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.
- Also, |título is title and |fechaacceso is accessdate.
(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.
|translator replace with others and add "(trans.)" after the name.
|curly=yes/no remove (deprecated). This used to add curly quotes to a cite.
|construction replace with contribution or chapter
|first print replace with origyear
|channel replace with publication-place
|pii replace with id. See Publisher Item Identifier
Sometimes citations will have both |page and |pages. The first is the page cited and the second is the total pages in the work. Remove the second.

Re this last item, the second value is often the ending page, like |page=215 | pages=226 when what is meant is |pages=215–226. I do not know why people do this, but in this case, do not always remove the second parameter. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:46, 19 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"isbn status"

I've just cleaned up Purebred (dog). There were about 6 instances of an "Unused data" called "isbn status", contents "May be invalid, please double check". In all cases there was no problem with the isbn. This stuff was added in 2008 by "Citation Bot". I wonder whether that bot's work could be undone by another bot, if their warnings are as useless as this article suggests, or perhaps tidied away into a valid field to suppress the red notes? PamD 10:56, 2 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]