Category talk:CS1 errors: unsupported parameter

Commonly encountered unsupported parameters and how to fix them

There are 11,000+ articles in this category, as of 8 October 2013. This is a list of commonly-encountered parameters and how to fix them, to expand on the contents of the help text. If the "bot-fixable" list turns into a substantial list, we may be able to feed it to a bot and fix a bunch of these articles automatically.

Feel free to edit this list. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:34, 8 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Bot-fixable parameters

All bot edits suggested here should be manually checked and corrected by human editors after the bot has passed through the category.

|translator – Fix by changing |translator to |others and adding "Translated by" in front of the translators name or ", translator" after the translator's name.
|pagees – Change parameter name to |pages.
|auther – Change parameter name to |author.
|middle – Copy contents of |middle and paste after the contents of |first, with a space after the contents of |first. Remove the |middle parameter entirely.
|quotes = yes – Remove. This is not a supported parameter. Someone was trying to make the citation do something that it doesn't do. This appears almost exclusively in cite journal templates, for some reason. (It is a valid parameter in {{Infobox Doctor Who episode}}, so don't just go stripping it from every article, please Mr. Bot.)
|other – Replace with |others.
Correct all common misspellings listed at Module:Citation/CS1/Suggestions.

Non-bot-fixable parameters

|unused_data – This common parameter was added by a bot that cleaned up "unnamed parameters" before these CS1 errors existed. You have to look at the data to determine if it should be removed or if a parameter name should be added to it.
Lots of one-time misspellings and other typos that are not common enough to put in the list of common misspellings, e.g. |volumbe (volume), |firstn (first1, first2, etc.), |first[1] (first1, first2, etc.), |editorn-first (editor1-first, etc.).
|editorial – This is the Spanish word for "publisher". If it makes sense, change the parameter name to |publisher.
(a bunch of stuff that looks like the all or part of a web address) – This happens when there is a "|" in the |url parameter followed by an "=". To fix, replace each "|" in the URL with "%7c". Check the url to see if it is valid. You may also need to add "url=" in front of the "http://" part of the URL.
|note – This is not a valid parameter. Notes can be removed and pasted between the closing }} and the closing </ref>, though this is not ideal.