Talk:Political status of Puerto Rico/Archives/2021/August

Merge footnote sections

I'm having a lot of difficulty. As you may see from my previous edit which I saved and then reverted for the record, I was trying to merge the two separate footnote sections into one. In addition, two of the footnotes are very long, and so I tried to move them into the newly merged § Notes. As far as I can tell, I did everything right, but no matter what I do, I keep getting the following error messages for the second footnote:

Cite error: The named reference fn2 was invoked but never defined

Cite error: A list-defined reference with the name "fn2" has been invoked, but is not defined in the <references> tag" error messages.

I'm at a complete loss on how to fix this. Everything is defined, I'm using {{Refn}} tags which Help:Footnotes says to use due to the nested references, no <ref> tags are missing, all the curly brackets are paired, and I couldn't find an equal sign (=) that wasn't part of a parameter syntax. I've even tried leaving the long footnotes where they are in the article body and just merge the two footnote sections together. Everything should be working, but it does not like the second footnote. What am I doing wrong, and how do make it work? — CJDOS, Sheridan, OR (talk) 08:18, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

URLs aren't "part of the parameter syntax." Using ones without "=" in them should fix at least the first error. The bottom line is that the problem is with the content of your footnote: you can verify that by replacing it with a single letter--it'll work just fine and generate no errors; then you could just brute-force troubleshoot it by rewriting it sentence-by-sentence, fixing problems as you go. Or maybe someone will come and do it for you if you keep this request open long enough! 78.28.44.31 (talk) 10:41, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

Are you suggesting that one or more bare urls in the second citation may be responsible, and that I should adjust the URL in them by replacing = with %d3 (its URL equivelent) or switch them to a citation template; that should resolve the error? I get what you're saying in your second point: plug-and-chug. Eventually, I'll come across which one or more is causing the error to be thrown. — CJDOS, Sheridan, OR (talk) 17:37, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

@CJDOS: I think the approach you are taking will ulitmately run into the bug described at WP:Nesting footnotes#4. List-defined references.

Because the fn2 footnote text contains an = inside one of the ref URLs, you definitely need to insert 1= in front of it. That corrects one problem but still leaves the one mentioned above. I tried using text= but that failed to solve the problem even though the parameter data indicates it should work the same.

There may still be a way to get the two footnote sections merged. I'll leave this open in case there's someone else who knows enough to suggest a better solution. — jmcgnh^{(talk) (contribs)} 22:27, 2 August 2021 (UTC)

@CJDOS: I'm going to close this request before it gets to 48 hours with no additional response. It seems the collection of people who look at {{help me}} requests do not have anything further to add. You are welcome to ask at the technical section at The Village Pump so see if you can raise a different set of helpers there.

I suspect the bottom line is that you can't have both nested references and list-defined references together. You can combine the notes under a single rubric but will have to leave the long footnote content up in the article body where the footnote is defined. — jmcgnh^{(talk) (contribs)} 03:06, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

I looked at it, but I didn't have much time and was reluctant to suggest a solution after being unhappy with the footnote format in general, thinking that some of the content inline there ought to have been in Refs. No objection to the close, but maybe I'll get back to it separately. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 11:32, 4 August 2021 (UTC)

Question: What is the purpose of the footnote?

Please clarify the purpose of the footnote. Presumably, it is attempting to clarify something in the cite-supported content of the paragraph which it follows. What is it trying to clarify? It might be useful to note the following:

unincorporated territory	A United States insular area in which the United States Congress has determined that only selected parts of the United States Constitution apply.
territory	An unincorporated United States insular area, of which there are currently thirteen, three in the Caribbean (Navassa Island, Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands) and ten in the Pacific (American Samoa, Baker Island, Guam, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Atoll, the Northern Mariana Islands and Wake Atoll).

Source:

"Definitions of Insular Area Political Organizations". Office of Insular Affairs of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Retrieved August 6, 2021.

.

Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 11:11, 6 August 2021 (UTC)

Unincorporated territories of the United States is already linked in the article's lead sentence, unless you feel that an {{Excerpt}} would be appropriate in addition. It might be. — CJDOS, Sheridan, OR (talk) 07:30, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

I've redone this footnotem Ref-ing the cites and doing some minor rewriting. I don't think I've garbled it in the process.The final cite was to a source not found online; I have replaced that with a cite of the source I mentioned above. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 10:36, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for fixing the notes issue. I didn't mean for you to do the work for me, but now I can compare page histories to see what I should have been doing in order to fix the problem, rather than what I was trying to do. I also see that you've trimmed [note b] down. It all looks much cleaner. I will further study the changes and learn from them. Again, thank you. — CJDOS, Sheridan, OR (talk) 18:20, 7 August 2021 (UTC)