Help talk:Introduction to referencing with VisualEditor/1

Content

This page closely mirrors its wikimarkup equivalent. Two subpages (on WP:RS and WP:V) are currently transcluded into both to synchronise them. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 09:31, 20 November 2015 (UTC)

What are topics Shelja897 (talk) 12:03, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Date format

@Evolution and evolvability: The page says "Note: dates should be YYYY-MM-DD". I've not changed that sentence, but I have doubts as to its validity. For example, WP:VE/UG says nothing about this, nor does the equivalent page for Wiki markup. Could you explain, or point me to a source that says that dates should be so formatted? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:28, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Hi, I added the YYYY-MM-DD note because the {{CS1}} template seems to reject a lot of other date formats that people my intuitively attempt (e.g. DD-MM-YYYY or MM/DD/YY). It does accept other though (e.g. DD Month YYYY and YYYY). What we really need is a succinct way to give a couple of examples of acceptable date formats so that users are not put off when they enter a non-accepted one and it gets rejected. This discussion section is the closest thing to a list of accepted/not-accepted that I've seen. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)^talk 22:39, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

@Evolution and evolvability: There's also some information at Help:CS1 errors#bad date and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Things to avoid.

I guess my concern is more about readability - VE will leave "2015-11-19" as is, in a footnote, but "November 19, 2015", or "19 November 2015" is better from a readability viewpoint. The sentence in question, "Note: dates should be YYYY-MM-DD", seems to be saying that "November 19, 2015" should not be used; that's obviously not true. My feeling is the reverse, in fact: I find "2015-11-19" to be problematical, because I don't think that's what readers want.

Why not simply say the following?

"Note: the format for dates should be either Month DD, YYYY; or DD Month YYYY."

That way, if someone gets an error message within a citation, it's easy for them - looking at the tutorial page - to see how to fix it. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 17:40, 26 November 2015 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 2 June 2019

Prospectuses of north america Lord Sir King Luis32nd (talk) 19:27, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. Jannik Schwaß (talk) 20:13, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

Reliable source example

Noob here. I tried the visual editor tutorial and got the first reliable sources question wrong. [[1]] says it's a blog and I thought that blogs weren't allowed as sources. The Blogs as sources proposal page [[2]] says blogs hosted by newspapers are reliable but it says the proposal failed. Should there be a better first example of a reliable source for newcomers than a blog? STEMinfo (talk) 23:02, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

@STEMinfo, yeah, I like having an example that relates to Wikipedia itself, but that's a fair point. To get very deep into the weeds with you, as you noticed, the page you link to, Wikipedia:Blogs as sources, is a failed proposal, meaning it doesn't have any weight of community consensus behind it. The more relevant guidance would be WP:NEWSBLOG, which as part of the verifiability policy does have such weight. My reading of WP:NEWSBLOG is that the L.A. Times blog in that case would be okay as a source, but even so, the blog question introduces needless complexity, which isn't really what we want for the intro quiz.

I'd be very open to suggestions on what we might change it to. Thanks for looking over the tutorial and for flagging this! {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 05:09, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

@Sdkb I looked at the LA Times and NY Times, but they are both paywalled and the reader might not see the source. The Washington Post looks more available. How about this one? The text could be something like "Wikipedia has over 55 million posts, 270,000 active volunteer editors a month, and has seen over 1 billion edits." STEMinfo (talk) 23:03, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

References

Removing the recommendation to use YYYY-MM-DD

Back in 2015 this recommendation was added to help new editors avoid getting error messages: (Note: dates should be YYYY-MM-DD). But date in templates, particularly reference templates, should match the style already in use in articles. The statement here seems to be saying that this is the format that must be used. I am changing it as recommended in the discussion above from 2015. — Preceding unsigned comment added by StarryGrandma (talk • contribs) 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Good spot, StarryGrandma. There are a million things we need to teach newcomers, and formatting issues like MOS:DATERET should ideally be pretty low on the list so that we can focus on more important core policies and guidelines. Avoiding causing errors, as can easily arise when e.g. an American editor tries to use MM-DD-YYYY for a source date, should be somewhat higher up.

The best place to address errors is always as close to where they happen as possible, so I tried going to an article in VisualEditor and entering a source in the wrong format to see what would happen within the dialogue box. The answer is, nothing — it's only once the reference is inserted that the "Check date values" error appears. The core problem here is that, despite the |date= parameter being correctly tagged with the "date" type in its TemplateData, the VisualEditor doesn't actually perform any check that the user is entering a valid date format. This is why improvements to TemplateData (as WMDE was planning and then abandoned) are so badly needed. I think this is worth highlighting for Trizek (WMF)/PPelberg (WMF)/ESanders (WMF) as you work on Edit check — "enters source date in wrong format" could easily have been among the edit check ideas if it had made sense to address it that way. (In this case, the better way to address it is to force the user to enter a valid date in date fields, the same way the Commons upload wizard does. Unfortunately, what counts as a valid date will vary from template to template because "date" was so imprecisely defined.)

As a stop-gap solution, I added explanation text to the source templates to make it suggest using a valid format. Importantly, note that templates like {{use mdy dates}} will cause a date to display in a way that matches that article's preferred formatting, regardless of how they are entered, so the default suggestion to use YYYY-MM-DD doesn't actually mean that that format will show up on pages where another format is defined. This will allow us to remove the mention of DATERET from the referencing tutorial here (it's still mentioned later on in the style section, where it's more relevant). It's obviously not ideal, and I suspect that the explanation text may be regularly challenged by editors who don't understand the automatic formatting conversion (the inability to add hidden comments within TemplateData exacerbates this), but it's the most we can do without developer support. Sdkb ^talk 02:19, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation. I don't use Visual Editor for sources, but I've run across YYYY-MM-DD dates in unlikely places in references and done fixing. I've recently been checking whether editors are using Visual Edit when asking questions about referencing and if so providing a link to Help:Introduction to referencing with VisualEditor/2. I was surprised to see the note there. I would love to have seen the requirements document for VE. I suspect that references, and perhaps templates in general, were an afterthought. StarryGrandma (talk) 03:33, 17 March 2024 (UTC)