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.
The error "line feed character in |publisher= at position 26" is not cool. Templates are supposed to be whitespace-agnostic, and if the template can detect the presence of an LF it can also strip it out for metadata purposes. This is an impediment to copy-pasting source details. — SMcCandlish☏¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 01:18, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
Line feeds create many more issues than just those concerning metadata, and they should be fixed at the wikitext level. Headbomb {t · c · p · b}03:11, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
Somehow WP has failed to fall apart as the result of LFs being present, which they often can be. This is not a citation issue, and the citation template should not be barfing on cite data or metadata to try to force people to fix something they can't even see. The averaged editor probably doesn't even know what an LF is. — SMcCandlish☏¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 06:04, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
WP also has also failed to fall apart as the result of vandalism. Doesn't mean vandalism shouldn't be fixed. Likewise for stray line feeds which can cause both rendering accessibility issues. Headbomb {t · c · p · b}12:17, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
That's a WP:GREATWRONGS argument. Cite templates are not the place to try to do anti-LF enforcement. Way, way out of scope. It's abusing a core function and necessity of the encyclopedia (citing sources) to try to arm-twist people into doing geek work for which many of them are not competent. Don't insert work- or behavior-coercion "riders" into basic functionality templates. Have a bot look for LFs and remove them. This is what we have bots for. Also, your analogy is false; WP has failed to fall apart at the hands of vandals because and only because of the constant work a large number of anti-vandals. There is no huge cadre of anti-LF editors, and WP works just fine without one. — SMcCandlish☏¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ< 20:25, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
Must say that this is a very useful feature of the templates as it catches many vandal edits as does the date error messages. Keith D (talk) 21:35, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
Bots can certainly assist in cleanup, but that doesn't mean the issue shouldn't be flagged in the first place. Headbomb {t · c · p · b}01:22, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
As an average editor who learned what an LF was precisely because of this error, I agree that it's beyond the fixing capacity of many. That said, it is an error that ought to be identified because an invisible character in a URL is still a character and is contaminating the usefulness of the information. I see it as similar to date errors: while potentially difficult/unintuitive to fix, it causes problems, and so it needs to be identified. Leave the error message and get the bot to do its work. Triptothecottage (talk) 04:27, 4 October 2017 (UTC)
missing error handlers for cite bioRxiv and cite citeseerx
It somehow escaped us to include the error handlers for the cases where {{cite bioRxiv}} and {{cite citeseerx}} are missing their respective parameters |biorxiv= and |citeseerx=. That oversight has been remedied in the sandbox:
