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Best practices for a full citation with no author, when linked by shortened footnotes

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 – The help page now transcludes the advice from Template:Harvard citation documentation and includes two examples informed by the discussions below. Many thanks for the assistance and happy Thanksgiving, Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 08:45, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

I have a question about a help page which is directly giving advice about the CS1/CS2 templates. Are any of the no-author styles explained at H:SFN, misusing a parameter? The section at Help:Shortened footnotes#No author reads:

Some sources do not have a single author with a last name, such as a magazine article or a report from a government institution. Options include:

• For a newspaper or periodical, use the name of the publication and the date, or set the author parameter to "publication name staff".
• For a publication by an institution, use the name of the institution.
• Some style guides recommend using the title of the article (title-date).
• Other style guides recommend using "Anonymous" or "Anon."

This seems to contradict the template documentation, but I have seen a lot of people create citations using the |author= field this way. Regards, Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 22:44, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

You've gone to the trouble of quoting H:SFN which you then claim seems to contradict the template documentation but you fail to specify or quote that conflicting documentation. Which template? Which documentation?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:03, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

@Trappist the monk: Valid point, Template:Cite book/doc gives this example: |author=<!--Staff writer(s); no by-line.--> and explains the author parameter as so: this parameter is used to hold the name of an organizational author (e.g. a committee) or the complete name (first and last) of a single person; for the latter, prefer the use of |first= and |last=. This parameter should never hold the names of more than one author. Template:Cite news/doc and Template:Cite journal/doc contain the same text. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 23:16, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

I changed the example in Template:Cite book/doc § Usage to match the recommendation at Help:Citation Style 1 § Authors.

Why do you think there is a contradiction? All that the cs1|2 template doc says is use real names, for humans prefer |last=/ |first= pairs for each human author. The |author=<!--Not stated--> is merely a recommendation to prevent future en.wiki editors from wasting their time searching for author(s) who have not been named. I don't see any of that as a contradiction.

I do think that making up names for any of the |author= aliases (|author=Anonymous etc) is wrong because that attributes the work to an author who appears to be named 'Anonymous'. Similarly, |author=publication name staff is just as bad. For periodicals, I think that the best solution for use with {{sfn}} is to set |ref={{sfnref|''<periodical name>''|<date> and {{sfn|''<periodical name>''|<date>}}

—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:45, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Surely the advice should be to setup the |ref= field appropriately rather than misusing |author=. Especially when it duplicates publisher, and doubly so when it comes to constructs such as title/year. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 23:34, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Yes, and this poor documentation probably explains why I keep running into redundant junk like |author=NYT staff, or even worse |author=The New York Times|work=The New York Times or |author=Museum of Modern Art|publisher=Museum of Modern Art. The material at H:SFN is clearly wrong, or at least badly misleading. You might need to use a short footnote that read something like "Museum of Modern Art (2023)" when there is no specified author, but the way to template this is to use |ref={{harvid|Museum of Modern Art|2023}} in the main citation, not to do a bogus |author=Museum of Modern Art that is redundant with |publisher=Museum of Modern Art. This can probably be resolved by editing H:SFN and the docs of Template:Sfn to include specific examples of this sort, and to explicitly say not to abuse the |author= or |last= parameter to kluge this. PS: {{harvid}} has been moved to {{SfnRef}}, and it may be preferable to update the mentions of {{harvid}} to use the current actual name of the template.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:42, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

+1 -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 23:50, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

I copied the text by Charlie Gillingham from Template:sfn/doc to Help:Shortened footnotes, changing "harvid" to "sfnref", which already suggested using |ref=.[1] And regarding the question of why I saw the language as contradictory, I was saying that advice to use the title of the work or a description of the author (at H:SFN) seemed to contradict the advice to use a person or organization's name (at Template:Cite book/doc). I was uncertain, so I asked. Rjjiii (ii) (talk) 00:53, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Also, thanks all for the input, Rjjiii (ii) (talk) 00:54, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Keeping in mind that {{sfn}} should be short, and this is all about convenience for editors (i.e., not users), I think the |ref= should be encouraged to be short as well, so rather than |ref={{harvid|Museum of Modern Art|2023}}, it should be |ref={{harvid|MMA|2023}} which will very likely be unique among refs on the page (and if not, there are alternatives). Mathglot (talk) 01:14, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

I disagree. Initialisms are inherently obscure so in general should be avoided. But, surely, if you are going to use an initialism, and the source has a commonly used initialism, use the source's initialism, not one that you made up or is used by some other organization. In your example, if you must use an initialism it should be 'MoMA' not 'MMA' (commonly used for Mixed Martial Arts}. For the avoidance of doubt, both long- and short-form citations should use the same name.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 01:25, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Yep.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:16, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

The example from the {{sfn}} doc page includes a generic "BGI" initialization. I've replaced that on H:SFN with a "MoMA" shortened footnote.[2] I haven't changed anything on the template documentation. Rjjiii (ii) (talk) 02:42, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Unnecessary pile-on support for this statement. Anything used in the {{sfnref}} should either appear verbatim in the full citation or be listed in a "(Cited as Short Name)" parenthetical immediately following the full citation. Folly Mox (talk) 05:35, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

And by the way, for those who are talking about "modify the sfn doc" (which I generally agree would be a good thing) it's a little hard to find; it's at Template:Citation Style documentation/author. Mathglot (talk) 01:44, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

@Mathglot: Thanks for helping out. I see you've transcluded the text from Template:Harvard citation documentation#No author name in citation template. That seems easier to maintain. Would it be wise then, to transclude the whole thing, and use whichever example is best on that page? Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 04:03, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Also, what do you mean about "the table column presentation is messed up in this one"? I see a 2x2 grid in both? Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 04:06, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Yes, it's 2x2, but left col is 90% of page width on a computer monitor; are you using only mobile to view it? Maybe I should verify with some other browsers, in case it's just me? Mathglot (talk) 05:07, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Works now; your "3rd time" fix did it. Must've been the url. I've seen that issue before, and I forget how I fixed it, but there's a way. In the meantime, the shorter url works fine. Mathglot (talk) 05:24, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

@Mathglot: thanks for the explanation! I tested the mobile skin and both desktop skins but only on Firefox. Chrome keeps the URLs as one line and Firefox breaks them at the slashes. As soon as I read your "left col is 90%", I realized how I goofed. I've run into this problem before and totally forgot about it. With a smaller URL and a space before the parameter, it now looks fine on desktop Chrome, mobile Chrome, mobile Safari, Edge, the android app, and some niche browsers. Thanks again, Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 05:47, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Guess I'm a niche browser person; I use Vivaldi almost exclusively, others on mobile, or for testing or special purposes. Mathglot (talk) 06:35, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

As far as transcluding the example as well: excerpting from a Template that can have params is tricky, because {{Excerpt}} doesn't pass params; so I conservatively excerpted only the top part with the intro paragraph and bullet list, because I could easily see that there were no template params like {{{1|}}}; the markup code below it was denser, and I didn't want to risk a mistake by transcluding it if it used params. If it doesn't, that should be excerptable as well. Mathglot (talk) 05:11, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Ordering of full citations

If an article is using shortened references, that means a full list of sources appears in alphabetical order according to the first element; the only fields which can be first in a CS1 template are |author=/|last= or |editor-last= I believe. If there is a |ref={{harvid|MoMA|2023}} then a reader should be able to find MoMA accordingly amongst other M-names and so the first element should include whatever tag the reader will use to find the source in an alphabetic list.

For the curious, here's the CMoS:

If a publication issued by an organization, association, or corporation carries no personal author’s name on the title page, the organization may be listed as author in the reference list, even if it is also given as publisher. To facilitate shorter parenthetical text citations, the organization may be listed under an abbreviation, in which case the entry must be alphabetized under that abbreviation (rather than the spelled-out name) in the reference list.

Umimmak (talk) 06:37, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia isn't bound by a single thing CMoS says. Our own material at WP:CITE (including WP:SFN) requires neither shortened footnotes (much less ones in CMoS style in particular) nor an alphabetical list of sources. It generally makes sense to provide one, if an article is using shortened footnotes, but putting a {{cite web |publisher=[[Museum of Modern Art|MoMA]] |...}} in alphabetical order under "MoMA" is perfectly fine. If some reader's head would just explode upon encountering this, they are not competent to be reading our material in the first place. And no one reads lists of citations like a novel. They get to a citation by clicking on a link to it. If for some reason they did not but are manually hunting around for a MoMA source in a list of sources (why?), all they have to do is Ctrl-F MoMA Enter (or on a Mac Cmd-F MoMA Enter). If this still just somehow doesn't compute for someone on the editorial side, they can do the source list entry as * MoMA: {{cite web |publisher=[[Museum of Modern Art|MoMA]] |...}} (though I think other editors would later remove the leading "MoMA: " as extraneous and silly, treating our readers as if they had brain damage). Nothing said above is any excuse for doing a bogus |author=MoMA.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:18, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

The tone of your comment was needlessly rude…

We aren’t bound by Chicago, obviously, but I think it’s worth seeing what other style guides do in similar situations. Why alphabetize anything if the links take an online reader directly to the source or they can use a search function? People sometimes print out articles, the Creative Commons license allows materials to be used elsewhere which might not have as robust links, links can also be be broken for a variety of reasons and having sources in an order which makes intuitive sense to the reader might be an asset that the editors of some articles might desire.

If there is no author, the first part of the citation would be the title; MLA uses an abbreviated title in its parentheticals when there is no author, and this is another option if it’s really that bad to repeat information. That way sources can be still sorted alphabetically by their first element and by whatever appears in the shortened citation. Umimmak (talk) 08:02, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

I already said it was probably a good idea to alphabetize them. If you insist on having the first element on the line be the name by which it is alphabetized, I already provided you a way to do that without fudging citatation template parameters, though there is no reason in the first place to suppose that our readers are so dense they can't understand that an entry with no author which is alphabetized in the Ms between Michaels and Munster is under MoMA, the publisher name.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:14, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Way off topic: This ship may have sailed, but {{harvtxt|ref=none|Last|YYYY}}.  will create exactly the citation format for the bibliography when given the same parameters as {{sfnref}}. The citation templates could generate this when fed sfnrefs, but I don't know if it's worth the effort. It also won't be highlighted from the pinball links.

References

• SSAC (2023). "Black History Month Profile: Leroy Chollet (Loyola)". SSAC Sports. Montgomery, Alabama: Southern States Athletic Conference. February 27, 2023. Archived from the original on March 29, 2023. Retrieved March 29, 2023.

Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 08:40, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Simpler to just do plain text:

• SSAC: "Black History Month Profile: Leroy Chollet (Loyola)". SSAC Sports. Montgomery, Alabama: Southern States Athletic Conference. February 27, 2023. Archived from the original on March 29, 2023. Retrieved March 29, 2023.

if the goal of this stuff is just to ensure that the citation line-item begins with the string it is alphabetized by. Which, again, is not a requirement that we have; it's just something a few editors want to have happen for reasons I find non-compelling since it's obvious in an alpha-ordered list of such sources that this one is alphabetized under "SSAC Sports". If this is just for editorial benefit, Mathglot's approach below gets the job done, though would be simpler to type and easier to read as <!--Aron 1962--> than <!--{{sfn|Aron|1962|p=}}-->.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:29, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

True, and maybe I'm taking ease of use to a fault, but what I want to do is kill two birds with one stone, demonstrating the alphabetization element first, as well as having a copy-paste element readily available that makes use of {{sfn}} as brainless as possible. There are *so* many errors with it (as ActivelyDisinterested can attest), that anything I can do to assure the correct {{sfn}} formulation is used, is a step in the right direction, and worth the (minimal) extra effort in typing out a few more characters. That said, SMcC's (how do you abbreviate a name like that, anyway?) version does the job. Mathglot (talk) 09:43, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Fair enough. I guess the articles I'm shepherding that use one form or another of shortened references haven't had a problem of "drive-by" users making mucked up sfn instances with wrong author names or dates in them, so I'd never had a "show them how to do the citation right" need. PS: Yes, SMcC or S.McC. or S. McC. would be pretty typical. My pool team has two Johns, and we call them John McN. and John P. in texts. If the latter had been Irish, he might have ended up compressed to John O'P. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:55, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Just to say there are so many errors with it because it doesn't appear that the error category has ever been cleared down before. New errors are generally caused by inexperienced editors not understanding how referencing should be done. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 12:07, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

The alphabetization of sources in a "Works cited" or "Bibliography" section is mostly for the user, but has benefits for the editor wishing to expand the article and reuse the citations as well. Unfortunately, it's not always easy to find the "alphabetization item", which might be last1, last, author, surname, editor1-last or something from |ref=, and which might be placed anywhere in the template... tick, tock; .... tick, tock; ... tick, tock; ... Have you found it, yet? I finally got tired of this, and to make it easier for myself on subsequent edits, and for other editors, I hit upon the solution I used in Liberation of France#Works_cited (edit ). It makes it easier for editors, and has no effect on readers. Mathglot (talk) 09:12, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

An easier solution is to include alphabetical breaks <!-- A --> etc. As can be seen in the Bibliography of Historiography of Christianization of the Roman Empire. Any editors can just search the correct string, and it's very simple and easy to understand for new editors. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 12:12, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

@ActivelyDisinterested Naively done as there causes a WP:LISTGAP. Please feel free to correct it as you see fit. Izno (talk) 19:07, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

They're not causing LISTGAP at Historiography of Christianization of the Roman Empire, maybe that only applies if you haven't used {{refbegin}}/{{refend}}. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 19:13, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

ActivelyDisinterested, yes, actually, the use there is a LISTGAP problem. A comment on its own line will break the lists, which is what LISTGAP concerns itself with. IznoPublic (talk) 03:10, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

Are you suggest that a screen read would want to read through the hundred+ cites in that article as if the where a list? Maybe as a sleep aid. And if they did the list would be sectioned alphabetically. This isn't four items in an infobox. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 12:14, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

@ActivelyDisinterested no, they don't, and that's the problem. What they will hear is "list of N/26 items, would you like to listen?" times 26 as they attempt to come to the end of the section. This is categorically worse for navigation. Moreover, they will have no idea that each is separated by a letter, the only information they get is "list of N/26 items" before diving into each. Izno (talk) 21:41, 26 November 2023 (UTC)