Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Citation cleanup

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[edit] Goals

[edit] Opposition

I am opposed to one of the goals of the project, "Maximising the use of {{cite web}}, {{cite book}}, and {{cite news}}". I oppose this goal because these templates cannot be used to cite every conceivable web page, book, or news article, only those for which parameters have been provided in the respective template. Furthermore, when one of the templates cannot be used, the editor who wants to create a manual citation in the same style is at a loss, because the citation templates do not attempt to follow any recognized citation style, so the editor does not know which manual of style to look in for further guidance. --Gerry Ashton 19:05, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

I would say in that case develop a template that helps you insert the source you need. So far I have I have been able to cope with the ones available. Arnoutf 19:24, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
Most editors don't know how to create or modify a citation template, and if they are in the middle of writing an article and discover the existing templates don't accommodate a particular source, they certainly won't want to take time out from writing the article to create or modify a template. --Gerry Ashton 20:18, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
A possibly useful multistep goal which you might support could be
  1. Identify a suitable and suitably documented citation style (or styles)
  2. Change cosmetics of {{Citation}} to this style (or create an alternative template)
  3. Enhance this template to compatibly support what {{Cite web}} (and book, and news, etc.) support
  4. Deprecate {{Cite web}} (etc.) in favor of this alternative
  5. Migrate existing {{Cite web}} (etc.) instances to this alternative template (use a bot)
  6. Delete the now obsoleted {{Cite web}} (etc.) templates -- Boracay Bill 02:59, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
Boracay Bill - that is a beautiful solution. However, in response to Gerry Ashton's comment that most editors don't know how to create their own templates, I believe this is the reason the generic {{Citation}} template is available. It's not perfect, but no generic fallback is perfect. Biochemza (21:41, 1 November 2007 (UTC))
Biochemza, the fact that the Citation template is intended to be all-purpose does not help. Citation and other templates support a fixed list of parameters. If it is necessary to include information in the citation that is not covered by the paramenters, the editor cannot use the template, and is forced to format the citation by hand. --Gerry Ashton 02:28, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
Or items which would otherwise be handled by template parameters not supported by {{Citation}} can be tacked in manually. — e.g., {{Cite web}} and some other citation templates support a quote= parameter but {{Citation}} does not, so something like the following can be done: <ref>{{Citation |url=http://whatever.com |title=Example}} "This would be a quote"</ref> -- Boracay Bill 03:45, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
Boracay Bill's suggestion may work, provided the material not supported by any parameter belongs at the beginning or end of the citation. --Gerry Ashton 04:22, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
I too feel that not necessarily the promotion of those specific templates should be the goal, but promotion of using inline references with a reference section at the bottom of the page rather than simply linking articles like this[1]. -Drdisque (talk) 06:38, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ambiguous goal

What do you mean with the goal "Standardising the use of citations in articles by making them all consistent with each other". Do you mean citations within an article should be consistent (I agree); or do you mean all citation styles over all wiki articles should be following the exact same structure (I oppose as this in direct conflict with the official guideline on inline citations which allows both Harvard and footnote). This has to be clarified. Arnoutf 19:24, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

I meant that they need to be consistent within one article, obviously. May need to clarify it a little though :) Melsaran (talk) 15:48, 9 September 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Guidelines

Extra guidelines, based on tasks in the OpenTask list, should be specified for new users looking to join this project. Any discussion/comments would be welcome. Biochemza [21:41, 1 November 2007 (UTC)]

I've moved the guideline section to after the OpenTask list, since many of the guidelines are based on tasks in the OpenTask list. Biochemza [21:41, 1 November 2007 (UTC)]

[edit] Test case citation cleanup exercise

I tried a test case citation cleanup exercise on an article with a {{Citation style}} tag. I picked an article with which I was not familiar and which looked like it had some fairly straightforward and fixable citation problems. I found that things didn't turn out to be as straightforward as they looked.

The article is Eating disorder and my working draft with the citations reworked is here. I ended up using the existing References section in the article mostly as a footnotes section to link inline <ref>s to other endmatter sections where the cited works were described. I left in place two exceptions to that where <ref>s link to external webpages directly. I'm not really happy with the results of this citation cleanup attempt, though I think it is an improvement.

The article already used citation templates, and I ran into problems with inconsistencies between templates. I used the {{Citation}} template to make the citations linkable from the References section items (though without a backlink), overriding the template's default mechanism for specifying the element ID which is the link target by using the template's undocumented ref= parameter (lowercase r). I used the {{Harvnb}} template to place clickable links in the References section which linked onwards to matching {{Citation}} templates, overriding the template's default mechanism for specifying the element ID which is the link target by using the template's partially documented Ref= parameter (uppercase R). I noticed that {{Cite book}}, which the article already used, supports a documented ref= parameter similar to {{Citation}}, so I used {{Cite book}} where appropriate instead of {{Citation}}. The article also uses {{Cite journal}}, but that template doesn't support a Ref= parameter, so I used {{Citation}} where the cited sources were journal articles.

It doesn't show up in this test case, but {{Ref}}, {{Ref label}}, {{Ref harvard}}, and {{Ref harv}} hook up with {{Note}} and {{Note label}} similarly to the way {{Harv}} and {{Harvnb}} hook up with {{Citation}} and {{Cite book}}, but the ID naming conventions differ and there is no provision in those templates to override the default conventions.

Comments? Observations? Criticisms? Suggestions? -- Boracay Bill 06:22, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

(Update 2007-09-09)I've re-edited my working draft to do some nontraditional things which seem to improve the style a lot. I've used the <span style="display:none"> trick discussed here to group all the <Ref> declarations together in a hidden span, then moved that hidden span to the top of the article. Doing that allows the display order of the expanded Reference section items to be controlled. I then reordered the items into a sensible order. One irritating artifact of this is that all the References section items now have at least two backlinks, and backlink "a" is uniformly nonfunctional.

Comments? Observations? Criticisms? Suggestions? -- Boracay Bill 03:53, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

It is trivial to convert a cite-book to Citation. The names of (almost) all the fields are the same. ---- CharlesGillingham 17:00, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
Right. I did not do the conversion because my mindset at the time was to improve the article with as little disturbance as I could manage. -- Boracay Bill 14:33, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Miscellaneous

I've added some extra structure to this page (in terms of section breaks), in anticipation of future requirements for clarity of layout. Biochemza [21:41, 1 November 2007 (UTC)]

[edit] Terminology

I have some problem with the lack of clarity in the use of Wikipedia terminology concerning "citations" and "references". I have added a recommendation at Template talk:Unreferenced#Sources vs. Referenced vs. Citation.

Softtest123 02:12, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Citing Wikipedia Articles

I've been fixing an article (with no proper references in the text) which lists another Wikipedia article as a reference. How do you create an in-text citation for that? <ref>???</ref> What template? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Biochemza (talk • contribs) 23:25, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Don't. Cite a reliable source instead. --Gerry Ashton 23:34, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Bibliographic record keeping discussion.

On the Village pump (technical) there is a discussion to simplify the citing of commonly used sources, and more generally to improve our bibliographic record keeping. There are a number of options presented, some of which are ready for prime-time, and an organised effort is required to consider their suitability and prepare a well rounded proposal if any option appears to be workable. John Vandenberg (talk) 04:09, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Style guideline for PD sourced content

A discussion has started at Citing sources on the question: Does this style guideline mean that all PD-sourced content be placed in quotes? --Paleorthid (talk) 07:17, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Converting BibTeX to Wiki template (found it myself)

The subject says it all. Is this currently possible? I've looked at OttoBib and the Template Builder, but neither seem capable of it. ImpIn | (t - c) 01:24, 11 June 2008 (UTC) Nevermind, I found it. Didn't even look carefully at the tools of WP:CITE...