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Greetings, For example, at article Ancient Diocese of Alais there is comment ( <!-- Bot generated title --> ) wikicode within a reference. Can or should this be deleled? There are additional articles with this same comment, so I am asking here for help. Thanks. — JoeHebda • (talk)20:39, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Joe. Text contained in <!-- this markup --> doesn't...shouldn't have any effect on the way the article displays. If it does for some reason, it can probably be removed with no consequence. A lot of times this is used in article to note where an extensive, but still somewhat controversial consensus has been achieved and should be respected, especially where casual editors who are unaware are likely to make well meaning contributions against consensus. For example, say...if Japan, Korea, and China disagreed on what the real name of a body of water is, and it gets changed on nearly a daily basis. TimothyJosephWood21:42, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
Hi JoeHebda. The short answer is yes, but it indicates that a human hasn't looked it over yet. Reference titles added the by bot often aren't very good and references need more than a title. Complete the information needed so it has a title, publisher, author if there is one, date if there is one. Then remove the comment. StarryGrandma (talk) 21:50, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
Hi, JoeHebda. Another example is when I did this to (hopefully) deter some unwanted date changes. When used correctly, they don't affect the appearance of an article at all, but edits like this one can unintentionally make entire sections disappear, as I learned that day. (Thankfully, that was quickly noticed by another user and we eventually figured out the problem — the extra ! at the end of the invisible comment.) -- Gestrid (talk) 22:17, 26 September 2016 (UTC)
