Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 12
 | This is an archive of past discussions about Help:Citation Style 1. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
| Archive 5 | ← | Archive 10 | Archive 11 | Archive 12 | Archive 13 | Archive 14 | Archive 15 |
Cite web needs a section parameter
We need a |section= parameter in {{cite web}}. We used to have better support for this, it seems to have been "rationalised".
I'm just trying to reference a PDF hundreds of pages long. It has chapters and legalistic paragraph or section numbering, yet it's not published except on the web, it has no ISBN, it's not a "book". |section= or |chapter= annotation would be useful and appropriate here. Merging the section numbers into the title (as suggested) breaks downstream metadata handling. Andy Dingley (talk) 13:38, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
- This cite? So what if it doesn't have an ISBN? That source is book length, has chapters, and pages, is in electronic form which would seem to pass the duck test for an e-book. Therefore, use
{{cite book}}. - —Trappist the monk (talk) 14:03, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
- Similar issues arise with books and other documents. Rather than sections or chapters, a more general solution might be to allow
|at=to co-exist with|page=/|pages=. In this case, one would write|at=Rule 184.3|page=208. In others, it would be|at=Table 3.1or|at=Map 9in conjunction with a page number. Kanguole 14:05, 21 February 2016 (UTC)|at=would work for me (better than calling something that isn't a book a book). I tried that, but it's either/or with|pages=.- Incidentally (AIUI) this isn't a book and can't be readily bought as a book. That itself is a source of some annoyance to those who'd like to be able to buy it as a bound paper book, but instead keep ending up with ragged printouts. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:15, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
- If you just dislike calling it a book, use {{Citation}}, with
|mode=CS1if you must scatter stops everywhere. :-) Peter coxhead (talk) 22:23, 21 February 2016 (UTC)
- If you just dislike calling it a book, use {{Citation}}, with
- A
|section=parameter would be useful only in those cases (analoguous with the use of|pages=) where the source as a whole is a sub-unit of a larger work (such as an article in a journal, or contribution that is published separately). Where one is citing a specific section (or page) then it is best not to merge a specific detail into the full citation. In the typical case where a source is cited only once it is quite acceptable to append the specific location after the template. Which is a tad cumbersome with {cite} as you have defeat the automatic terminal punctuation (with|postscript=none). And another reason for using {citation}. Or (as Peter suggests)|mode=CS1. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:05, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
Proper use of Website not explained.
From the CS1 messages it appears that it is not proper to use a URL in the website= entry for cite web. I think that needs to be *much* better explained if that is a problem. A would expect a new user to be much more likely to do {{cite web|url=http://www.example.com/widgets|title=Widgets through the ages|website=http://www.example.com}} than {{cite web|url=http://www.example.com/widgets|title=Widgets through the ages|website=Example Company}}. IMO, *either* website= needs to be specifically added to both Help:CS1 errors#External link in |<param>= (which doesn't show website as one that would be a problem and the docs on Cite web, or this CS1 error needs to be disabled.Naraht (talk) 21:13, 22 February 2016 (UTC)</nowiki>— Preceding unsigned comment added by Naraht (talk • contribs) 19:45, 22 February 2016
- In the doc for the templates, the description of
|website=says "title of the website". I don't see how that could be interpreted as URL. - Of the multiple occurrences of
|website=in the Examples section, none show a URL. - The error shows
|website=as the problem parameter. - The error description lists several problem parameters and says "or any of their aliases". The doc shows that
|website=is an alias of|work=, which is one of the parameters listed in the error description.
That's adequate in my opinion. Any more would be unwarranted instruction creep, and people do need to learn to use the doc that's available to them. ―Mandruss ☎ 21:50, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
- I've calmed down now. I agree that the docs are as good as they could be, but it is still a fairly likely mistake. Any ideas that may help?Naraht (talk) 15:25, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
- I've added the aliases to Help:CS1 errors#External link in |<param>=. This is about users who don't read the template documentation, but adapt existing examples and are then confused by error messages. The first documentation they encounter is a subsection of Help:CS1 errors that is linked from the error. Kanguole 15:54, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
Status of filtering square brackets in URLs
Are we planning to handle brackets in URLs? I found an article (at redirect "EAPPI") where the "url=" contains sets of single brackets ("[...]") and should be encoded by a Lua filter (as '%7b' and '%7d' values?). Apparently those are very rare inside a URL, but they should be filtered by the Lua module, some day. This problem goes back 15 years due to the poor design of the MediaWiki markup language which should have used 2-character tokens to denote an external URL link, such as with both angle+square brackets, "<[http:...]>" rather than just single brackets "[http...]" as now unable to include each ']' inside a URL address. Anyway, 15 years later, now the cite templates should handle "[...]" inside each URL parameter. -Wikid77 (talk) 11:37, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
- Technically, unencoded single brackets are actually forbidden in the path part of a URL according to the URL specification. Of course, in practice anything is allowed provided that browsers and servers support it. Wikipedia also have issues with angle brackets ("<", ">") breaking urls. There might be other examples too. Dragons flight (talk) 12:39, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
- The embedded brackets "[...]" are so rare, it can wait to be handled, along with other URL characters. -Wikid77 (talk) 14:00, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
- Forbidden in the path part yes, but I think that they are legal in the query string. When used there they will still break the MediaWiki parsing: I have come across examples of such use in the past, occasionally when somebody posts to VPT with "why doesn't my URL work?". --Redrose64 (talk) 21:53, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
- The embedded brackets "[...]" are so rare, it can wait to be handled, along with other URL characters. -Wikid77 (talk) 14:00, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
Here's an example of a URL containing square brackets (from Pass Me By (R5 song)) that does not render correctly:
| Wikitext | {{cite web
|
|---|---|
| Live | "R5 Performs Pass Me By, Loud [Morning Show Toronto] 8/26/13". Muzikkitabi. 2012-09-08. Retrieved 2012-09-13. |
| Sandbox | "R5 Performs Pass Me By, Loud [Morning Show Toronto] 8/26/13". Muzikkitabi. 2012-09-08. Retrieved 2012-09-13. |
We should probably do something to either render this reasonably or flag it as an error. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:41, 10 February 2016 (UTC)
- Following up on a comment at Help_talk:Citation_Style_1#Update to the live cs1|2 modules weekend of 20–21 February 2016:
- For a very long time, the template docs have advised editors to percent-encode certain characters when they occur in a url; see Template:Cite_book#URL for the list. :Characters allowed in the various parts of a url are defined in Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax. Essentially, the characters defined in the table at Template:Cite_book#URL must be percent-encoded when used in the path portion of a url (not allowed in the scheme and domain parts).
- That leaves us three options:
- ignore the content and make up of the url path – this is what we do now
- detect the presence of these characters in the url path and then emit an error message
- detect the presence of these characters in the url path and then percent encode them
- What do?
- —Trappist the monk (talk) 18:31, 14 February 2016 (UTC)
- I think option 1 is not good, since the citation renders quite poorly.
- We have been encouraged many times on this page to pursue option 3, i.e. be permissive in what we accept, even if it is technically invalid. Our historical practice in most cases has been option 2, detect input that does not comply with guidelines and emit an error messages, letting human editors fix the errors.
- If option 3 (reliably detect and replace) is technically feasible, I recommend it. If not, option 2 (emit an error message). – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:54, 14 February 2016 (UTC)
- I'll explore the latter two options after the next update.
- —Trappist the monk (talk) 16:29, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
- I too would prefer option 3. The FAQ database on various Konica Minolta web sites is another example of urls containing square brackets (see f.e. http://www.konicaminoltasupport.com/index.php?id=4569&L=2 ).
- --Matthiaspaul (talk) 21:03, 15 February 2016 (UTC)
- If option 3 (reliably detect and replace) is technically feasible, I recommend it. If not, option 2 (emit an error message). – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:54, 14 February 2016 (UTC)
I've added a bit of code to external_link() so that square brackets occurring in the path portion of a url are percent encoded.
| Wikitext | {{cite web
|
|---|---|
| Live | "Was ist die Zonenwahl-Funktion?" [What is the Zone Matching function?] (in German). |
| Sandbox | "Was ist die Zonenwahl-Funktion?" [What is the Zone Matching function?] (in German). |
Because the module creates a label from |url= when |title= is missing or empty, the label it creates is not encoded:
| Wikitext | {{cite web
|
|---|---|
| Live | (in German) http://www.konicaminoltasupport.com/index.php?id=4569&tx_faqmanager_pi1[question]=3640&tx_faqmanager_pi1[product]=136&tx_faqmanager_pi1[producttype]=10&tx_faqmanager_pi1[category]=&L=2. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
|
| Sandbox | (in German) http://www.konicaminoltasupport.com/index.php?id=4569&tx_faqmanager_pi1[question]=3640&tx_faqmanager_pi1[product]=136&tx_faqmanager_pi1[producttype]=10&tx_faqmanager_pi1[category]=&L=2. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
|
—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:13, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
- Looks good to me. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:56, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
- Thanks. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 00:51, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
Template {{Cite episode}} undocumented parameter / error
In researching the answer to the query above, I discovered that the |city= parameter in this template doesn't seem to function, nor is it documented. Would someone investigate, please?
—D'Ranged 1 VTalk 23:56, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
This comparison is the current Lua version against the last {{citation/core}} version:
| Wikitext | {{cite episode
|
|---|---|
| Live | Hitchcock, Alfred (April 14, 1958). "What Mary Knew". Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Episode 311. NBC. WMAQ. Mary had a secret. {{cite episode}}: Unknown parameter |city= ignored (|location= suggested) (help)
|
| Sandbox | Hitchcock, Alfred (April 14, 1958). "What Mary Knew". Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Episode 311. NBC. WMAQ. Mary had a secret. {{cite episode}}: Unknown parameter |city= ignored (|location= suggested) (help)
|
|city= was removed from {{cite episode}} with this edit; three years before the Lua conversion.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 01:20, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
- I've edited the documentation to reflect the deletion. The parameter no longer appears in the documentation. Is this template part of any tools that you know of that need to be checked?
- —D'Ranged 1 VTalk 01:34, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
multiple author names in |author= and aliases
One of the things that I noticed recently while cleaning up Category:CS1 maint: display-editors is that there are a lot of cs1|2 templates that use |author= to hold multiple author names. This is semantically incorrect and I can't see in our documentation that we explicitly permit multiple author names in a |last= alias – yeah, that practice isn't specifically proscribed either but should be. The simple fix is to change |author= to |authors= but that's not really a fix. It's not a fix because |authors= is not made part of the metadata:
{{cite book |title=Title |authors=one, two, three}}'"`UNIQ--templatestyles-00000028-QINU`"'<cite class="citation book cs1">''Title''.</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=book&rft.btitle=Title&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AHelp+talk%3ACitation+Style+1%2FArchive+12" class="Z3988"></span> <span class="cs1-visible-error citation-comment"><code class="cs1-code">{{[[Template:cite book|cite book]]}}</code>: </span><span class="cs1-visible-error citation-comment">Unknown parameter <code class="cs1-code">|authors=</code> ignored ([[Help:CS1 errors#parameter_ignored|help]])</span>
I've added code to extract_names() that calls a new function name_has_mult_names() which counts the number of separator characters (comma and semicolon). If there is more than one of these characters in a |last= alias then the page is added to a new (not yet existing) maintenance category:
{{cite book/new |title=Title |author=one, two, three}}
the same applies to |editor-last= aliases:
{{cite book/new |title=Title |editor=one, two, three}}
I don't know how many of these kinds of improper uses there are but I'm guessing that there are a lot of them. Fixing these will be a task similar to the (still incomplete) |coauthor(s)= task. I suspect that a bot can cleanup the low-hanging fruit by converting these kinds of parameters to |vauthors= or to individual |authorn= parameters. When that is done, we should then convert this code so that it emits an error message.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:32, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
- What is your plan for corporate authors that have two or more commas as part of their name? Jc3s5h (talk) 17:27, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
- Examples?
- —Trappist the monk (talk) 17:48, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
- It's obvious that corporations and partnerships can choose names that include several commas. You're the one that wants to make the templates harder to use; you should prove there are no legitimate institutional names that contain more than one comma. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:09, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
- It might be something like Abel, Baker, Charley and partners --Redrose64 (talk) 21:36, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
- So no examples then?
[Proving] there are no legitimate institutional names that contain more than one comma
is a bit like proving that Russell's teapot doesn't exist, isn't it? You have claimed that these names exist so the burden to prove that is yours.
- So no examples then?
-
- But, to forestall a pointless discussion about orbiting crockery and the like, I will stipulate that such corporate names exist. I can think of no better way to know if
|author=has more than one author name assigned to it. Can you? The method won't find the cases where two names are separated a single separator character (|author=A. Smith, B. Jones) so it is just as likely that the method will find names that legitimately have multiple separators. - —Trappist the monk (talk) 21:42, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
- My suggestion is don't implement unreliable checks and make editors do unnecessary troubleshooting when there is really nothing wrong with an author's name. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:39, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
- So no idea for a better method then?
- —Trappist the monk (talk) 11:24, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
- Trappist, are you seriously trying to claim that there are no corporate or partnership names with more than one comma in them? We have articles here on Adelson, Testan, Brundo & Jimenez – Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz – Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine – Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner – Robinson, Silverman, Pearce, Aronsohn, and Berman – Sullivan, Papain, Block, McGrath, & Cannavo – to pick a few examples found from briefly poking around some likely categories. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:02, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
- My suggestion is don't implement unreliable checks and make editors do unnecessary troubleshooting when there is really nothing wrong with an author's name. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:39, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
- But, to forestall a pointless discussion about orbiting crockery and the like, I will stipulate that such corporate names exist. I can think of no better way to know if
- It might be something like Abel, Baker, Charley and partners --Redrose64 (talk) 21:36, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
- It's obvious that corporations and partnerships can choose names that include several commas. You're the one that wants to make the templates harder to use; you should prove there are no legitimate institutional names that contain more than one comma. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:09, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
- I agree that no parameter (except in vcite) should have multiple authors. However, is it proper or useful for the cs code the enforce this? It seems to me this is not such a great problem that the cs code needs to be further complicated in a quest to Right All (citation) Wrongs. An occassional run with a special purpose bot would suffice. And then Trappist would have little more time to expand the
|title=nonefeature. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:09, 22 February 2016 (UTC)- I wouldn't mind a maintenance category, with the understanding that there is not yet a consensus for "fixing" the condition identified. The description of the category, and the linked help text, could make it clear that this message is merely a tracking category to identify the scale of this type of parameter usage and to look for potential false positives that could be used to refine the error check. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:04, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
- Yes, sounds like a reasonable approach to me. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 00:50, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
- I wouldn't mind a maintenance category, with the understanding that there is not yet a consensus for "fixing" the condition identified. The description of the category, and the linked help text, could make it clear that this message is merely a tracking category to identify the scale of this type of parameter usage and to look for potential false positives that could be used to refine the error check. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:04, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
For those cases where any single entity's name requires multiple separators, we can employ a similar trick that is used in |vauthors= to instruct the module to skip the multiple names test:
{{cite book/new |author=(([[Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz]])) |title=Title}}
The doubled parentheses must wrap the entire parameter value. If they do not, then they are not stripped from the rendering:
- ((Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz)) more author stuff. Title.
{{cite book}}:|author=has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
- ((Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz)) more author stuff. Title.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 14:11, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
- I think we should avoid introduction of such type of text (vauthors excepted, of course) since there's no demonstrable consensus above for editing the articles which exhibit this concern. As with Jonesey and Matthias, I think a maintenance category is desirable. --Izno (talk) 14:18, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
Unrecognized language
Is there some reason that Filipino is triggering the unrecognized language error message? It's a valid language with the code [fil], apparently. Maybe some list needs to be updated?
—D'Ranged 1 VTalk 14:25, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
filis not an ISO 639-1 code which is a requirement of|language=. Neither offilnor Filipino are recognized by MediaWiki. See names.php for the current list of supported language names and codes. Consider Tagalog (tl).- —Trappist the monk (talk) 14:39, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
- More confusing information, then. If you look at the entry for Tagalog at List of ISO 639-1 codes, you find the following in the Notes column:
- Note: Filipino (Pilipino) has the code [fil]
- Apparently ISO 639-1 is limited to two-letter codes, although they have three-letter codes under ISO 639-2. In skimming the Wikipedia articles on Tagalog and Filipino, apparently Filipino is the standardized version of Tagalog. That's all well and good, but shouldn't we be accommodating to what people want to call their own language? I can't see us editing every citation that lists Filipino as a language to read Tagalog instead. I realize this isn't your circus, nor your monkeys, but once again I'm up against not knowing how to effect a change. How does one request that Mediawiki adopt the ISO 639-2 standard to be more inclusive? Should one even bother?
- —D'Ranged 1 VTalk 23:27, 23 February 2016 (UTC)
- What the reader sees when you use
|language=Filipinois (in Filipino). When Module:Citation/CS1 doesn't recognize the content of|language=, it does categorize the page and, for those who have turned on messaging, shows the maintenance category message. Maintenance messages are not necessarily error messages.
- What the reader sees when you use
- More confusing information, then. If you look at the entry for Tagalog at List of ISO 639-1 codes, you find the following in the Notes column:
- When I introduced ISO 639-1 as an option, I created a table of all of the ISO 639-1 codes and their languages. I abandoned that when I discovered the Scribunto library function
mw.language.fetchLanguageName( code, inLanguage ). It works well enough for ISO 639-1 and to some extent with ISO-639-2. The library fails for ISO 639-2 codes what also have an ISO 639-1 code. The library appears to use the same data set as the magic word{{#language}}. As an example,{{#language:is|en}}– ISO 639-1- Icelandic
{{#language:ice|en}}– ISO 639-2- ice
mw.language.fetchLanguageName('is', 'en')returns 'Icelandic' but when the language code isice, it returnsnil.
- That 'anomaly' was sufficient for me to not attempt to support ISO 639-2.
- When I introduced ISO 639-1 as an option, I created a table of all of the ISO 639-1 codes and their languages. I abandoned that when I discovered the Scribunto library function
- The other issue that comes to mind is categorizing. Module:Citation/CS1 categorizes all templates that use
|language=(except English). For the ISO-639-1 languages there are 185 of these categories. There are some 500-ish ISO 639-2 language codes 185 of which duplicate ISO 639-1 codes. Supporting all of them might be more work than it is worth.
- The other issue that comes to mind is categorizing. Module:Citation/CS1 categorizes all templates that use
- I have thought, on and off, of supporting certain ISO 639-2 codes where those codes or their associated language names appear commonly in Category:CS1 maint: Unrecognized language;
filand Filipino would be one such example. - —Trappist the monk (talk) 00:57, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
- I have thought, on and off, of supporting certain ISO 639-2 codes where those codes or their associated language names appear commonly in Category:CS1 maint: Unrecognized language;
- I would definitely support that solution. I agree that supporting an additional 300+ language codes is burdensome and unnecessary, but since ISO 639-1 isn't ever likely to include Filipino, it would be great to add it to our list somehow. Thanks for your very educational response!
- —D'Ranged 1 VTalk 19:04, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
- In perusing the pages in the maintenance category, I've found two anomalies already.
- If the language in
|language=is Wikilinked, the maintenance tag is added, as in|language=[[Japanese language|Japanese]]. - If the language is the English equivalent, it may trigger the maintenance tag, as in
|language=German
- If the language in
- While the first example is easily fixed by unlinking the language (although that's a pain), the second is more problematical. Purging the page cache removes the green maintenance tag notifications, but doesn't remove the page from the category. The relevant article is 1. FSV Mainz 05. Other articles using
|language=Germandon't fall into the maintenance category, though, see Attila. - Something goofy is obviously going on, but don't ask me what. It would seem that there are numerous pages in the category that don't belong there.
- 19:28, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
- At the last update of Module:Citation/CS1 a bug in the code caused the
language_parameter()to improperly categorize proper and correct language names (not codes) as unrecognized. That has been fixed. MediaWiki sometimes takes its time when removing pages from a category. The usual solution is to simply wait for MediaWiki to get around to doing whatever it is that needs doing to remove the page from the category. After all, there are thousands of us all making little modifications which all need MediaWiki's attention, so some things can be put off until later. - —Trappist the monk (talk) 19:58, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
- A null edit will typically remove the page from the category. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:27, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
- At the last update of Module:Citation/CS1 a bug in the code caused the
- In perusing the pages in the maintenance category, I've found two anomalies already.
The problem in the 1. FSV Mainz 05 article was apparently the use of {{de icon}} in some raw html references. Once I converted them to Cite templates (which were widely used in the rest of the article), the page was de-listed from the Category. I'll try to remember to check back in a few days and see if the Category has been purged.
I want to expressly thank you, Trappist, for your patience and all the time you spend composing detailed, educational responses to my queries. I know I'm probably on your "HME list" (High Maintenance Editors), but I hope my wanting to improve my editing skills and Wikipedia as a whole is some sort of balance for all the energy you expend. You're very much appreciated! Thank you. —D'Ranged 1 VTalk 21:51, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
- If that were the problem, you would see the category and the error message when looking at the previous version of the article in the article's History. I do not see the category or the error message. Your edits forced the page to reload all of the templates in the page, which is what fixed the category membership.
- Standardizing the citations was the right thing to do, but it was not related to this discussion. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:54, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
- Thanks! Since I'm mostly clueless about this stuff, all I can do is relate my actions and wait for someone to explain what impact they did or didn't have. I appreciate the education!
- —D'Ranged 1 VTalk 23:03, 24 February 2016 (UTC)
Author titles or jobs
A lot of time, like when arguing over whether a source is from a "scholar" or not, I think listing the person's title or job at the time they wrote a book would be useful. Is it possible to have a field for that?
It seems to fall outside the bounds of |last= |first= splitting. Should we just use |author= and manually do "Last, First" ? In that case how would we format a mention of their title or job? After, before, in-between? 184.145.18.50 (talk) 20:06, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
- Probably not. For example, I suspect that many authors of articles in medical journals and other scholarly works are entitled to be addressed as doctor or professor; many I suspect have PhDs yet, that information is not included in citations or bibliographies. That being the case, such titles and honoraria should not be made part of cs1|2 citations.
- —Trappist the monk (talk) 20:34, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
- [ec] Not a good idea. It is outside the scope of citation to evaluate the goodness, authority, relevance, etc. of the source or the author(s), and it would be a very large can worms to address anything like that in a citation. If there is any question regarding the reliability or applicability of a particular source or author in particular case that is resolved on the Talk page of the article where the question is raised. Also, job titles are very poor indicators for such purposes. Note that when Einstein published his theory of relativity he was just a clerk in a patent office. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:39, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
- As a compromise, perhaps not titles and job specifications (they are just "sounds and smoke"), but direct professional affiliations or associations (if mentioned).
- I have run into various cases, where an author's affiliation / association with a particular company or research facility (f.e. Hewlett Packard, IBM or General Electric) was prominently mentioned in an article or on a book's front cover, to the extent that this information almost had "publisher status", even though the work was published by someone else. Related research or the work itself might have been initiated and/or sponsored by the associated company. In such cases I consider an author's association a vital part of a reference, and I have seen references in books where such information was included as part of the reference.
- I have sometimes put this information into the
|location=parameter, but a dedicated parameter would be more desirable in order to allow automatic parsing and ensure a consistent display format. Something like|author-assoc=and|editor-assoc=(or something more generic like|author-suffix=and|editor-suffix=), displayed after the author name and separated by comma or in brackets. Like in: Doe, John, IBM; Zweistein, Willibald, CERN (2016). Title XYZ Press (Ghosttown, USA).- --Matthiaspaul (talk) 23:21, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
- It's advertising. Hewlett Packard or whoever have put up money towards the cost of producing the book, in return for getting their name on the front. The author would probably have written exactly the same book without HP's cash, but might not have found a publisher willing or interested enough to take a gamble. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:15, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
- In some cases, that might be true, in others the research or development work the book is about was funded and conducted at that company and by the author of the book, so without the company the work would not exist in the first place, and without the company's consent and approval (and perhaps endorsement) the book could not have been written as the author would typically be under NDA prohibiting him from sharing his insights with anyone outside the company.
- Examples:
- (Schmid was employed by General Electric when he wrote this book on decimal computation, and the book introduces him in the front matter like "Hermann Schmid, General Electric Company, Binghamton, New York" whereas the publishing company is located elsewhere. I put the company information into the
|location=parameter, but it would certainly look more logical if the "General Electric Company" thing would immediately follow the author's name):
- Schmid, Hermann (1974). Decimal Computation (1 ed.). General Electric Company, Binghamton, New York, USA: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-76180-X.
- (Walther was employed by HP when he carried out the R&D work on CORDIC for the first scientific handheld electronic calculator HP-35. In that capacity he published a paper at a conference. I tried to use
|via=and|publisher=to reflect this, but the result is unsatisfactory):
- Walther, John Stephen (May 1971). Written at Palo Alto, California, USA. "A unified algorithm for elementary functions" (PDF). Proceedings of the Spring Joint Computer Conference. 38. Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA: Hewlett-Packard Company: 379–385 – via American Federation of Information Processing Societies.
- (Chen and Ho were both IBM employees when they created the so-called Chen-Ho encoding for IBM):
- Chen, Tien Chi; Ho, Irving T. (January 1975). "Storage-Efficient Representation of Decimal Data". Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery. 18 (1): 49–52.
- (Schmid was employed by General Electric when he wrote this book on decimal computation, and the book introduces him in the front matter like "Hermann Schmid, General Electric Company, Binghamton, New York" whereas the publishing company is located elsewhere. I put the company information into the
- I don't see cases like these as blatant advertising, even though it may have a promotional side-effect (because of the work they did). I see this information as part of the bibliographic data that belongs into the citation somehow. In some cases, it might be possible to use the
|others=parameter treating the company as kind of a co-author or other contributor, but this would break for multiple authors. - What I'm trying to say is that the OP's suggestion has some merits. Some kind of suffix parameter associated with each of the author / editor parameters could be put to good use in quite a few cases.
- --Matthiaspaul (talk) 11:20, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
|location=is for the town or city that the publisher is located in, not a full postal address nor anything not directly related to the company that published it. If General Electric Company have published the book - and so are named as publisher on the copyright page - then|location=Binghamton, NY|publisher=General Electric Companyis valid. Otherwise, it's|location=Hoboken, NJ|publisher=John Wiley & Sonsand General Electric Company don't get a mention. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:02, 26 February 2016 (UTC)- (edit conflict)
- As I think someone said before in a different way, this is an attempt to assert notability via citations. That's not what citations are for. Citations are a way for a reader to verify the information that is included in the article is sourced from a particular place. Their main function is the location of the information, not communicating the quality of the information. There are policies and guidelines for what can and cannot be used as a verifiable, reliable source, if the citation is included in the article one must assume that the source meets the criteria necessary for inclusion.
- If there are disputes over sources used, they need to be resolved on the article's Talk page, not in the citations themselves. With millions of articles on this Wikipedia alone, imagine the additional space needed to include justification for a citation in every citation? The examples above include information totally superfluous to enabling a reader to locate the citation. Adding a company name to the
|location=parameter, for example, also breaks any metadata indexing, as General Electric is not a location. Please use the templates in the way the are intended to be used: - Addendum As for including credentials, etc., it's also not the job of the citation to identify the qualifications of the person being cited. If we don't list Albert Einstein's accomplishments in citations, I see no reason to list anyone else's. Just my 2¢. 12:35, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
- —D'Ranged 1 | VTalk : 12:28, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
- It's advertising. Hewlett Packard or whoever have put up money towards the cost of producing the book, in return for getting their name on the front. The author would probably have written exactly the same book without HP's cash, but might not have found a publisher willing or interested enough to take a gamble. --Redrose64 (talk) 00:15, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
- --Matthiaspaul (talk) 23:21, 25 February 2016 (UTC)
- Yes! Citation are for identifying and locating sources, not for any kind of comment about the source or its authors. And any such misuse of the citations should be removed. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:23, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
- Exactly so. Peter coxhead (talk) 20:42, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
- Yes! Citation are for identifying and locating sources, not for any kind of comment about the source or its authors. And any such misuse of the citations should be removed. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:23, 26 February 2016 (UTC)
Error message at preview
I'm running into this more and more as I try to clean up pages and need a way to identify the miscreant citation, please.
When I press Preview, I get a message similar to this:
- Warning: [Article name] is calling Template:Cite web with more than one value for the "publisher" parameter. Only the last value provided will be used.
Maybe I'm tired, but short of eyeballing every instance of {{Cite web}}, I don't know how to identify this. I'm sure there's a RegEx search that would help, but that is beyond my current skill set.
Wouldn't this error message be better appearing next to the guilty citation in the Refs list like missing/misspelled parameter name messages? Is there some reason it doesn't? And shouldn't this be a maintenance category as well?
Thanks!—D'Ranged 1 | VTalk : 19:03, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
- That error message is is not created by Module:Citation/CS1. The module does not see duplicate parameters; it gets one parameter of each name even if there are 50 of them. The error message is created by MediaWiki.
- There is a tool that may be helpful (I haven't used it so don't know): User:Frietjes/findargdups
- —Trappist the monk (talk) 19:16, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
- Thanks! I gave it a try and it failed, but I left a message at the author's Talk page. Apparently such pages are categorized, so maybe someone else will be able to fix it. I so appreciate your fount of knowledge, kind sir Trappist!
- —D'Ranged 1 | VTalk : 20:27, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
- To find these errors efficiently, add the following code to your vector.js or monobook.js file (whichever one you use):
//Find duplicate template parameters
importScript('User:Frietjes/findargdups.js'); // [[User:Frietjes/findargdups.js]]
- Then go to the article again, click Edit, and look for the "Find dups" link in your left toolbar, under Tools. Click it, and it will tell you which template has a repeated parameter.
- Frietjes, SporkBot, and a handful of other editors have been working on emptying Category:Pages using duplicate arguments in template calls, which is down to about 15,000 articles from a high of well over 50,000 when the error tracking was put in place. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:41, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
More help with foreign languages
I just discovered an article where 99.9% of the citations are in Portuguese! Someone went through and changed all the parameter names, but left the foreign dates behind, which is what triggered the cleanup from me. (That was not fun, by the way.)
So we have citations with valid dates and parameter names, but none of the citations use |translate-title= or |language=. Several also use the |quote= parameter, stuffed with Portuguese. In other words, these citations are nearly worthless on the English Wikipedia.
I can't find a specific {{Cleanup}} template for this situation and wondered if anyone here had any advice on how to tag the page?
Thanks!—D'Ranged 1 | VTalk : 20:33, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
- It is helpful to provide a link to the page when you have a question like this.
- BattyBot will clean up most foreign dates in citation templates. It runs that task about once a month, so I usually fix the unsupported parameters and leave the dates in their original language.
- You might try {{cleanup-translation}}. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:00, 27 February 2016 (UTC)
- @D'Ranged 1: BattyBot just ran over Category:CS1 errors: dates - did it fix the article you discovered? GoingBatty (talk) 03:22, 1 March 2016 (UTC)
- The article is A Regra do Jogo; I fixed all the dates in the citations by hand, not really thinking about bots that would do that. Since Portuguese isn't even remotely in my wheelhouse, I had to find a translation of the names of months, lol. All's well and I'll know better next time. Thanks, GoingBattyand Jonesey95
- —D'Ranged 1 | VTalk : 03:36, 1 March 2016 (UTC)
Citing the Introduction written by the editor, not the author
The book has one author and one editor. The editor wrote the Preface/Introduction, how do we cite it? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 09:22, 1 March 2016 (UTC)
{{cite book |title=Title |contribution=Introduction |contributor=Editor name |author=Author name |publisher=Publisher |location=Location |date=2016}}- —Trappist the monk (talk) 10:56, 1 March 2016 (UTC)
- Thanks! Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 11:34, 1 March 2016 (UTC)