. I definitely wouldn't leave a link to a document out just because the file is big, though. ~Mable (chat) 06:43, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

I have a couple possibilities in mind:

1. Consider linking to [7] instead, with possibly an HTML comment.
2. Consider providing some text within the <ref> but outside the {{cite}} which says "big file!" or "access book from publisher's about page".

--Izno (talk) 09:18, 22 May 2016 (UTC)

I like option 1; it may also keep the source accessible for longer if the name of the file changes. ~Mable (chat) 20:01, 22 May 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, I think I will go with #1 with a warning of the size of the full download. Meters (talk) 20:17, 22 May 2016 (UTC)

", Jr." in the "Surname, Firstname" format?

Hey, this doesn't look right to me -- any ideas? Hijiri 88 (聖やや) 01:57, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

Indeed. I don't have any authoritative sources at hand, but generally the presentation in inverted format is "Buswell, Robert E., Jr.", which is obtained with |last= Buswell and |first= Robert E., Jr.. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:06, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

RFC: Is a change in citation markup method a change in citation style?

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.

---

Some editors believe that a change in the wikisource formatting of citations, such as a change to or from List-defined References, or a change to or from the use of citation templates, is a change in citation style, and under WP:CITEVAR should not be made without obtaining consensus first, if there is an existing established citation style. Others believe that as long as the visible citations are unchanged, changing the wikicode does not amount to a change in style. Various arguments have been made in recent threads here on WT:CITE, as well as on WT:MOS. I ask for comments to resolve this issue with clear consensus, if possible. DES ^(talk) 21:55, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Background

This issue was being discussed at least as far back as 2010, in Wikipedia talk:Citing sources/Archive 29#Consistent style. Changes to WP:CITE in October 2015 favored the "coding is style" view, but were disputed at the time and since. Recently the matter has become heated once more. Extended dispute over the meaning of an important guideline is not good, and should be settled by wider discussion. DES ^(talk) 22:02, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

• Comment: Here's a link to a possibly relevant previous discussion from 2010. There may be others between then and now. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:37, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
  • Isn't that the same discussion I linked to in the paragraph above? DES ^(talk) 22:42, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes, coding is part of style

• Yes, coding is part of style, because it causes the same kind of mental adjustments and tool selection adjustments that editors would have to make when changing among completely different kinds of styles (APA Style vs Chicago Manual of Style, for example). Jc3s5h (talk) 22:43, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

• The formatting of the wiki-code is at least as important to editors, perhaps more important, than is the rendered appearance. Moreover, even if it makes no difference in appearance at a given moment, the use or non-use of templates may make a significant difference in future, as the templates might well be changed to emit different output. Moreover even now it is not really possible for the output to be identical: most of the citation templates emit machine-readable microformats, which manually formatted citations that are otherwise identical will not. Thus a change to or from the use of citation templates is a change in rendered output, even if that change is not readily visible to the non-automated reader. Similarly the use of WP:LDRs facilitates particular editing styles, and not others. Changing existing citations to use or not use LDRs without consensus is undesirable, as neither is favored or disfavored by any guideline. DES ^(talk) 22:41, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

• Yes. How citations are rendered is a stylistic choice, as much as is choosing to use APA over MLA. We don't mandate that users format citations using {{cite}} over {{citation}}, or use LDR over inline refs; it's a choice that someone has to make at some point in the article's development. Changing that is not "coding cleanup" unless we have a community consensus on a single approach that all articles must use - and we aren't there now. Until that happens, this is the best way to avoid endless edit-warring over optional preferences. Nikkimaria (talk) 01:40, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

  Perhaps you mean {{cite ...}} (cs1) v. {{citation}} (cs2) since {{cite}} redirects to {{citation}}. We should make the distinction between the cs1 templates and {{citation}} because they render differently:

  Author (2016). Title. Publisher. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help) – {{cite book}}

  Author (2016), Title, Publisher {{citation}}: |author= has generic name (help) – {{citation}}

  The cs1|2 templates have |mode= which allows cs1 to render in the same fashion as cs2 and vice versa so that the reader does not know that there are differences in the coding.

  —Trappist the monk (talk) 11:06, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

it's a choice that someone has to make at some point in the article's development There are two problems with this: (1) allowing "someone" to make a choice is pure WP:OWN (2) as noted below, coding style often needs to change with article length, so a choice made at one point should not be privileged over choices made later. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:12, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

"it's a choice that someone has to make" is a simple statement of fact: if you are the first person to add a reference to an article, you obviously must make some sort of decision about how you are going to format that reference, since there is no mandatory style. As for your point (2), no, it doesn't need to change. You might prefer using different formatting for longer articles vs shorter, but it's perfectly possible to keep it the same. Nikkimaria (talk) 15:33, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

• Yes, coding is an important aspect of style for editors and I agree with Nikkimaria — until we have templates that can invoke styles through a style=-parameter — it is important that we don't allow arbitrary changes by saying "coding is not style". ~99% of so called "code-cleanup" consists of wasteful edits which only intend to inflate edit-counts of the editors who perform them. CFCF 💌 📧 14:24, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

• Yes, coding is part of style. The reason we have WP:CITEVAR is to avoid situations where people are discouraged from contributing by being forced to use unfamiliar citation styles. Coding differences is probably the most significant deterrent from contributing. Changing for example simple inline short references (Johnson 2001:59), to linked ones using the harv template creates the same visual output style, but the second forces the editor to learn much more wikimarkup. WP:CITEVAR just needs to be respected. This of course does not mean that you cant change <ref>M</ref> to <ref name=M> (which I think is basically the same style and requires the same level of expertise), but it does mean that if someone takes exception to that choice you need to go to the talkpage and argue your case.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 18:59, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

  @Maunus: Funnily enough if you make coding part of style sensu CITEVAR, then no-one can add "(Johnson 2001:59)" to a {{Harv}} based article, causing precisely the deterrent you want to avoid. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 21:27, 31 March 2016 (UTC).
  

Yes, they can. Someone else will subsequently change it to the articles preferred format. What they cant do is editwar or wikilawyer to make sure that their preferred citations style is enforced over the preferences of other editors.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 21:49, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

• Yes. Coding is part of how citations are written. In fact, CITEVAR's origins go back to preventing editors from forcing citation templates onto manual cites. I don't use citation templates, so when I edit articles where templates are used, I add manual refs in a style that copies the style the templates use. But I fully expect someone to convert those refs to templates, because the preference of the first major contributor, or whoever is most active on the page, is for templates. Similarly, when manual cites are dominant, I expect those who prefer templates not to impose them. SarahSV ^(talk) 02:03, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

See next subsection. For everyone who's taking the reflexive position – based on the intent in an old discussion and pretty much nothing else, least of all whether the rationale behind that intent made any sense at all and wasn't just more WP:OWNish territorialism, and whether current consensus cares what the original idea was – there's just as many people providing frankly pretty obvious rationales for why it cannot actually be that code = style.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  23:28, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

• Yes, per several of the comments above. For the articles I've worked on, I can't remember a situation where I've argued against a proposed coding change, but for the reasons given above I think it should not be done unilaterally. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:54, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

• Yes: this is another aspect of the relatively arbitrary choices which must be made when creating (or whatever) an article and all of the relevant guidelines (and whatever) which deal with such arbitrary choices – WP:RETAIN, WP:ENGVAR, WP:CITEVAR – stress the importance of content stability and consistency within an article. They also say that when there is an objective reason for a change then that is allowed within normal evolution of consensus.

  An example of this would be a stub article with four "vanilla" web page references (<ref>...</ref>) being expanded to an article with 25 inlines referring to various page ranges in a dozen books, plus a few web references. In this case it makes obvious sense to start using Harvard-style references at least for the books and it would be proper for the person adding the new content to decide how to do that while updating the article.

  If an article is obviously (as evidenced by its inconsistencies) not being maintained, then I see nothing wrong with anybody who is prepared to tidy it up deciding how they want to do that, which would then become the reference for any "which style" or "stability" consideration.

  Nothing forces editors to follow the existing style slavishly, although it is considerate to try to do so as much as practicable. The expectation of stability and consistency does however, define the acceptable direction of any subsequent tidying up.

  Not all editors put the same emphasis on such tidiness, but there can be no harm in allowing those for whom it is important to address those issues as long as they do so tactfully.

  We are also expected to respect the contributions of our fellow editors. That absolutely precludes allowing every new editor who starts working on an article to rewrite it in the new editor's preferred style. Apart from any issue of stability this is a matter of common courtesy. --Mirokado (talk) 23:07, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

• Of course it is. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 07:56, 16 May 2016 (UTC)
• Yes - per Sarah. Ealdgyth - Talk 13:24, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

No, coding is not part of style

• Style is what readers see. Code is how we make that happen, and the exact methods for doing this change over time. Furthermore, the attempts by certain editors to prevent other editors from improving citation markup, without changing the rendered style of the citations, violates WP:EDITING, WP:OWN, and WP:NOTBUREAUCRACY policies; no one needs permission to do coding cleanup. It would also interfere with various bot and AWB work; is an unreasonable burden on other editors (to remember which tiny handful of editors out of our many thousands believe that no one is allowed to touch "their" cite coding); is not practical (citation coding requirements change over time, and thus must be updated whether their "owner" understands or not). And it's against the WP:5P ("mercilessly edited") and WP:COMMONSENSE principles. Among many other reasons covered in more detail in #Instruction creep in WP:CITEVAR, above, the most obvious being WP:CREEP.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  22:03, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
• Clearly, otherwise every change to a Cite template would result in mass bannings and nuclear war. Moreover many improvements have made parameters obsolete. Many editors do not know how to use Cite templates, and welcome others improving their referencing. Some of us are not allowed to use things like "refill" and rely on others applying it.
  There are enough restrictions on who can edit and what they can do already, without making minor changes in references yet another prohibition.
  All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 18:55, 27 March 2016 (UTC).
  
• The best solution to problems of this kind is to gain community consensuses on the largely inconsequential details that we spend so much time arguing about, and codify those consensuses in the guidelines so that we are all on the same page. Except for the few who refuse to follow a guideline, even on such trivial details, because they disagree with it and "it's only a guideline", that solution would put an end to the arguing.
  For example, we should be able to reach a consensus that a refname should be meaningful. And we should be able to reach a consensus on preferred parameter formatting within a citation template. There is no merit in an argument that such decisions should be left to local consensus because, for example, some articles might need a space before the separator character while others might be better served by no space there; these are cases where one size could in fact fit all.
  The common argument against such guidelines, CREEP, is easy to defeat. Guidelines are justified when they discourage editors from spending a vast amount of time arguing about relatively unimportant things. A legitimate function of guidelines is (or should be) the elimination of bikeshed opportunities. The guiding principle should be sensible use of editor resources—not individual freedom of expression.
  Another opposing argument, that it would make it more difficult to learn editing, is also fallacious. No editor would be forced to conform, and no editor would be chastised if they did something "wrong", but they should not object when "their" coding is modified to conform by someone else (preferably with a link to the guideline in the editsum). Again, no time wasted arguing about it.
  I see no other good solution to the problems addressed in this RfC, but to corrupt the intent of CITEVAR would be a step in the wrong direction. ―Mandruss ☎ 09:23, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

  In that example I like meaningful ref names. But I would not object to someone improving an article by naming references with "ref1" etc.. Someone else can add meaning later (if they want to). However someone changing "BBC" to "Ref1" would get a "stern look".

  I think that means I agree with you.

  All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 23:02, 29 March 2016 (UTC).
  

• Seems a bit superfluous at this point. If I edit a page with the VisualEditor, I end up inserting citations which are "styled differently" from those on the page currently without thinking about the current style or knowing that I'm inserting a variant. Likewise I am very skeptical of proposals which would hem in our ability to update references to templates (or some future tool) by invoking a longstanding policy that was developed for (largely) different purposes. Protonk (talk) 16:27, 10 April 2016 (UTC)
• Taking the opinion that "coding is a part of style" (or vice versa) seems a bit black and white. For example, VisualEditor currently moves parameters around when you edit a citation. Should I take that to mean that VE is broken in some way, or that it's editing in non-compliance with CITEVAR? Rich's comment above, wherein a change to an established template citation method is applied, makes the answer painfully obvious. No, that result would plainly be ludicrous. I find myself most in-agreement with the notion that "it's clearly not a part of style at a 'low level'", but that it may be a part of style at a "higher level". By "higher level", I mean the distinction between CS1/2/published X style/unpublished Y style. I am not sure about the question of whether e.g. changing a "bare" Harvard reference to a "linked Harvard reference using {{sfn}}" would be more likely to be "low level style" or "high level style"--You've already made the choice to use Harvard style referencing. This decision itself was a style decision and seems clearly to me to be a "high level" style choice. But at the next level, to choose whether to use templates or not? Not so clear. If you were to ask me? {{sfn}} looks like a pain to manage compared to an un-templated reference. But I prefer using general CS1 when I don't have a citation for the same work repeated. Hmm. --Izno (talk) 21:17, 14 April 2016 (UTC)
• This position makes the most sense to me. As long as the visible appearance doesn't change, replacing manual markup with templates should be unproblematic. (I would argue against changes in the other direction, but not on the basis of CITEVAR.) For that matter, expanding references with additional useful information in the same general style (e.g. adding dois to journal references) should also not count as a change in citation style. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:54, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Partly, some aspects of coding are relevant, others not

• I am a strong advocate of using templates for citations. They are simpler to use, consistent in rendered appearance and facilitate the generation of metadata. I would favour a change in policy that favoured the widespread and general conversion to templates, on the grounds that they are objectively better. That said, I know that some editors oppose their use. I see, at minimum, a need to separate the question of whether to use templates from some other questions about their more subtle use.

There are (at least) two other issues of whitespace, formatting and layout that have no effect on the rendered page and for one of them is only of strong relevance within the templated context anyway. Despite that, both have been contentious of late. These are the use of {{Reflist|refs= ...}} and also the layout of parameters to a citation template, either in-line or per-line, and with or without whitespace. Whatever is (if anything) decided about conversions to and from templates overall, we should separate out these changes as clearly being, "minor changes that affect neither rendered behaviour, nor the overall use or not of templates".

As to our behaviour over these changes, then I see that there is very little reason to prohibit changes in either direction, other than a general reluctance against churn or edit-warring. As they are so inconsequential to the finished result, there can be little strong reason to favour one over the other. For the use of lists of refs in particular, this is likely to become more attractive as an article grows in size. The current view that "preserving the status quo is all that matters" is deeply unhelpful here. Andy Dingley (talk) 02:12, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Agreed. I would modify my own comment above with the suggestion that these matters might be something we want to have guidance on, but it/they must be separated out from the style issue. The problem is that we have a guideline on not changing from AMA to Harvard style (or whatever). Some people separately want to also not change from LDR to entirely-inline references, or (when inline) from horizontal to vertical or (when LDR) from vertical to horizontal. These are not style matters, they're coding standards. But by shoe-horning them into the sentence on style (what the reader sees) it opens the unintentional back door of people editwarring to the death other whether you can change their <ref name=Washin_08/> [or worse – I see crap like <ref name=_39xps#p8/> with increasing frequency] to <ref name="Washington 2008" />. The present situation is untenable, robbing Peter to pay Paul by defending one kind editwarring to prevent another.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:02, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Agreed. We need to separate out the different issues. In particular, a coding style for a short article, however long-standing, is often not appropriate for a longer article, particularly when the same sources are used repeatedly. It's unacceptable that a coding style adopted when an article first ceases to become a stub is then imposed on editors when the article undergoes a major expansion; it can discourage them from expanding the article. (I've a short list of articles I won't work on because of encountering this issue.) On the other hand, there are different ways of dealing with referencing in long articles (e.g. using the sfn family of templates or not), and flipping between them isn't helpful, which is why I say the issues need to be separated out. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:06, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

If editors working on an article think that, as it grows, a different coding style would be an improvement, all that they need do is hold a brief talk page discussion to establish that that is the new consensus for the article. What should not happen is for one editor to decided that he knows better than all other editors and make a wholesale change without consulting other editors who work on the article. What is even less desirable is edit wars over coding style. The point of CITEVAR is to prevent such edit wars, and prevent such unilateral undiscussed changes. But if a change is clearly an improvement, then obtaining consensus to change should be quick and easy, If it isn't so easy, maybe its status as an improvement isn't so clear. DES ^(talk) 16:09, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Or maybe there's a small group of editors with fixed views and a sense of ownership. The point is that most articles have few editors working on them so a local consensus builds up. That's why we need project-wide guidance. Peter coxhead (talk) 18:30, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes. The key problem here is the "other editors who work on the article" sentiment, the WP:VESTED / WP:OWN belief that whoever has put in more time at a particular article has "tenure" at it and must be obeyed or at least deferred to. This is an un-wiki and anti-policy viewpoint that needs to be scrubbed away vigorously and with strong solvents until no trace remains.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  21:16, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

Whereas the idea that who ever manages to get their preference encrusted in the MOS has the moral right to make everyone else conform to their wishes on any detail of writing and presentation is profoundly wikipedian? People who are WP:VESTED in their WP:OWN citation preferences are no less WP:VESTED than those who happen to WP:kNOW about a topic and therefore take a special interest in writing about it and like to have some say about how that knowledge is represented.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 23:59, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

@Maunus: No-one is suggesting imposing a single visible uniform citation style, and I would be strongly opposed if they did. The main issue is whether WP:CITEVAR should give the first main contributor even more control in even more detail over the internal coding of referencing, which is quite a different matter. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:22, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

In fact I think, lots of people are waiting for any sign that citevar is loosing consensus to do just that. It is not about "more" control, since the difference between hand formatted and coded referencing is in fact the original context for wp:citevar. Of course the same rules should apply to the case with the difference between <ref> tags and {{sfn|}} cites for example. There just is no reason why anyone's preference for one or the other should overrule the first style that is systematically used in an article. Changes to citation coding can always be changed through normal talkpage consensus. But as long as it is one persons preference vs. the preference of another, then of course it makes sense to use WP:CITEVAR as a grandfather clause.·maunus · snunɐɯ· 18:07, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Nice conspiracy theory there. What "lots of people"? Ping them, and let's see if they agree with the way you've characterized them. 23:30, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

• IMO coding normally should not be "style" as far as WP:CITEVAR is concerned, although stopping edit wars over the templates-vs-manual question is clearly a plus-good side effect.
  All of this guideline, including the CITEVAR section, ought to be built upon the sensible, practical "do your best" standard that is introduced in the lead, rather than the "Shame on you for violating a guideline!" attitude that some editors show. Interested editors can improve the formatting later if that's needed. The important point is to be able to figure out what the source is. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:24, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: yes, a very sensible view, but the problem is with interested editors can improve the formatting later – there simply isn't agreement on what "improve" means. I think that if an article uses Harvard style references, it's an improvement to make these wikilink to the full citation; other editors dislike the blue colour this produces and don't think it's an improvement, and so use WP:CITEVAR to prevent wikilinking (see the long discussions at Talk:Ancient Roman pottery if you want an example). There's no way of reconciling these two positions. Peter coxhead (talk) 06:32, 20 April 2016 (UTC)

Your example changes the appearance as perceived by a non-editing reader, and therefore is not a question of "coding" at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:07, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: your comment illustrates how WP:CITEVAR leads to instruction creep and restrictions quite absent elsewhere. No-one would say that you can't add appropriate wikilinks to article text, yet WP:CITEVAR is interpreted to mean that you can't add wikilinks to citations. Note that by this logic, if I create an article and do not include any author links in the citations (and as it happens I personally dislike them), then I can object to others adding them later since this will change the "visible style". How is this helpful to readers? Peter coxhead (talk) 08:55, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Does this page (WP:CITE) require author links? If so, then you can certainly add them. If not, then there is no consensus that they do help readers. The implicit argument you are making is that the change you want to make (e.g. adding author links) will help readers. But everyone thinks that the changes they make will help readers, so that is really no argument at all. The truth is that usually these things make very little difference. If something is important enough that it should be done everywhere, it should not be too difficult to get consensus to add it to the guideline, at which point CITEVAR would not apply. — Carl (CBM · talk) 10:09, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

@CBM: sorry, I don't quite understand your point. Mine is to ask why adding relevant wikilinks to an article is always allowed, but adding relevant wikilinks to citations is treated as violating WP:CITEVAR (whether they are links to authors, journals, book titles, publishers, or whatever). If WhatamIdoing's interpretation above is correct, then an editor would need to seek consensus at the article talk page before adding wikilinks to citations if none were already present and an editor objected. I don't believe that WP:CITEVAR should have this authority. Do you? Peter coxhead (talk) 15:19, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Your commentary is confusing because you are conflating adding wikilinks within citations (eg. to author or publisher articles elsewhere on Wikipedia) with adding links from short to long citations within an article (ie. harvlinks, however these are done). Nikkimaria (talk) 17:57, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

@Nikkimaria: why is this "confusing"? The objection to adding wikilinks from short to long citations within an article is that it makes the citations look different – part of them will then be blue. Adding wikilinks from within a citation to anywhere (either a section in the same article or a different article) makes the citations look different – part of them will be blue or even red. The interpretation offered above is that making citations look different is against WP:CITEVAR and so needs consensus. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:58, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

But the two are still different issues, and one might reasonably object to one change but not the other (we are, after all, in a section devoted to arguing that some format changes are against CITEVAR and others are not). Conflating the two in this way only further confuses the discussion. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:30, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Of course one might object to one change but not the other. But that's not the issue. The issue is whether CITEVAR can be used to support such an objection. If all visible changes to citations are covered by CITEVAR, then it necessarily covers adding wikilinks to citations. If you want CITEVAR to cover adding wikilinks from short to long citations, but not from citations to articles/sections, then it needs to be written differently. I think it should not cover either case. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:35, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

But it does, and you've already explained why - because there isn't agreement about what it means to "improve" a citation. An argument could be made that wikilinking is governed by MOS and harvlinking by CITE, but if there's disagreement you'll end up needing to discuss either way. Nikkimaria (talk) 11:27, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Well, we agree on how the current CITEVAR can be interpreted. I want to change it, so that it protects a much more limited range of major choices of citation style, not details like blue vs. black text. "Discussions" under CITEVAR are, in my experience, usually unhelpful, since CITEVAR is essentially based on preference – I like it this way, you like it that way, but I got here first/I have more friends here than you do. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:43, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

One could say the same about pretty much any style discussion where the guideline leaves room for interpretation. If you think linking short cites to long is always an improvement, then as CBM suggested you could open a broader (not article specific) discussion to gain consensus to put that in the guideline. Nikkimaria (talk) 11:54, 22 April 2016 (UTC)

Extended discussion of the Style RFC

• It doesn't really matter whether the use of citation templates is "part of style" or not. The key point is that there has never been consensus for either of these two options: (1) all citations should be converted, over time, to use citation templates; (2) all citations should be converted, over time, to not use citation templates. Because there is no general agreement over whether to use citation templates, the guideline here is neutral about the use or non-use of templates, and at the same time the guideline here discourages users from converting articles that are well-established with or without templates from being randomly "switched" to the other method. Even if citation templates are "not part of style", the guideline would still explicitly say not to change articles from one method to another, at least not without gaining consensus that the current method is inappropriate for the needs of the article. That fact is really what should be discussed at the RFC; the question about what is "really" a "part of style" is mostly irrelevant. — Carl (CBM · talk) 22:18, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

• @CBM: the October 2015 addition is concerned with the placement of citation templates, not whether they should be used or not, and so goes well beyond "templates or not". The current wording is used to defend all kinds of "coding style", such as whether the parameters to templates are placed on separate lines or not. What absolutely needs to be discussed is what counts as "style", and how to prevent continual creep of the guidelines. Peter coxhead (talk) 22:42, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
• As WP:CITEVAR says that what should not be changed without consensus is "style" the question of what requires a consensus discussion to change is the question of what constitutes "style" unless we opt to change how CITEVAR is worded. The real question here is what things require a local consensus in advance to change. DES ^(talk) 22:46, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
• I think that SMcCandlish is badly mistaken is several points made in the "no" section above. An insistence that coding style as well as rendered style be RETAINED, and not changed without consensus, is not a violation of WP:OWN It does not privilege any one editor, what it does privilege is the established stable style, if one exists. Anyone may change it after obtaining consensus, no one may change it without doing so, not even the "first major contributor". Nor does it require remembering "which tiny handful of editors out of our many thousands believe that no one is allowed to touch "their" cite coding" because it applies equally to every editor's cite coding, or more exactly, to every article's existing consistent coding style, where one does exist. Neither bots nor AWB users should be making automated or semi-automated changes that change such a style -- they might well make changes to move inconsistent, more recently added cites to the pre-existing style of the article. That will require a good algorithm to determine that style, or else use of human judgement to filter the list of articles to be worked on. But that is probably a good idea anyway. As this has been understood by many editors (and I argue has been the accepted albeit not unopposed consensus) for years, this is not CREEP, it is merely clarifying an existing guideline. DES ^(talk) 22:57, 26 March 2016 (UTC)
  • It absolutely privileges any one editor, namely a) the first major contributor who believes they have WP:VESTED editorial rights (a falsehood perpetuated by the wording in this page, and often vigoriously defended by wikilawyering by various people who defend that anti-policy wording), or b) any random editwarrior who wants to over-control every aspect of a squatted-on article which pretty much no one else cares about, but which some gnome tried to improve before stepping on the hidden land mine that the page has a would-be owner. These are the two most common cases I encounter. I believe they're also among the cases Peter coxhead runs into, though I think his major concern is orthogonal to my main one, being only one of my secondary ones: people resisting LDR formatting without any actual rationale for their stonewalling, just an "I don't like it" complaint, using the incorrect and anti-policy interpretation of CITEVAR as a system-gaming platform from which to filibuster changes they don't understand or want to resist for the same of opposing change generally, but cannot formulate an actually rational objection to.

    If you have an issue with what a bot or AWB is doing, take it up at the bot and AWB talk pages. There may be a potential problem of an AWB user mistaking a lone case of a citation done one way as the norm in an article actually otherwise done a different way, and mis-normalize to the non-majority style, but this doesn't seem to come up often enough to care about. It seems to cause fewer problems than editor-vs.-editor filibustering of code improvements, which is the reason we're here disputing your view on this.

    A more sensible solution to the whole matter would be to normalize to the majority style in the article (aside from recent changes that altered existing citations). If I come to "your" C-class article you just improved from a stub, and I triple the size of it and the number of citations in it, why should you have any more say over what the citation style is to be now, other than as one editorial voice among all others? I know Curly Turkey takes this view (it's his #1 concern raised about CITEVAR, at any rate), but perhaps it's a different proposal for another time.

    The real point is that whatever the best solution may be, there's definitely not a consensus in favor of the one you prefer, or there would not be so much dispute about this. "I get my way pretty often in bitter fights, and people give up because I fight to the end" is the approach too many have taken to this. It is not evidence of consensus, but of tendentious possessiveness that everyone rolls they eyes about and moves on because its petty and a waste of time. Ask yourself: How does preventing Peter Coxhead from using LDR in this article, or even preventing Jane Doe from using APA references in this article instead of Vancouver ones, for that matter, help the reader? Ask yourself also this: If this provision was enacted to prevent editorial disputes but is just leading to a long-term and increasingly dug-in editorial dispute of a broader nature, how well is it working? We tried it for a while, for lack of anything better to try, and it has not worked well. There's an old saying that the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing but expect different results. So, let's not be crazy. Is broke, do fix it.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  00:16, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Just to clarify: my particular examples were ukiyo-e and comics, wher I completely scrapped what was there are rewrote the articles from scratch. This is not SMcCandlish's example of "If I come to 'your' C-class article you just improved from a stub, and I triple the size of it and the number of citations in it". I don't necessarily disagree with SMcCandlish, but it's not really the same as my situation. My point was that it would be merely disruptive and WP:LAWYER-ly to force the previous ENGVAR (assuming there was one) on an article that was completely rewritten from scratch. Curly Turkey 🍁 ¡gobble! 11:15, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification; I wasn't meaning to mis-analogize your cases. We are arguing the same point, I think. The wikilawyering about forcing the previous CITEVAR (or, rather, against introducing a consistent one or a better one) after major article improvement is what brings me to this discussion in the first place. I never have trouble with people over citation formatting except when expanding a poor, barely-above-stub article, and thereby rousing some page "owner" from a year or three ago who starts using every excuse they can think of to put the article back to their perfect version. I've also seen (and experienced) it used in a hounding manner by editor A who has a personal beef with editor B, following B around article after article in a particular topic area in which A desires control and desires B's absence, using CITEVAR as a bogus revert excuse, just another way to may life difficult for B at "A's own" articles. This can be particular destructive, given the habit of some editors of using a revert-all-work-punitively-to-object-to-one-particular-change tactic of editorial participation discouragement. This kind of nonsense is only possible under the "CITEVAR means code not style, despite being written to address style" interpretation.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  21:12, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

So, in lieu of the current policy, we would have some number of completely avoidable edit wars, and a larger number of completely avoidable discussions on talk pages where people waste their time arguing whether LDR is better or worse, rather than working on actual article content. This is the WP:BIKESHED effect spread over thousands of articles. The current guideline has an easy fix: just leave the current style alone. That fix, like ENGVAR, *has* worked well. Very rarely do I see people come around my large watchlist randomly changing citation styles. Almost everyone does what the guideline says. The small number of self-appointed "gnomes" who insist that their preferences should override the preferences of everyone else are usually reasonable enough to cut it out once the fact their their preferences are not actually guidelines is noted. — Carl (CBM · talk) 00:29, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

This isn't a policy. WP:EDITING is the policy. The current guideline is not up for deletion, so I'm not sure what you mean by "in lieu of". What's under discussion here is whether editor A can prevent editor B from improving underlying citation code, in ways that are invisible to the reader, and can filibuster in this way with no rationale at all for the objection other that bible-thumping CITEVAR as if it applied to citation code formatting, not style as it actually says. Editwarring would not magically become permissible all of sudden, under any interpretation. The very fact that editor A in this scenario is gaming a guideline, against policy, to engage in a form of editwarring, however, is a good summary of the problem that brought us here. I'm not sure why you think the bicycle shed and debate problem is in any way improved by the interpretation you seem to favor. The exact opposite is the case. If editor B is making improvements to the citation code that make the article easier to work with, this increases the likelihood that people will work on it, and the efficiency with which they can do so. No one without a real argument is likely to get in the way. However, if there's a perception that CITEVAR allows someone to object to any citation-related alteration of any kind at all, and that they'll get their way if they can stonewall again consensus-forming without a real reason, just CITEVAR by itself – which is precisely the interpretation being advanced – this gives a very strong incentive to WP:OWN / WP:VESTED types to raise as much hell as possible on the talk page, hand-waving at CITEVAR until they are blue in the face, without ever raising a single substantive objection to the changes. If another couple of fans of this interpretation of CITEVAR show up (and they always seem to as if out of the blue ... I wonder why that is, since so few editors actually hold this view?), the over-controller of the citation code will probably WP:WIN, and the article will continue to be their personal playground, and will suffer in quality as a result.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  02:29, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

"If editor B is making improvements to the citation code that make the article easier to work with," then there will be consensus to document those improvements directly into the WP:CITE or WP:MOS guideline, and CITEVAR won't apply. Invariably, the actual issues are with things for which there is *not* a general consensus that they are improvements, such as list-defined references, citation templates, etc. The argument by editor B that they are "improving" the article falls flat in these cases, where editor B is only imposing their own optional preferences over someone else's optional preferences, and there is no consensus that either is better. If the guideline says that either of two options is acceptable, there is no reason to think that changing from one to another is an "improvement". — Carl (CBM · talk) 02:51, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

We're talking past each other, since our concerns about CITEVAR are largely unrelated. I can tell you from a mostly observer perspective (LDR isn't a big issue to me) that most of us have figured out by now that LDR is very helpful in long articles, and not so much in short ones. The exact same thing is true of SFN formatting and splitting references up into two refs sections, short and long. The disputes really are about a) which of these is a better approach, and b) at what point an article needs one of them. The underlying brainfart in CITEVAR, when wrongly applied to cite formatting not cite style, is that it is massive roadblock to ever coming to consensus on these matters at any article at all, because it ossifies the status quo. Secondly, the idea that there is not a broad consensus for templated references is totally untenable, sorry. There are a handful of people who hate them, and that's it. Everyone else uses them, and there is no real controversy in imposing them. I do it very frequently, and have run into people reverting me on that, in over ten years, fewer times than I can count on a single hand. Maybe reversing this situation is important to you in this RfC. Good luck. I have my eye on a more likely outcome: no one has any business reverting me on CITEVAR grounds if they have put in <ref name=7> and I change this to <ref name="Hendricks 2015"> so it's actually helpful and isn't meaningless noise.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:26, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

• SMcCandlish above wrote that CITEVAR, when applied to coding style rather than visible style, ossifies the status quo. If taken to its extremes (which some of those posting here seem determined to do) it does, and so would have prevented some of the recent developments in editing tools and the re-working and improvement of the cite/citation templates. Fortunately, those involved have rightly ignored this extreme interpretation. Peter coxhead (talk) 07:47, 29 March 2016 (UTC)
• The definition of "Style" is given in the section WP:CITESTYLE. The first sentence of WP:CITEVAR states "Editors should not attempt to change an article's established citation style merely on the grounds of personal preference ..."(my emphasis). There is no mention in definition of WP:CITESTYLE about how the style is achieved. Using templates is a method for achieving a style, but templates are not a style in their own right. In other words using {{citation}} or {{cite book}} introduce a slightly different style, because of differences such as the seperator, but {{citation|mode=cs1}} changes the style to that of {{cite book}} and such usage does not introduce a different style. Style should be put back in its box and be used as was always intended, to prevent changes from footnoted inline long citations to footnote inline short citations (or vice versa), or from inline bracketed citations to footnoted citations. Those are changes in style the use of templates does not affect such things. -- PBS (talk) 06:41, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

I agree with you, but it's clear that many (if not most) of those commenting here do not. Whether there is any way to hold a wider discussion and reach consensus, I don't know, but I'm beginning to fear that we are stuck with the very broad interpretation of "cite style". Peter coxhead (talk) 08:40, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

• Templates such as {{EB1911}} apart from hiding the complexities of linking to Wikisource also add categories that are useful for maintenance, article development and checking attribution. The linking to Wikisource from within a template allows for easy changing of the path in one place if the path to the article changes on Wikisource. The same is true with other templates which provide a link to external sources. If the external path changes then a change to one template fixes the problem in all the article that use such a template instead of having to run a bot job to do the same thing (see for example {{cite SEP}} and {{Cite DCB}} for two templates where such changes have been made). In such case using templates such as these is not "merely on the grounds of personal preference". However if these templates are used is it reasonable for other to insist that the other citations in an article should not for example continue to insist that the year of the publication comes at the end of a hand-crafted citation or does that mean insisting or retaining a style "merely on the grounds of personal preference"?-- PBS (talk) 06:41, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

However, such templates must provide for at least the choice between CS1 and CS2 styles, and not all do, which means that they are not acceptable in some articles. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:40, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Those that wrap around standard citation can easily be modified. Those that do not can usually be modified quite quickly. The exception are those that use {{Cite wikisource}}. That would be a much larger job. I can think of an elegant LUA solution but that is best discussed elsewhere. If you come across any templates that need mode added let me know and i'have a go at adding it. -- PBS (talk) 12:04, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

• The elephant in the room is change. When a language is selected for spelling purposes, it does not mean that the names of entities can not change, indeed we encourage the usage of modern names in WP:AT eg Myanmar. What we are doing is saying use British or American spelling or whatever are to be used and so far spellings such as color/colour have not altered, but if they do presumably we will update the wording (as is often done for archaic words and phases imported from a PD source). But citations are not like that because over the years citation templates have become used more and more. Millions of articles were created before templates were commonly used so WP:CITEVAR is being used by some to support a status quo ante, and it is time this stopped. There are numerous advantages to using templates so using them is not a "personal choice", they do not in themselves introduce a style. The use by editors should not be mandated, but altering citations to use templates should not be reverted "merely on the grounds of personal preference". -- PBS (talk) 06:41, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

No, it shouldn't, but it will continue to be, whatever you or I think, since this is how WP:CITEVAR is interpreted by those that wish to enforce minor details of their preferred style and coding. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:40, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Identifying the actual concerns and their validity

This RfC is basically a false dichotomy and we're talking past each other a lot because many of our concerns are tangential to those of others. I can identify at least all of the following issues (not all of which are valid) in the above discussions, and feel free to add more. Some are clearly much more legitimate than others, and it's pretty obvious that there's a culture clash here between GA/FA-focused editors and stub-expansion editors, both of which camps feel they're doing more important work than the other.

1. There are concerns that undiscussed changes of style (i.e. visual display) of citations in an article may be disruptive of article stability. (This is alleged to affect both readers and editors.)
2. There are concerns that undiscussed changes of certain kinds of coding standards (article-wide formatting) of citations in an article may be disruptive of article stability. Examples include WP:LDR, WP:SFN, and the conversion to or stripping of templated citation formatting. (This is a different analysis, and largely on affects particular editors who like or dislike particular code approaches, though removal of template citations also destroys metadata and introduces maintenance problems.)
3. There are concerns about WP:GAMING by using the pretense that undiscussed changes of trivial code formatting (a third category of change, affecting a particular cite, set of cites, or use of particular templates) may supposedly be disruptive of article stability, without any plausible rationale to support such a notion.
4. There is a dispute (thus the RfC above) about whether these concerns should be commingled as if identical despite raising different potential problems in different circumstances, or treated separately for clarity (or even at all, in the case of code).
5. There are concerns about misuse of CITEVAR to prevent coding-standards changes (the article-wide sort) that are needed for editorial efficiency, on the basis that it's "change in style", a disputed claim.
6. There are concerns that over-extension of CITEVAR's scope enables furtherance of interpersonal disputes between editors by providing a "weapon" for revertwarring over trivia, to the detriment of community peace, article quality, and maintainability.
7. There are disputes about which citation style (i.e. visual display) is most appropriate for a particular article, often tied to what is done in journals in the field to which the article's scope most pertains (though there can often be more than one, thus many of these disputes).
8. There are disputes about whether WP should be importing external styles, and they feel we should stick with WP:CS1. (There does appear to be consensus to permit these styles.)
9. There are disputes about whether WP should be permitting made-up styles that are neither CS1 [including CS2, now handled by CS1 templates, and increasingly merging], nor a recognized, documented style found in professional literature. (There is a local consensus at this page to permit this, but it has not actually be subjected to a site-wide consensus discussion. Given WP's hostility to "made up nonsense" it is actually unlikely that the community really supports the idea that fake citation styles cannot be changed without a big discussion, even if it would support the idea that citations may be added in any form as long as they're usable.)
10. There are disputes about which citation-grouping coding standards (invisible to the user) are best for editors, at a particular level of article development, or when the use of WP:LDR or WP:SFN is warranted.
11. There are disputes about which citation template-layout coding standards (horizontal vs. vertical) are best for editors, depending on citation placement. (In reality, we know from experience that horizontal works best for full citations when used inline, since it does not interfere with the ability to understand that paragraph structure of he document, and that vertical works best when full citations are grouped at page bottom, via either SFN or LDR, since it makes the citation details easier to parse and each cite easier to distinguish from the next.)
12. There are disputes about which citation template parameter-spacing coding standards are best for editors. (In reality we know that: 1) in horizontal cites, {{cite foo |para1=value1 |para2=value2 |...}} is the vast-majority usage and that weird formatting like {{cite foo | para1 = value1 | para2 = value2 | ...}}, or {{cite foo| para1= value1| para2= value2| ...}} is cleaned up on sight as a parseability problem, with virtually no one ever reverting it; and 2) aligning = characters in vertical templates is common but not enforced, and also virtually never reverted.)
13. There are concerns about misuse of the "consistent" provision to game the system by adding a few cites in a different style then claiming the style is inconsistent and imposing a new one. (See below for a tool that could short-circuit such behavior, if it's actually even happening.)
14. There are disputes about expectations that an editor who did more work at an article – a) to get it past stub stage, b) in total, or c) recently – has more say about what citation style is to be used, what citation coding standards are employed, and what citation cleanup tweaks are permissible. (Policy does not support either of the first two cases – see WP:EDITING, WP:OWN and associated pages like WP:5P and WP:VESTED – and seems to favor the latter, since all of WP is built and maintained by the WP:CONSENSUS of who is doing the work now, not who was around in 2007, and consensus can change at any time. Further, the "first major contributor" rule was determined to be problematic at MOS and removed, further evidence of consensus against the first of these "control criteria". Nevertheless, we have a long-standing proviso site-wide that in the event of a dispute and its failure to reach resolution, preserve the status quo ante.)
15. There are concerns that even the "first post-stub revision to introduce a style" rule, which replaced "first major contributor", may interfere with our normal status quo ante rule.
16. There are concerns that despite attempts to resolve this WP:CONLEVEL conflict that people are still incorrectly interpreting CITEVAR (and WP:ENGVAR, WP:DATEVAR, WP:TITLEVAR) as "I did it this way, so you can't change it" WP:OWNership rules, when in fact they were intended as last-resort default when no other solution can be reached.
17. There is a dispute about CITEVAR and other style-related material in WP:CITE being a WP:POVFORK from WP:MOS, and how to reintegrate them to prevent further conflict.

I think the causes of this fracture are: Firstly, GA and FA tend to give a lot of deference to whoever worked the most on an article (this is a choice by the participants at those processes, and is not a WP policy matter when it comes to who may edit and how). Secondly, some WP:MOS-focused editors, early on, resisted the use of external citation styles that do stylistically unusual things like using smallcaps extensively; but none of the current MoS regulars seems to care any longer, so this rift is illusory and only being maintained by WP:CITE regulars.
 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:26, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

I think per point 4, the point-by-point analysis suggests that there should really be multiple RFCs. The RFC above doesn't say "making refnames understandable and converting between templated/untemplated citations are the same", it says "CITEVAR covers coding yes/no". We're getting more division on that because of different interpretations of "coding"; if we ran more limited RFCs on some of the individual points above (particularly 1-3), we would get a clearer consensus. Points 7-12 really shouldn't be part of a CITEVAR RFC unless/until a different RFC is run to determine which style is better/preferred/deprecated, because until that point all styles are available on the table. (And I would like to see some citations on some of your interpretation above). Nikkimaria (talk) 19:54, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Right. The point of this exercise is to see what the actual sticking points are, and RfC those separately.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  05:07, 2 April 2016 (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.

Semi-protected edit request on 31 May 2016

In the bulleted example under § Bundling citations, the first line should also be bulleted. 67.14.236.50 (talk) 04:57, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

Not done: please establish a consensus for this alteration before using the {{edit semi-protected}} template. Looking into the issue, I'm not sure it makes sense to attempt to fix it, as any user attempting to replicate would have a bit of a fun time doing so. Izno (talk) 11:18, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 31 May 2016

In § Citing multiple pages of the same source, the text

The use of ibid., Id. (or similar abbreviations) is discouraged, …

should read either

The use of ibid. or Id. (or similar abbreviations) is discouraged, …

or

The use of ibid., Id., or similar abbreviations is discouraged, …

67.14.236.50 (talk) 04:36, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

This one seems okay on its face, but I'm not a grammarian. --Izno (talk) 11:20, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

Done. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:16, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

Regarding how page= (and the like) are rendered

reference info for Copyright status of work by U.S. subnational governments

unnamed refs	0
named refs	0
self closed	0
explanations

I think it would be good if the page (or other location) info (as is currently sometimes given using {{Rp}}) when rendered, appeared twice - both in the References section and where the reference is cited. (Perhaps this is perennially discussed? RFC?) It currently just appears in the latter location, and I find I often don't notice it there. I think it should appear in the References section, or at least the References section should have some indication that there is page/loc data for the source. Thoughts? Clear or should I provide examples? Implementation ideas? --Elvey^(t•c) 19:09, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

I don't understand what it is you want, it would be great if you could provide an example.. Carl Fredik 💌 📧 19:44, 19 May 2016 (UTC) (revised)

I just read Template:Rp#Function, which makes it clear to me that there's consensus for a change like this, but the technical implementation is non-trivial. I revised my OP for clarity. Examples: 1)I added (§s cited in article body above) with this edit where I combined references... 2)I like that the section #s appeared in the References, as they did before my edit. 3) What is {{Rp}}? Well, {{rp|at=§313.6(C)(1)}} renders as . --Elvey^(t•c) 20:18, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

What I'm unhappy with, in other words, is that the only way (AFAIK) to have page numbers appear in the References section is to duplicate the references. If the references are combined, the page numbers move up to the article body. My workaround was to put (§s cited in article body above) where I did. I suppose another workaround would be to replace that with the actual §s - but then you have a maintenance nightmare - I don't want the page #s to appear twice in the source. The editorializing at Template:Rp#Function suggsts that there's consensus for a change like this, but the technical implementation is far from trivial.--Elvey^(t•c) 20:37, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

Don't use a named ref to make a "reference" display in multiple locations; use {{harv}} or {{sfn}} to link back to the full citation. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:45, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

J. Johnson (JJ) - You mean change the citation style for the whole article (in this instance Copyright status of work by U.S. subnational governments )? And get consensus, per WP:CITEVAR first? Or are you suggesting something simpler? Please clarify. Your advice seems to be contrary to the rule: "If an article is already using a reasonably consistent type of inline citations, and you want to change the style (either to or from this type), then you should discuss that change on the article's talk page first."--Elvey^(t•c) 17:23, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

That article doesn't really use a consistent citation style methinks. Looks like a mixture of hand-crafted and templated styles.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 18:12, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

Elvey, I am sure you are quite aware of the on-going debate as to whether CITEVAR applies to just the display aspects of citation, or the means of implementation as well. But even assuming the latter, note that my suggestion is in no way "contrary to the rule". The "rule" you refer to in no way a bar to what I suggest, it just says that if a "reasonably consistent" method is already in place (which Trappist is suggesting is not applicable in your example) then you should discuss first before proceeding. Which, even without any rule, would be a basic courtesy of civil editing. Surely you have no objection to the general standard of consensus? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 18:31, 27 May 2016 (UTC)

Actually I was entirely unaware of that debate when I opened this thread. I did notice it after you piped up. Not until you answer my questions, which you sidestepped, shall I entertain yours. --Elvey^(t•c) 04:24, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Crediting image captions

I wasn't sure which venue would be the best one to ask this question at, so I picked this one. I'm also posing this same question at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography. I created an article on Amy Bess Miller fairly recently, and that article includes her bibliography. However, there is another work currently not listed to which Miller contributed. The Shaker Image Second and Annotated Edition includes annotations by Magda Gabor-Hotchkiss, with captions written by Amy Bess Miller and John Harlow Ott. How would I credit this in a bibliography? For the introduction that Miller wrote for the fascimile reprint of The gardener's manual, I just used the "cite book" template and entered "Introduction" into the chapter parameter. But this type of thing I don't think would work in this case. So what would be the solution?--3family6 (Talk to me | See what I have done) 04:10, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

If you used a template, it's usually better to ask at Help talk:CS1. --Izno (talk) 11:17, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Related discussion on CITEVAR

There is an ongoing discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Checkingfax that might be of interest to editors here, As far as I can tell it concerns the question of whether changing the |authors= parameter of the citation templates to split out multiple authors into separate parameters (and in so doing change the formatting of the author lists) counts as a "change of style" that needs a discussion per WP:CITEVAR, or whether this sort of change is just routine cleanup not requiring discussion. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:37, 16 June 2016 (UTC)

Citing Google docs

Which template should be used to cite a spreadsheet on Google docs such as [8]. Also, is there an archive service that works with such links? Abjiklɐm (tɐlk) 11:57, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

You probably shouldn't because there is no way to know by inspection that that spreadsheet meets the requirements of WP:RS and WP:V.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:09, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

I though I might receive an answer like that ;) However, this spreadsheet is linked directly from the official website of the subject itself. Abjiklɐm (tɐlk) 12:27, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Then you could cite the linking page with {{cite web}} and let the reader link to the spreadsheet from there. Citing the spreadsheet standalone is not a good idea. I don't know if docs.google.com will allow it, but perhaps you can save the spreadsheet at internet archive (http://www.archive.org).

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:48, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. Unfortunately docs.google.com has a robots.txt that prevents archiving. Abjiklɐm (tɐlk) 13:18, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Assuming that the subject is considered a reputable source for such information, you would use Template:Cite web. The publisher would be the subject organization and the website would be something like "docs.google.com". The URL would be URL you posted above.- MrX 12:37, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Thank you. And to prevent link rot, do you have a suggestions? Abjiklɐm (tɐlk) 12:41, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Grave Markers

How would I cite a grave marker placed by an official historical society? Would the answer change if a picture of the grave marker is available (personally taken)? jmcgowan2 (talk) 12:22, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

{{cite sign}}?

{{cite sign |title=Andrew Drake |title-link=:File:Gravestone_of_Andrew_Drake.jpg |type=Grave marker |location=Stelton Baptist Church Edison, New Jersey |publisher=Official Historical Society |date=1743}}

Andrew Drake (Grave marker). Stelton Baptist Church Edison, New Jersey: Official Historical Society. 1743.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:46, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Thank you. That worked perfectly. jmcgowan2 (talk) 12:32, 7 July 2016 (UTC)

Wording issues at Template:According to whom

Opinions are needed the following matter Template talk:According to whom#In-text attribution for cited material. As noted, I responded in the section below that one since I wanted my reply to clearly address what is stated in both sections. Flyer22 Reborn (talk) 23:23, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

WP:CITEVAR

I'm sure there's probably a few volumes of material in the archives about this but given my late discovery of it, I'll just post my thoughts and it can get added to any future consensus tallies.

It's unquestionably better to have some citations than no citations. New and academic editors should be welcomed to use parenthetical citation and not be obliged to take introductory courses on {{citation}} syntax.

That said, CITEVAR doesn't seem like ERA or ENGVAR where there isn't a better answer and we have to default to the first major editor as a kludge. Currently we list "Improving existing citations by adding missing information..." and "Combining duplicate citations" as unquestionable improvements. Footnote citations are better than parenthetical citation on both counts. I didn't know about this policy and—amid other improvements—converted the referencing of Morrison's Chinese dictionary. Going from the old parenthetical version to the new footnoted version, there are over 20 duplicate citations that are now combined and every one of the 100+ citations links quickly and helpfully to the full bibliographic record and direct links. The running text of the article now only consists of the running text. Those are all unquestionable improvements in the article that will be undone just as soon as the old editor gets his computer fixed, because of this policy. And they're one of the kind and polite editors, going an hour or so out of their way to revert by hand so as to keep the other improvements.

The reason for the ERA and ENGVAR kludges is to avoid the edit wars of the early years by having a bright line rule. We don't want edit warring here either, but a better bright line rule than what we have is

Parenthetical citation is easier on the writer but footnoted citations are better for the READER and changes in citation style should only go from the former to the latter.

Is there any reason that shouldn't be the policy? Fear that editors who prefer parenthetical citation would take it personally and stop editing because other people are improving their articles for them? Shouldn't not minding that fall under thanking them for their work but counseling them to avoid feelings of OWNERSHIP?

Parenthetical citations work fine in print. We should figure out some way to convert our footnotes into parenthetical citations when we print articles out. That said, Wikipedia isn't a print encyclopedia and it's just not as helpful in general. — LlywelynII 00:13, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

The things you mention are not "unquestionable" improvements. Experience on this page shows that they depend just as much on opinion as the issues in ENGVAR. The purpose of CITEVAR is the same: to avoid pointless edit wars on a topic where there is no general consensus. With that being said: CITEVAR does not apply to advice that is actually contained in this guideline. So, for example, if this guideline said that parenthetical references could not be used, then CITEVAR would not save them. But the reason that this guideline does not specify any firm citation style is that there is no consensus about whether footnotes are better or worse than parenthetical references, whether citation templates should or should not be used, and many other issues.— Carl (CBM · talk) 00:25, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Undated reprints

I have a 12th printing of a 2008 source; there is no date on the printing. If I knew the date of the printing I could use "origdate=2008", but how can I indicate I consulted the 12th printing without a date? If I use the edition field, I'll get "12th printing ed." which is ugly. Typically in a reprint there is no change of text, but that's not a universal rule, so I'd prefer to indicate the printing if possible. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:48, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

Usually a reprinting is identical to the original, so if using citation templates, the parameter would just be |date = 2008. If the front matter of the book indicated it was a corrected reprinting, you might use parameters such as |orig-year = 2008 |date = c. 2012 |edition = 12th corrected reprinting of 1st. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:06, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

OK, thanks. I think I'll go with a version of the second option; I don't know for sure it was corrected, but stating it's a reprint at least tells the reader which printing I used, in case they want to check. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:53, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

To underline the point, it's hard to have a completely hard and fast rule. It might be irrelevant or at least distracting to cite this date, even if you could find it, because what the reader needs to know is the original date of publication in order to judge whether the information is current. It wouldn't make any difference for a reader to look for the 12th printing rather than settle for the 10th. But if it's for the Works Published section of an article on a writer, then it might be useful information about a book's popularity to know that it went through 12 printings.

BTW, you probably know but just in case, you can often (well, more often than not) find info on the number and dates of printings and editions by consulting WorldCat. Most browsers offer a search function in which you can choose WorldCat and get listings to see or download into popular bibliography programs.ch (talk) 17:12, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

Download-only sources

Are download links (PDFs, zip archives, executables, etc.) acceptable in citations? Or else if a source is only available in the form of a file in a zip archive or something, what do we do? I can’t find anything in project space about this, or I don’t know where to look. —67.14.236.50 (talk) 01:54, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Why not? Note that the {{citation}} and {{cite xxx}} templates have the {{para|url]] parameter, which in many cases is the direct download link. Although it should be noted that generally a link to a page that describes the source (such as, say, a journal article) and includes download links is preferable to a link that just (surprise!) dumps it into your lap. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:59, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, the surprise of it is my primary concern. Particularly when the citation makes no reference to the format. —67.14.236.50 (talk) 23:50, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

You want the |format= parameter (at least the cite xxx family has this. if the URL does not end on a clear indicator of format like .pdf, you can add |format=PDF to have it marked as such. Same with ZIP or the like. --MASEM (t) 23:58, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

@Masem: So we can safely cite, for instance, a readme file in a subdirectory of a zip archive, or a DOS-based executable e-zine, if we use |format=ZIP archive in the citation? These are citations I’ve found in articles, and may have removed in a misunderstanding of what’s permitted. —67.14.236.50 (talk) 03:06, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

If it is a README.txt file within a .ZIP, I'd use "|format=ZIP" and for the |title= field, make sure to name "README.txt" in that. That is sufficiently clear to direct the reader to the correct file within the archive. Key of citation templates is to make sure you help identify the source as best as you can. --MASEM (t) 03:09, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

What case should newspaper story titles be in?

reference info for Shania Twain

unnamed refs	127
named refs	72
self closed	70
	1
cs1 refs	185
cs1 templates	185
cs2 refs	17
cs2 templates	20
harv refs	9
harv templates	9
cleanup templates	6
dead link templates	1
webarchive templates	8
use xxx dates	mdy
cs1|2 df ymd	1
cs1|2 dmy dates	3
cs1|2 mdy dates	101
cs1|2 ymd dates	17
cs1|2 last/first	85
cs1|2 author	13
List of cs1 templates cite AV media notes (1) Cite book (2) cite book (3) cite encyclopedia (1) Cite magazine (13) cite magazine (19) Cite news (14) cite news (20) Cite web (26) cite web (86)
List of cs2 templates Citation (16) citation (4)
List of harv templates Harvnb (9)
explanations

The bots all give the case that story uses. MOS:CAPS doesn't offer anything clearly, but I was reverted https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shania_Twain&type=revision&diff=732706594&oldid=732705050 and the usual title case was removed. Walter Görlitz (talk) 03:18, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

There is no Wikipedia-wide standard. You should match the style used in other references in the same article. — Carl (CBM · talk) 10:25, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

Follow the source - use the same case that the newspaper itself used, particularly in a reference. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 11:06, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

If all the existing references in an article use a particular style, the new ones should match that. Capitalization of titles can vary from one citation style to another, so it doesn't work to just see what style each individual source used for itself. — Carl (CBM · talk) 11:18, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

I notice the article in question uses a mixture of hand-formatted cites, cite xxx templates, and the {{Citation}} template. So the article really has no citation style at this point. Perhaps if you look in the article's history you will find the article used to be consistent; if so, use that style. If not, someone should establish a consistent style.

Even if the style ends up being to use cite xxx templates, the documentation for the cite xxx templates, Help:Citation Style 1, only discusses how to use the template parameters to include the title; it contains no guidelines about the capitalization of titles. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:32, 3 August 2016 (UTC)

Citing sources pages

The "See also" section (listed under "How to cite") of this content guideline lists a couple of essays that are generally noted as "Wikipedia how to guide", "Wikipedia how to essay", "Wikipedia information page", some form of "advise page", or at the very least just an "Essay" within the appropriate box but are lacking this.

• Wikipedia:Improving referencing efforts does not contain such a box. Although the page appears to have some good information, and shows to have 36 editors, it contains wording such as "If you don't believe me, don't take my word for it..." and "With this page I hope to spur the discussion", eluding to some unnamed editor.
• Wikipedia:Citing sources/Example edits for different methods

Since they are all essays I suppose I could have just added a box showing that but thought it would be better to seek input. Otr500 (talk) 10:27, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

{{Citation needed}} vs. {{Dubious}}

A discussion has been started at Template talk:Citation needed regarding an apparent conflict between the documentation for the tags {{citation needed}} and {{dubious}} – namely, which to use for statements in articles that are both unsourced and of questionable validity. Wikipedia:Citing sources § Dealing with unsourced material states that either can be used. —Coconutporkpie (talk) 23:24, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

Google translate links

I have started a discussion about the use of Google translate links in citations and external links sections. Please comment there. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:23, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

About WP:PAGELINK

The problem seems to have arisen nearly 6 years ago, when it was decided to link Google Books pages not adding pageurl to titleurl and chapterurl, but distorting the use of titleurl, which since then can also address no longer at the front cover of the books. Personally I solve by placing a link in the page or quote parameter, but an editor disagrees and reverts me. I mean, what do you think of updating the template {{cite book}}? --Mauro Lanari (talk) 04:37, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

Is there any consistent paging system for e-books?

That is independent of screen size/aspect ratio. 72.43.99.146 (talk) 19:33, 10 September 2016 (UTC)

IBID and ref group

Does any have a problem with indicating that ref group is an acceptable use that does not run afoul with WP:IBID. Because, I have an editor that decides because it looks like IBID that it must act the same. But using group tag in references expressly keeps these references together. Thus using ref groups does not break like IBID. You have to expressly go in and break the references by removing the group name to have the problem. Spshu (talk) 13:48, 27 September 2016 (UTC) If any one wish to see the issue is at Defunct Scout and Scout-like organizations in the United States with additional discussion. Spshu (talk) 14:17, 27 September 2016 (UTC)

Please link an example. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:43, 27 September 2016 (UTC)

Jc3s5h, the question involves this version vs this version. scroll down to the references section to see the difference. Frietjes (talk) 14:55, 27 September 2016 (UTC)

I think this is a unique way of using groups; it is not an approach mentioned at Help:Footnotes. Since the article already uses Citation Style 1, a much more typical way to avoid having to repeat a full citation just because different claims are supported by different pages is shortened footnotes. I think using a method that is described by help pages, and for which example articles can be provided, is more desirable. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:09, 27 September 2016 (UTC)

German WP apparently uses this method, but I agree, it would be unique on en.WP. --Izno (talk) 15:21, 27 September 2016 (UTC)

It is an approach mentioned at Help:Shortened footnotes, but is not the code used in the example. Plus, it indicates that is not the only code usable ("Shortened footnotes using harvtxt or harvnb") not that this is the only method. Thus how does Shorten footnotes violate IBID? Spshu (talk) 16:47, 27 September 2016 (UTC)

if you check this version vs this version, you will see that one has the author and year and page number as illustrated in shortened footnotes, the other has only the page number in several cases. Frietjes (talk) 14:13, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

Snopes.com and other releated sites

This might have been addressed, but I wouldn't know where to look. But where would Snopes.com and other such sites fall in terms referencing and citating. Mr. C.C.^{Hey yo!}_{I didn't do it!} 02:04, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

Dead References

On the Blockbuster LLC article, there a number of dead references. Out of couriosity, is there a bot enabled to switch them the archived links in order to save time on doing multiple switches? Mr. C.C.^{Hey yo!}_{I didn't do it!} 20:43, 8 October 2016 (UTC)

Yes there is such a bot. tag the dead refs with one of the shortcuts for {{dead link}} so the bot knows to fix them. Meters (talk) 21:38, 8 October 2016 (UTC)

CITEHOW (Non-English titles)

I would like to make an amendment to CITEHOW to reflect that a translation of a foreign language title into English should be included along with the title. To me it seems commonsense on en WP, but I work in several languages and I think it needs to be stated explicitly. Thoughts? Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 02:31, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

Why? Peter coxhead (talk) 10:29, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

Because editors whose first language isn't English question whether they need to provide a translation of the titles, even at GA, and point to the lack of explicit guidance as a reason not to. Cheers, Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 21:42, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

The |trans-title= parameter is provided on the common "cite ..." templates for an English translation of a title. It supplies the square brackets: Noyster (talk), 09:05, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

CITEHOW doesn't mandate use of templates, so it is important to include the need for a translation. Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 10:15, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

My question was "why provide a translation"? It seems like commonsense to Peacemaker67, but not to me. The purpose of a citation is to provide access to the source. A translation of the title in no way helps with this. Indeed, given that there's no standardized way of translating most titles, it has the potential to create more confusion. When a work is available in both the original and English, then the English version will have a completely different citation. So I repeat, "why?" to the original post. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:46, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

I am talking about sources that are not in English. Readers looking at references shouldn't have to Google Translate the article title to see what it is. Where I edit (Yugoslavia topics), the translated article title can sometimes reveal POV that wouldn't be apparent if the title was just rendered in the original Serbo-Croat. This is English WP, and while using non-English sources is fine, and even encouraged to balance systemic bias, not providing a straightforward translation of the title of a foreign language source seems off to me. Cheers, Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 02:08, 15 October 2016 (UTC)

POV works both ways. Providing a straightforward translation of the title: as a reader who doesn't speak the language in question, how do I know that it's straightforward and accurate? Where's the source for the translation? What does a translation of the title really tell me about the content? I don't object to the provision of a translated title – I sometimes do it myself – but I do object to it being required. Peter coxhead (talk) 07:08, 15 October 2016 (UTC)

It's plainly desirable to have a trans-title when the foreign language is in a script that most readers of English Wikipedia can't read, and probably also when there's any foreign language. We can grant that for the Germanic and Romance languages most readers of scientific articles would likely to be able to guess the drift of a title (and thus whether it could possibly be relevant, is being used as a joke, or, perhaps, to push a POV). In the case of all other languages (at least) it would be "commonsense" as a best practice; whether we really want to mandate it is another matter. Chiswick Chap (talk) 19:49, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

There's a different case, I think, for a transcription when a non-Latin writing system is involved. Mandating rather than facilitating a translation is a step too far, in my view. Peter coxhead (talk) 21:14, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

I'm one of the editors whose first language isn't English. I do work a lot with non-English (Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and German) sources, which I think is an advantage. Relying solely on English-language sources will most often not give a very complete picture, when dealing with subjects which have strong connections to places were English is not the primary language.

As far as translating titles go, I've recently been asked to do that on occasion. I can do that, I don't really mind. It's sort of an interesting task in its own way, although I'm in no way a trained translator. I suppose title translations may help some readers understand what the sources in languages other that English is about. However, titles are not always very descriptive, and I would say that a superior way of figuring out what a book in a language one does not understand is about, is to click the ISBN number, go to WP:Book sources and look at what for example WorldCat says about the book. But I guess many readers will not know about that tool.

As far as access to sources, title translation does not really help. Manxruler (talk) 00:05, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

In most cases, it is obviously helpful to have a translation of the title (e.g. using trans_title), so I think it would be helpful to mention it in such a way that nobody can insist on not including a (correct and sensible) translation (without a good reason). If the editor who adds the source does not feel sufficiently competent, it should be OK to omit the title; even for someone with an excellent command of both languages, titles can be be difficult to translate, or may require an interpretation of the original title. It is obviously not required when there is nothing to translate, e.g. a book called Siegfried and it may be superfluous when the translation is fairly obvious, e.g. a book called Präsident Obama or Tristan und Isolde. On the other hand, even when the only word that needs translating is a definite article, a translation might help prevent confusion, as in Die Simpsons [The Simpsons] or Das Boot[The Boat] (not "The Boot"). The last example may also illustrate one of the problems I mentioned: some translators might prefer to call it something like The Sub or The U-boat if the word boat is not usually used (by itself) for a submarine in English. --Boson (talk) 09:42, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

Title translations should not be mandatory and one thing we should avoid under any circumstance are "This source has no translation, hence I remove it"-scenarios. It is important to remember that the primary purpose of a citation is to provide an exact reference to the source, so that others can look it up if they wish to do so. This can be achieved fine without any title translations.

However pointing out that the option for title translations exists and that some editors/readers consider them desirable or helpful is ok.--Kmhkmh (talk) 10:51, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

I agree with with you, Kmhkmh. Mandatory title translation does not sound like a good idea to me, for reasons I've cited above.

Further, I think that making it more challenging to use non-English language sources will be counter-productive with regards to countering Wikipedia's systemic bias. Manxruler (talk) 15:25, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

There seems to be a consensus that it is desirable, but not mandatory to provide a translation and the language used by the source? Cheers, Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 06:20, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

Is it acceptable to add a note as to clarify something about a citation

When the title of a reference does not quite reflect its contents, is it possible to add a note as to clarify what is in the webpage referencing? For example, if my reference is a Youtube video called "Completing a report card," but in fact the video covers far more topics than how to complete a report card, and among teachers they usually refer to this video as "The generals of grading in High School" is it acceptable to indicate next to the title "(a.k.a. The generals of grading in High School)"?

Mariana.dawe (talk) 15:06, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

I would write a brief description at the end of the citation. I wouldn't write "a.k.a." unless I had a reliable source saying that it was a.k.a. The generals of grading in High School. Jc3s5h (talk) 16:30, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

Journal citation with templates should be preferred

Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Journals cited by Wikipedia is a bot-generated list of journals cited on Wikipedia using the "journal=" parameter of the {{Citation}}, {{Cite journal}}, {{Vancite journal}}, and {{Vcite journal}} templates. It is a useful resource, but citations not based on templates, such as "<ref>J. Smith (2010), ''Journal of Foobar'' '''13'''(7):28–31</ref>" are completely ignored by the compilation. Therefore, I believe that journal citations using citation templates should be preferred, even if an article already uses a consistent system without templates. WP:CITEVAR says, "When an article is already consistent, avoid ... adding citation templates to an article that already uses a consistent system without templates...." In view of the value of Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Journals cited by Wikipedia, I recommend that this provision of WP:CITEVAR be modified, at least for academic journals. —Anomalocaris (talk) 07:38, 28 October 2016 (UTC)

I'm sure you're right, but it will never get consensus. WP:CITEVAR is defended aggressively, including by those who passionately oppose templates. Peter coxhead (talk) 08:28, 28 October 2016 (UTC)

CITEVAR is defended by a small vocal minority. It can be overruled, we just need to let the discussion run long enough that independent comments can be added. Carl Fredrik 💌 📧 08:34, 28 October 2016 (UTC)

Well, if you want to try again over at WP:CITEVAR, I'll support you, but with no expectation of success. Peter coxhead (talk) 09:02, 28 October 2016 (UTC)

If you do that for academic journals you have to do it for everything. The rationale, that it's convenient because right now there is a bot generated list created, is totally unconvincing - how long, I wonder, before that automatic system is changed? The costs of using templates, in terms of complexity, page load time, accessibility and so on far outweigh the minor benefit of adding something to a bot's list that could easily be added in other ways if necessary. Blue Square Thing (talk) 20:45, 5 November 2016 (UTC)

Blue Square Thing: With all due respect, it is your position that is "unconvincing".

• Plain website and newspaper citations, for example, could continue to be done without templates even if we call upon academic journal citations to use templates.
• Templates are not "complex" for Wikipedia. The software knows how to use them.
• Wikipedia does not deprecate templates on grounds of alleged page load time.
• Templates do not add accessibility problems to the general user.
• Many editors, including myself, find the {{cite}} templates make it easier, not harder, to reference, because we don't have to think about how to format entries.
• There is no way of generating and maintaining a current, accurate list of "What journals are cited on what pages of Wikipedia" other than through a bot.

Respectfully, —Anomalocaris (talk) 18:30, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Actually citation templates presumably could set up in such a way that they support different citation styles. This way you can switch to templates without changing the style already used in the article. While I do the see the additional advantages templates can provide, they also can be a nuisance to many other editors and personally dislike them myself. So it is also question of giving productive content a bit leeway to keep them happy (and continuing to provide content). Many autors focus on the primary on specific articles and the encyclopedia but less or not all on other uses and they sometimes get impression that rather the software being a tool for them become a tool for the software which causes frustration.--Kmhkmh (talk) 21:09, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

@Anomalocaris: I imagine we'll continue to disagree about the use of templates, although that in itself tells you something about the issue in general. If I quickly respond to the points you made then it's probably best to not prolong the discussion too far beyond this. If you want to respond then that's fine but I may not reply again here. If you do decide to take this any further then I would certainly appreciate being notified.

• The problem with mandating templates for one kind of reference is that it can only ever end in mandating them for all kinds in all circumstances.
• The software may know how to use them. The problem is users not knowing how to! It seems very common to find cite web being used when it shouldn't be, for example - because it's the first in the list and people assume that if it's on the web then that should be used! Or how many times are fields left out or filled in wrongly?
• The problem with page load times isn't due to depreciated templates - it's due to page load times when templates are used on the site. This discussion develops this a little. It remains an issue for me.
• It's not the standard user who would suffer from accessibility problems. By adding markup you add potential accessibility issues for users who require accessible websites. Those users are in a minority I have no doubt. That's sort of the point though.
• I'm not arguing that you shouldn't use those templates - although there are cases where you should at least try and follow the general style - I see a lot of ignorance of CITEVAR for example - and, indeed, people choosing deliberately to ignore it. I'm happy that refs are there though - the style can be tweaked at some point if it needs to be. I sometimes tell experienced editors what I'm doing but, given the abuse I've generally received from doing so recently, I probably won't bother too much with that.
• I suppose my point here is "so what"? Why do we need that list? Who would ever use it? To me it's much more important that good quality articles are written with good quality references. I have a feeling that if you mandate template use you'll simply push editors away who might otherwise have bothered adding references. I'm already ignoring some pages (or leaving poorer quality references than I usually do) because of this sort of thing.

But anyway, thanks for at least raising the issue here. As I say keep me in the loop. Have fun and so on! Blue Square Thing (talk) 16:03, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

Blue Square Thing:

• Mandating templates for academic journals leading to mandating templates for other types of sources is purely conjectural. Wikipedia is not a crystal ball. (grin) Anyway, in my original posting here, I suggested that templates for academic journals be "preferred" not "mandated".
• I agree with you that the various cite templates are sometimes misused, but references without cite templates are often also incomplete, incorrect, and inconsistent within an article. The cite templates tend to clean up these problems.
• There is no problem with cite templates page load times. Barack Obama loads on my computer in under 2 seconds and has 542 cite templates, considerably more than the 463 cite templates that were the subject of a 2011 discussion at this discussion. (Note {{oldid}} template; identical result without external link to Wikipedia.)
• I do not understand the point about users who require accessible websites. Any given reference to an academic journal can display identically generated with or without {{cite journal}}. How is the user harmed by identical output?
• Some Wikipedians obviously value Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals, otherwise it wouldn't exist. Page view statistics show it is visited about 3 times a day. Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Journals cited by Wikipedia/Popular1 is visited about 1 time a day.
• I would not expect mandating (or preferring) templates for academic journal references to push editors away. Editors who don't know about the templates or don't want to bother with them will go ahead and reference academic journals without templates, and other editors can add the templates later, just like now, where less experienced editors create valuable content, sometimes with sloppy or incomplete references, and other editors improve the references. —Anomalocaris (talk) 18:00, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

• @Anomalocaris: Hey. You're quite right that you said "preferred" - my fault. Just to clarify, the issue with page load times is one that particularly impacts on slow internet speeds, particularly mobile networks (non 3G or 4G for example) or just plain slow connections - and these are the things many people around the world still use. I fully appreciate that my allegedly super-fast broadband (by UK standards it's not bad) will load stuff quickly. But when I drop off onto the mobile network it's way slower. WRT accessibility, any markup which gets in the way of screen readers is an issue for me. Again, modern ones probably don't have a problem. Blue Square Thing (talk) 18:14, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

• @Blue Square Thing: Thank you for your thoughts. Regarding page load times, I created a test example at my sandbox showing two identical references, one with {{cite journal}} and one without. The result is that the extra HTML overhead of the template is 570 bytes. Most users are now accessing the Internet at faster-than-dialup speeds, but even at dialup speed, 56k (actually 57,600) bits per second, an additional 100 {{cite journal}} would add about 8 seconds to the download time. A page with 100 such templates is probably already several hundred kilobytes at least, so the extra burden of the templates isn't very significant. Even slow cell phone data rates are usually faster than dialup. As for screen readers, I don't have any experience, but I would think that screen readers already contend with <span class="classname">...</span>, so I don't see how a few more of these is going to make a difference, but of course I have no actual experience regarding this. —Anomalocaris (talk) 20:21, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

• A few years ago, someone converted all the citation templates to plain text in a long and heavily sourced article. The resulting difference in page-loading time was noticeable (human-scale, not just if you checked dev tools).
• This will some day be a pointless conversation, because (a) we'll start citing Wikidata items for sources and (b) citation templates are increasingly popular and common anyway. So if you just wait patiently, you'll get what you want, without having to make a bunch of editors mad at you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:35, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

• That's quite probably true - and if there are articles in which page load time is an issue things can be converted to plain text as necessary. So long as no one forces me to use cite templates I won't mind that much and with the visual editor and so on I imagine button click editing will become more and more common. Blue Square Thing (talk) 15:17, 14 November 2016 (UTC)

A few remarks here. WP:JCW is a list internal to WP:JOURNALS, and it's mostly used to assist us in prioritizing which article/redirect should be created. It also helps with cleanup. However, the list's existence shouldn't be an argument to use or not use templates.

Concerning 'load times', that argument had some merit before the citation templates were converted to make use of LUA modules. The current templates are much much more efficient and add very little to load times.

The main benefits of templates is the ease of formatting, and the ability to have scripts (like the ref toolbar) and bots assist with maintenance (e.g. finding identifiers like Bibcodes, DOIs and PMIDs, as well as automatic completion of reference based on such identifiers), archive links, dead urls, etc. It's also much, much easier to facilitate the long-term care of citations.

So yes, templates are all around better, but the existence of WP:JCW is really at the bottom of the list in terms of arguments for the use of templates. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 14:03, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

Journal citation with journal or online date should be preferred to just the year

Under the heading "Journal articles" it says,

Citations for journal articles typically include:

...

• year and sometimes month of publication

...

I believe that an article published in a periodical should have the periodical date, not just the year. I believe that an article published online should have date of online publication. —Anomalocaris (talk) 18:34, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

The vast majority of style guides omit both the month and the day. Keeping the month is more common with magazines than journals however, since the month is more or less equivalent to issue number in those cases. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 19:04, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

I prefer the most accurate date. It is often important to understand the order in which things were published. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 05:16, 19 November 2016 (UTC).

Excessive citations of a single source

See here This permanent version of Bill Goldberg has 139 instances of reference #131 (which is itself a bare link but that's beside the point). I don't see anything at Help:Footnotes#Footnotes:_using_a_source_more_than_once or Wikipedia:Citing_sources#Repeated_citations that states a maximum limit on how many times we should use a reference but certainly over 100 is too many. Thoughts? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 14:20, 18 October 2016 (UTC)

One way to fix that citation would be to use {{sfn}} or some other mechanism to separate out the obvious sections at that link and citing each specific section as necessary. Sometimes a large number of citations can indicate a copyvio, but I doubt that that's what is going on here. I don't see a reason to restrict the maximum number of citations. --Izno (talk) 14:24, 18 October 2016 (UTC)

Having an explicit limit makes no sense to me. Whether a large number of citations of the same source is appropriate, is entirely context dependent.--Kmhkmh (talk) 15:04, 25 October 2016 (UTC)

setting a limit seems unnecessarily arbitrary to me. Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 09:14, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

I agree. The Other Backward Classes table used one reference a similar number of times. Had it been completed it would have used another dozen references a similar number of times, and a few dozen more a handful each. This would have been good sourcing.

However with a more subjective article there is a presumption that as balanced a variety of sources should be used as practicable. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 05:43, 19 November 2016 (UTC).