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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Citing sources page.

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view · edit Frequently asked questions Why doesn't Misplaced Pages require everyone to use exactly the same style for formatting citations on every single article, regardless of the subject? Different academic disciplines use different styles because they have different needs and interests. Variations include differences in the choice of information to include, the order in which the information is presented, the punctuation, and the name of the section headings under which the information is presented. There is no house style on Misplaced Pages, and the community does not want to have the holy war that will happen if we tell people that they must use the style preferred by scientists in articles about history or the style preferred by artists when writing about science. Editors should choose a style that they believe is appropriate for the individual article in question and should never edit-war over the style of citations. What styles are commonly used? There are many published style manuals. For British English the Oxford Style Manual is the authoritative source. For American English the Chicago Manual of Style is commonly used by historians and in the fine arts. Other US style guides include APA style which is used by sociologists and psychologists, and The MLA Style Manual which is used in humanities. The Council of Science Editors and Vancouver styles are popular with scientists. Editors on Misplaced Pages may use any style they like, including styles they have made up themselves. It is unusual for Misplaced Pages articles to strictly adhere to a formally published academic style. Isn't everyone required to use clickable footnotes like this to cite sources in an article? Yes. Footnotes (also called "<ref> tags") or shortened footnotes are now required in new articles, although some older articles may still use the now-deprecated citation system of inline parenthetical referencing (see WP:PARREF). Why doesn't Misplaced Pages require everyone to use citation templates in every single article? Citation templates have advantages and disadvantages. They provide machine-readable meta data and can be used by editors who don't know how to properly order and format a citation. However, they are intimidating and confusing to most new users, and, if more than a few dozen are used, they make the pages noticeably slower to load. Editors should use their best judgment to decide which format best suits each specific article. Isn't there a rule that every single sentence requires an inline citation? No. Misplaced Pages:Verifiability requires citations based on the content rather than the grammar. Sometimes, one sentence will require multiple inline citations. In other instances, a whole paragraph will not require any inline citations. Aren't general references prohibited? A general reference is a citation listed at the end of an article, without any system for linking it to a particular bit of material. In an article that contains more than a couple of sentences, it is more difficult to maintain text-source integrity without using inline citations, but general references can be useful and are not banned. However, they are not adequate if the material is one of four types of content requiring an inline citation. The article Early life of Joseph Smith, Jr. is an example of a featured article that uses some general references. Can I cite a sign? Yes, signs, including gravestones, that are displayed in public are considered publications. If the article is using citation templates, then use {{cite sign}}. You may also cite works of art, videos, music album liner notes, sheet music, interviews, recorded speeches, podcasts, television episodes, maps, public mailing lists, ship registers, and a wide variety of other things that are published and accessible to the public.

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Manual of Style

This page falls within the scope of the Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style, a collaborative effort focused on enhancing clarity, consistency, and cohesiveness across the Manual of Style (MoS) guidelines by addressing inconsistencies, refining language, and integrating guidance effectively.Manual of StyleWikipedia:WikiProject Manual of StyleTemplate:WikiProject Manual of StyleManual of Style This page falls under the contentious topics procedure and is given additional attention, as it closely associated to the English Misplaced Pages Manual of Style, and the article titles policy. Both areas are subjects of debate. Contributors are urged to review the awareness criteria carefully and exercise caution when editing. For information on Misplaced Pages's approach to the establishment of new policies and guidelines, refer to WP:PROPOSAL. Additionally, guidance on how to contribute to the development and revision of Misplaced Pages policies of Misplaced Pages's policy and guideline documents is available, offering valuable insights and recommendations.

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Citing a web page that's multiple pages?

Hi, for a while now, I've been wondering how you would best cite sources that are multiple web pages. The issue is that unlike books, webpages are not permanent so one may have to occasionally retrieve an archive in which they would need to know the exact address.

What I've been doing is linking to the page of the information and adding what page number it is in the title. (IE: the title "The Rain in London" would become "The Rain in London, Page 2") Is this too confusing? I don't think it is, but I don't see anyone else using this, so I thought I'd ask. --Deathawk (talk) 06:14, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

Confusing, yes, but also incorrect, as "Page 2" is not part of the title. If you are using any of the citation templates (it would be helpful if you provided examples of what you are trying to do) and the web site has page numbers you can use the |page= parameter to specify the page. If there are named or numbered sections you can use the |loc= parameter the same way. See Global warming Effects of global warming#Notes for examples of how IPCC reports are cited. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:17, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

So if I put in the template page 2 do I also link to page 2?--Deathawk (talk) 23:48, 26 August 2014 (UTC)

  Well, it's just a little bit complicated here. Generally speaking, there is a difference between pointing to a source itself, and to a location within a source. If the source is, say, an article in a journal, or a paper in a collection of papers, you might add page numbers to show where the source is located within the larger work. When you refer to specific material within the source you should provide specific page number (or section, etc.). This would go not into the {{cite}} template, but after the short cite (possibly implemented using a {{Harv}} template). E.g.: "Smith 1977, p.2". If you are not using short cites (perhaps because you cite the source only once), just tack it on following the citation.

  As to linking to a specific page (section, paragraph, etc.): if you can do that, sure. But I would do that following the template, not within it. If you want to link to the source itself, use the |url= parameter. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:16, 7 September 2014 (UTC)

You could preemptively archive it and set deadulr=no. Then readers could always go the right page. In that case, I don't there is any need to indicate the page in the citation template. Even otherwise. I think the page= argument in cite web is for sources like PDFs, that do have page numbers. I really can't recall anybody indicating page numbers for webpages. But if do you want to do it, I agree that it could tacked on at the end. Maybe using the {{Rp}} template. --Margin1522 (talk) 10:42, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Good grief, {{Rp}} is wretched, let's not encourage that.

Web pages are not usually numbered, but it is possible. More often you see sections named or numbered, and that is what |loc= is good for. Which is (currently) actually a synonym for |page=. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:57, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Agreed, {{Rp}} is not very pretty on the page. It is the first option listed in Help:References and page numbers. I for one prefer it to 10 cites in the form <ref>Smith 2011, p. 10</ref> where the only difference is the page number. It can also do sections, as in DHCP_request. That may be an abuse of the syntax, I don't know. In any case, I still don't think the page number is needed here. Just put the URL for that page into url= and the URL will have a page number parameter. That's enough. If the editor feels that the page is likely to move, then I think the best solution is still to check whether the page has been archived at the Wayback Machine. --Margin1522 (talk) 07:17, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

  The question is not one of a web page moving, but of changing content. Regardless of whether you cite the original or an archived version, having an exact address (url) that points to a specific section or "page" within the source where the relevant material should be found makes that material easier to find, and quicker to determine when it is missing or altered. This is distinct from using the |url= parameter for pointing to the source as a whole.

  I forgot how screwed up the Global warming citations are. For examples of linking to specific sections within a web page see Effects of global warming#Notes.~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:44, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

@J. Johnson: I'm a bit confused here. Earlier, you wrote "you can use the |loc= parameter the same way. See Global warming for examples", but I can't find a single instance of |loc= in Global warming. In your comments above, you don't say which template that the |loc= parameter is part of. It's certainly not in the major cite templates ({{citation}} {{cite book}} {{cite journal}} {{cite web}}). The only citation-related templates that I have seen it in are the {{harv}} group, including {{sfn}}. This brings me to your last comment, "|loc= ... is (currently) actually a synonym for |page=". It's not a true synonym: {{harv|Smith|2014|page=123}} → (Smith 2014, p. 123) harv error: no target: CITEREFSmith2014 (help) but {{harv|Smith|2014|loc=123}} → (Smith 2014, 123) harv error: no target: CITEREFSmith2014 (help). They can coexist: {{harv|Smith|2014|page=123|loc=456}} → (Smith 2014, p. 123, 456) harv error: no target: CITEREFSmith2014 (help).

I suspect that you meant the |at= parameter, which is recognised by the major cite templates, but again, it's not a true synonym. Except in the case of {{cite journal}} (and {{citation}} when it thinks that a journal is being described), the contents of |page= are prepended with "p. " before output, something that does not happen with |at=. They are mutually exclusive though, and |page= has precedence. --Redrose64 (talk) 07:35, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

You're right, I was thinking of |at=, which is used in the cite/citation templates. Well, I was also thinking of the harv templates (the short cite), which is where I nearly always put specifiers like page number, but the question was on how to use a specific page number with the full citation (like where the full citation/reference is cited only once, and an extra short cite would be redundant). For such cases my suggestion is to put it after the citation template. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:47, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

@Deathawk: I am not sure there is a best way, but I have just spent several hours on a problem like this, which is one possible solution that you could probably use. I put the main web site information into the references section using {{Citation}} and linked the individual web pages into the short citations using {{harvnb}} with the loc= parameter for the link to the individual web pages. To complicate the matter further all the pages are archived. See the entries for the "RAF staff" at Bombing of Hamburg in World War II. There is just about a separate web page for every month of the war (and Hamburg was bombed most months for about three years and every other month at the start of the war). The Bombing of Hamburg article also contains inline citations to "Brunswig 1978" which is to a website laid out in a similar fashion for the USAAF bombing missions. -- PBS (talk) 23:19, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

Discussion on placement of ref-related tags

Please see Misplaced Pages talk:WikiProject Inline Templates#Placement of ref-related tags, on placement of reference-related inline templates (e.g. {{verify credibility}} and {{clarifyref2}}) inside or outside the <ref>...</ref> element.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ≼  14:06, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

Lazy citations

I have been coming across many instances of citations that use the ref name format for a text, several times in an article. Editors use this as a lazy way of citing without page numbers. In this format, there seems no place to put page numbers, so these articles end up with lots of cn or page needed tags. I have been replacing these inline citations with a shortened form (eg. Smith (1999), p. 12.). However, this seemed to require a bibliography entry with the text name in full. The WP article Help:References and page numbers seems to suggest that the full text reference would be put in the references section and the shortened citation in notes. I don't see this very often, and it would surely be very confusing. A solution would be to allow the ref name format to specify a page number, but I can't find a way of doing that. Myrvin (talk) 08:57, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

I am now trying rp|12 to indicate page number, but I'm not sure readers will understand it. Myrvin (talk)

rp|page=12 seems better. Myrvin (talk) 12:21, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

@Myrvin: The {{rp}} template is disliked by a number of editors, partly because it means putting the page number some distance from the rest of the ref. One way, as you noticed, is Shortened footnotes - you can see this in use at NBR 224 and 420 Classes; another is to use a full citation for the first use of a given source, and a shorter form for subsequent uses where only the page number differs - this is what I did at Boar's Head railway station#References, refs 2 & 6. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:16, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Myrvin: What do you mean by "use ref name format for a text"? Are you referring to the inclusion of explanatory text or comments in a note? Could you provide some examples?

Your surmise that that a shortened form, or "short cite", requires "a bibliography entry with the text name in full" is correct. That is the "full citation" Redrose just mentioned. The beauty of short cites linking to full citations is that only one full citation is needed for each source, with as many short cites as needed, each customized with specific page numbers or comments as needed. Putting these into separate sections — typically "Notes" and "References" — is quite common. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 19:57, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments. The problem with "the first use of a given source" is that often we are changing an existing article. The new edit, or the page-less cite, may well precede the first naming of a given source. It can also be difficult to find it. I have edited many articles where the full name of the ref can be anywhere. By ref name format I mean e.g. ref name="Barber, Spanos 1974"/ for a citation. In most of the articles I have edited, there are no Notes sections; cited sources all go in References. Suddenly introducing Notes, or even Bibliography, seems a big change to a settled article. See my recent edits to Hypnosis.Myrvin (talk) 06:46, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

  What you are referring to as a "ref name format" is what we call a "named ref", referring a construction in the form of "<ref name=xxx />", which will link to another "ref" in the form "<ref name=xxx ... </ref>". (This is the "named" variant of the "<ref>" entity.) Note: "ref" tags (named or not) are not references (despite the name), nor citations. They only make a place — specifically, a note — where citations can be put. The "named ref" is just a way of linking to a "ref" elsewhere. And you are correct, it can be difficult to find the master "ref", as they can be anywhere. For that reason I find them obnoxious.

  A better solution is put all of the full citations that provide the full description of a source (typically using the {{Citation}} or {{Cite xxx}} templates) into a dedicated section as described above, and then linking to them using short cites in the notes.

  Yes, doing this can be a big change, so always ask on the article's Talk page before proceeding, in case someone else is vehemently opposed. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:01, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm sure you are right about the name, although I don't think my usage was confusing. I'll try to do better and "use correct term" next time. However, I note that in WP:REFNAME they seem to be called "named footnotes" - perhaps the correct term will be hard to find. I disagree with you about the use of Notes - a note is not a citation reference, it's an explanatory note. WP:Citations says

If an article contains both footnoted citations and other (explanatory) footnotes, then it is possible (but not necessary) to divide them into two separate lists, using the grouping feature described in the Grouping footnotes section of the footnotes help page. The explanatory footnotes and the citations are then placed in separate sections, called (for example) "Notes" and "References" respectively.

WP:REFNEST gives an example of where this is particularly useful. However, WP:SFN seems to agree with you. And what about Bibliography? All very confusing. See discussion below on all this. Myrvin (talk) 07:02, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

It would take a braver man than I to change, say, Intelligent design the way you suggest. Myrvin (talk) 08:58, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

I note that

Yes, it is confusing, and the confusion of terms and concepts is perpetuated for having taken root in various places. Yet I would have you disabused of notion that "a note is not a citation reference, it's an explanatory note." Which is an ambiguous statement: do you mean "reference" in the same sense whereby it is often taken to be synonymous with "citation", meaning the bibilographic details of a source? Or are you implicitly referring to the tags used for creating notes (aka "footnotes" or "endnotes")? Either way, you are trying to make a distinction that simply is not useful. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:24, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

I disagree with J. Johnson's assertion that the English Misplaced Pages is using the wrong terminology. But he and the regulars all know that already, because we've had this discussion many times. In my opinion, and I believe it's one that's generally shared, any words that average, non-style-expert editors can make sense of is good enough for discussions like this. Don't worry too much about getting the terms "right". If people can't figure out what you're saying, they'll ask. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:55, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

"Wrong" is somewhat relative, but the confusion of terms is self-evident. The problem of confused terminology is that it leads to confused thinking, such as the notion that "footnote" and "citation" are synonymous, and therefore should be processed by the same code. We can't even properly talk about these things (witness the prior discussions alluded to) because we keep running into differences of meaning. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:09, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Should we improve ref tags?

I've been talking off and on to James F on the mw:Editing team about this problem. He says that (in theory, at least) it should be easy to build in page numbers to the citation system. You'd type something like <ref name=Foo page=123>(Bibliographic citation for the whole source here)</ref> – or, for the second use of the same book, just <ref name=Foo page=456 />. The cite.php system would handle the rest.

The most important question is how the page numbers should then be displayed. The simplest system is to repeat the entire bibliographic citation each time, appending the page numbers at the end. Would that be an improvement over the current system? Do people have ideas about how they'd like it work? (Realistically, we are only able to have one "built-in" system across all wikis, so people will still want to have the ability to use manual options. The goal is to find the one that will work for the most cases.)

This isn't likely to happen this year, so we've got plenty of time to think about what we actually want. If you're interested, feel free to leave a note for me or ping me. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:54, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

I think something like what User:Whatamidoing (WMF) says would be preferable. However, if the article is to look like an academic article, the first mention of a source should be in full, and the rest, with page numbers, in short form (or even ibid). I suspect this is too much to ask of an automated system. See my comments above on where the full name is often found - anywhere. The system would have to find the full name, move that to the new first position and redo the subsequent mentions of the source. Would there need to be a Bibliography, and would the system produce that or some editor? Perhaps the best idea pro tem is to repeat the full name with added page numbers in the References. Even that might be difficult. Myrvin (talk) 08:24, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Also see Template:Bug.Myrvin (talk) 13:03, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

A full listing only on the first appearance and short forms are ok when footnotes appear on each page of a printed book, and the short form is only used if the full listing appears on the same page, but when lists become long it becomes hard to find the full listing. That is why, if sources are used many times each, it is better to have all the citations be short forms and have an alphabetical list with the full citations. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:28, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): In general it sounds like a good extension. As far as the concrete display is concerned I suppose tastes will differ. However may it would be possible to offer 2 versions? One for duplicating the full reference each time and one for proving a shorthand like author or title + page numer only.--Kmhkmh (talk) 13:34, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm dubious about the ability to create a good design and use more than one system. I wouldn't want to type <ref name=Foo page=456 style=short /> or <ref name=Foo page=456 style=full /> for each citation, and I expect that other people would feel the same way. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:25, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

Thinking about it a bit more, <ref> and </ref> are used with many styles of referencing, not just citation templates. The code for these things does not examine or parse the citation; it can't, since there are no Misplaced Pages standards for the format of the citation. So the <ref> and </ref> thingamabobs parser tag hooks can't possibly shorten a citation, because the citation is not parsed. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:57, 15 September 2014 (UTC) modified 2:15, 16 September 2014 (UT)

I find it odd that <ref> should be used for notes and not references. I see it in many articles, but academic books will often have a Notes section and then a References section for sources that have been cited. Mixing the two seems confusing. Given that it is <ref> and not <note> and {{reflist}} and not {{notelist}}, the original idea was surely for citation references. It seems to have been extended to other things. I note that there is a {{refn...}} for notes, as well as {{notelist}} & {{efn}}. Not that I use that, but maybe I should. Myrvin (talk) 18:44, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

If Misplaced Pages had specified and developed a single comprehensive referencing system right from the start, it would probably have been different, and the names of the various page sections and elements would almost certainly have been chosen more carefully and enforced more rigidly. But over something like fourteen years, the several systems that we do have were built up piece by piece; and each new piece has been given a name that is not necessarily the best, but the most suitable of what's left over after everybody else has picked something.

{{efn}} and {{notelist}} are quite new; they date back to December 2011; the {{ref}}/{{note}} system is older by something like seven years, and needs more care in its use so that the right ref links to the right note. {{refn}} isn't really a system as such, just an alternate form of <ref>...</ref> without some of the latter's limitations, much like {{reflist}} is <references /> with extra features, or like {{sfn}} is really <ref>{{harvnb}}</ref> wearing a shorter coat with more pockets. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:39, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

The articles on Template:Reflist, WP:SFN and WP:Citations seem to advise different ways of doing all this. Myrvin (talk) 08:39, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes; as I say, it was built up piecemeal over many years. There is a lot of flexibility, and thus a lot of variation. Where there is a contradiction between those three pages, a careful examination shows that these are merely alternative approaches, none has precedence over the others.

Without being too formal, the rules for references go something like this. 1: WP:V is policy (those other pages that you named are not). 2: if adding sections for notes, references, etc., try to abide by MOS:APPENDIX. 3: if you're editing an existing article, stick with the ref styles and conventions already established in the article (this is WP:CITEVAR), unless there are very good reasons to change it. 4: if you're writing an article from scratch, use any referencing system that you're comfortable with, but be consistent within the article. Consistency isn't required by any policy, but it looks good and does become a requirement if you intend getting an article to FA-Class. 5: don't be afraid to ask for assistance.

I primarily use Shortened footnotes, mainly because I draw information from a variety of pages on a small number of books (as with NBR 224 and 420 Classes that I mentioned earlier). --Redrose64 (talk) 14:17, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

In articles with few citations then long citations with ref tags are not a problem, but as the size of the article increases with a corresponding increase in citations then I think short citations are a help. This is for several reasons:

1. When I convert an article that has a mixture of long and short citations to a reference list with short citations it frequently happens that mixed into the ref tags are citations that are missing enough information to meet WP:V, typically missing either the page number or enough extra information to identify the edition. This gets hidden when the the ref tags create a mixed list at the bottom of the article of slightly differently formatted long citations all mixed up together, particularly if the list also includes {{cite web}}s that do not include page numbers (spotting chaff in the wheat)
2. The second one is that there can be a large saving of space on an article with around 100 to 150 citations typically about 10K in my experience, something that ought not to be ignored.
3. A "Notes" section with multiple columns of short citations I think looks visually cleaner than a mix list of long and short citations.
4. An alphabetic list of long citations is I think of more use as a bibliography than a mix list of long and short citations not in alphabetic ordering (which is what one gets with just a {{reflist}}).
5. When the first citation is a long one and short citations depend on it. A deletion of that first citation means that the later short citations are no longer supported with a long citation. This is less likely to happen if the long citation is in a separate references section. However if the References section ends up with a few long citations that no longer support short citations, then while undesirable and needs cleaning up it is a fail-safe situation.

One problem I have seen with short citations is when an editor assumes that because only one book is cited there is no need to include year in the short citation. This can cause problems down the line when another edition of the book (or another book by the same author is cited) working out to which long version a short citation refers can be very time consuming involving a trawl through the edit history trying to find it. -- PBS (talk) 18:07, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes! I concur in full. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:24, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

What do you feel ought to be done with explanatory notes? If they are included in Notes along with short citations, doesn't that look less clean? Myrvin (talk) 18:44, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Once again, see here - the sole explanatory note is in a separate list with letter identifier instead of numeral. Similarly with this article - here the explanatory notes (lettered again) go first, because one of them is referenced (and the other one ought to be but isn't). --Redrose64 (talk) 20:44, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

I don't know if the various element names would have been chosen more carefully, but they should have been, because confused terminology and sloppy conceptualizing has wreaked all kinds of confusion and grief here. A prime example is this widespread notion that the "ref" in <ref>...</ref> tags is short for "reference", as in "the full bibliographical details of a work referenced". Sorry, no, "ref" is just a poorly chosen name for tags that mark a kind of bucket (otherwise called a note) that the software automagically processes in a certain way. Bibliographic details don't mean shit to <ref>...</ref> tags. Or perhaps I should say: they are not distinguished from anything else that can be put into these buckets. Nor should they. While there is good reason to keep full citations separate, there is no benefit in segregating short cites from any other comments or explanatory material.

WhatamIdoing has overlooked that facilities for handling page numbers are already built into "the citation system". E.g., her second example could be done as: <ref> {{Harv|Foo|p=456}}.</ref>. (Although it would be better to follow the standard convention of providing a year.) ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:36, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

@J. Johnson: writes "... facilities for handling page numbers are already built into 'the citation system'." Not exactly. The <ref> mark up is part of mw:Extension:Cite and, while optional, is widely used in articles that do not use citation templates, while {{Harv|Foo|p=456}} is only useful in articles that use citation templates. Another factor that the two facilities are, I surmise, maintained by different groups of editors or developers. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:52, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

When you say Harv templates are "only useful in articles that use citation templates", are you referring only to the specific template named {{citation}}? In that case your statement is wrong, as Harv works just fine with the {{cite xxx}} family of templates. If you mean "citation templates" generally, and are referring to articles where the editors prefer to manually format their citations without "citation" templates of any kind, then sure, Harv templates would be rather pointless.(But then the example is even easier: "<ref> Foo, page 456.</ref>") But why should we care? Where editors use the "citation" templates (citation/cite/vcite) page number handling is already available. Where they choose to not use "the citation system" they should not expect citation functionality to be added to the <ref> function. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:01, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

The {{harv}} template is just one way of making a Harvard ref, but it's not obligatory. It's possible for an article to use Harvard references without using any templates. See Misplaced Pages:Harvard referencing, where the first half of the page (down to the Linking inline and full citations heading) uses no templates for the ref examples. --Redrose64 (talk) 20:26, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

@J. Johnson:, I was referring to any of the templates compatible with the Harv template, including {{citation}} and CS1. Citations that don't use any templates can still use mw:Extension:Cite, which is part of a citation system. Jc3s5h (talk) 21:30, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

The existence of local templates is irrelevant. My goal is a system that works as a "built-in" product on 800+ WMF wikis. Only about 1% of WMF wikis have a copy of {{harv}}. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:06, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

@Redrose, sorry I didn't check out your examples before. They look very neat and tidy. However, I note that you did distinguish between the explanatory note and the short citations. I too think that is a distinction worth making, although others here do not. I still would prefer that the explanatory notes went into a separate section. Perhaps in Notes while short citations go in Citations. Myrvin (talk) 12:55, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

If you work with a wide range of article types, you will see all sorts of variants of the way WP is used to cite references. There is something quite small like Hypnosis with all citations and explanatory notes put in References, and for which I have recently added a Bibliography so that I could use short citations to give page numbers. On the other hand, something larger like Intelligent design, which has a Notes section with explanatory notes often associated with citations and a References which has all other citations. Editors in ID see a reason to separate explanatory notes from general citations and have done so. It also has a Further Reading section, which is often used for the full reference for a short citation in References. There is also William Shakespeare with Footnotes (explanatory), Citations (mostly short with some explanatory notes} and References (Full references in alphabetical order}. Myrvin (talk) 16:10, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Just because the citation tools here are flexible enough that editors can split their notes and citations into separate sections does not mean they must be so split. Reference lists can also be split into popular and scholarly works, or by language, or any arbitrary scheme. Notes added by an editor could (conceivably) be segregated from the original notes. None of these require special versions of <ref> to do what is not its job to do. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:04, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

I don't think we are discussing what must be done, but what could be done to make perhaps large and complex articles, clearer and better articles. I happen to think that separating explanatory notes from citations (particularly short citations) would do that. So any change to how referencing and page numbers etc. are handled should allow that. Myrvin (talk) 20:22, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I'd like to hear more about the ideal–and the ideal for a wide variety of needs. For example, PBS's preference for separating short citations and full citations is one that I share for articles whose sources are entirely books, but it's not one I share for articles whose sources could accurately be listed as a long string of PMID numbers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:06, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

If you feel that an article is improved by separating "notes" into explanatory, citation, and mixed, fine, you can do it: the "citation system" already allows that. (Just as it already handles page numbers.) What is a really bad idea is to modify a general function to do a wholly different kind of function in certain specific cases. Indeed, it seems to me that what WhatamIdoing may be proposing (the details are unclear) is just the kind of "a lazy way of citing" with which you started this discussion. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:07, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Since nothing's been decided, there are no details to share. However, since the point of the discussion is to see how we might provide built-in support for supplying (and varying) page numbers, it is very unlikely to to result in citations with no page numbers.

I think it might be possible to create a system that separates short and full citations, possibly using the ref name as the key. But it's probably not possible to create a system in which separating short and full citations is an option. <ref name="Smith 2010" page=123 /> is plausible. <ref name="Smith 2010" page=123 style=separate /> is not so plausible. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:20, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

I think mandatory short citations created by the mw:Extension:Cite is not acceptable. I'm imagining if an existing article had a first instance of a given source such as <ref name = CMOS>''Chicago Manual of Style'', 14th ed. University of Chicago Press.</ref> and a second instance such as <ref name=CMOS/> the second instance would be rendered "CMOS". Since "CMOS" is not a universally understood abbreviation for Chicago Manual of Style, this would not be acceptable. I expect the encyclopedia is chock full of peculiar reference names that must not be used as the rendered text of short citations. Jc3s5h (talk) 00:04, 18 September 2014 (UTC) Fixed example markup 13:18, 19 September 2014 (UT)

Yes, you're right. One of the downsides to that approach is that it simplifies the wikitext, but requires anyone using it to use a refname that they want displayed to the reader. Things like Diberri's citation script produce refnames based on database numbers like "pmid12345678" or "isbn9781234567890", and short citations in the form of "isbn9781234567890 page 10" should not be inflicted on readers. The ones that default to first author's last name would require less work in renaming refs. Of course, a short citation shouldn't be displayed for any ref unless you were actually using the page-number feature, so there would be an element of choice about whether those names were exposed.

How would you provide page numbers, if not with short citations? Something like what {{rp}} does is also possible, but I'm not entirely thrilled about the way it looks (not that my personal preference actually matters, when it comes down to that). Can we come up with any other ideas for displaying page numbers without using short citations? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:58, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Why should we not use short citations? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:06, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

Some editors don't like short citations. If the overall (multi-project) preference is to not use short citations, then we would need to find a method that (a) still supplies page numbers but (b) does not use short citations as the method for supplying page numbers. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:53, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

The peculiar ref names result from editors thinking only of what is sufficient to distinguish the ref, and perhaps an implicit view that being internal (non-public) the actual name doesn't matter. It might be a big improvement to get editors to form a "name" as they would for a short cite. (E.g.: <ref name= "Smith 1978">.) But that reinforces the erroneous notion that the ref is the citation.

WhatamIdoing: the notion that there would not be details to share until something has been decided reeks of the attitude WMF has shown in the VisualEditor project. But in fact you have been discussing something — i.e., "handling" of page numbers — and you have some ideas of what is, isn't, or should be. It would undoubtedly aid discussion if you would provide definite and specific statements or examples, starting with the problem you that you percieve. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:16, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

It's not, as your edit summary says, "decision first, then share the details". It's ideas first, find out what real people want first, and both details and decisions come much later in the process. When (if) we (=the people who are interested in this subject, both on this page and other pages and on the English Misplaced Pages and on other wikis) agree on some broad goals, then we can identify details. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 04:58, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

At the moment some people use list within {{reflist}} where they store all the long citations using the parameter "refs=", but such lists are not directly visible. If there was a way to link named ref...tags pairs to an entry in a sorted list in the References section (as happens at the moment with the {{harvnb}} templates), then I think the proposal could well be worth investigating further. -- PBS (talk) 20:10, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

W: my edit summary was a query. My concern remains, that some of these ideas start with the pre-decided position that "the citation system" is broke, and therefore the "ref" system must be fixed. I have yet to see that there is any real problem with the tools we have, aside from editors with a deathgrip on having to do (or not do) things in a certain manner.

PBS: what do you mean by "Example text"? By "long citations" I presume you mean the full citations. By "parameter refs=" I hope you mean (yes?) the <ref>...</ref> tags by which we mark the text that {{reflist}} extracts to assemble as notes. Proceeding on that basis, note that {reflist} assembles these notes in the order they occur in the text — which is exactly as they should be. So when you refer to "a sorted list in the References section" probably you mean the typical list of full citations of the sources referred to — right? These lists are typically assembled manually by prefixing each entry with a "*".

With all that clarified (hopefully), please tell me: why should a note — that bit between the <ref>...</ref> tags — be linked to a full citation in a list of "references"? Why not have a short cite inside the note link to the full citation? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:13, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

@J. Johnson: By 'list within {{reflist}} where they store all the long citations using the parameter "refs="', I understand PBS to be referring to WP:LDR. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:59, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

@J. Johnson: Yes, as Redrose64 wrote, I meant that which is described in the section WP:LDR. A full citation consists of a long and short citation. The long hold most of the information the short hold page number.One of the problems we have had in the last 8 years or so is too many ways to be able to produced citations. It is daunting for new editors and means that even experienced editors may not know all the options which makes maintenance harder than it needs to be. -- PBS (talk) 19:06, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

  I most certainly agree with your latter statement. For all that policy and the tools permit citation to done in any style imaginable, we have suffered from lack of: 1) a recommended good practice (newbies want to know a way of citing, not every possible variant), 2) clear and definite terms and concepts (that we can talk about these things without having to constantly define our terms!), and 3) an overall conceptual framework that integrates all the variant conceptions.

  E.g., you said that " full citation consists of a long and short citation.". This is differs from my use of "full citation", and as that causes confusion we should sort this out. In referring to the non-short element I grant that there is use of "long". But much less than "full". Using Google as a rough guide, the balance is about 16,000 instances to over 2 million. More authoritatively, the Chicago Manual of Style uses "full citation" in my sense (that is where I picked it up); I don't recall any major style guide that uses "long citation". Therefore I suggest we should use "full citation" for the record with the complete bibilographic details, but not including any short cites that point to this record.

  If all that is sorted out, perhaps we can return to my previous question: why should a note be linked to a full citation in a list of references (full citations)? Why not link a short cite inside the note to the full citation? I wonder if what you had in mind was using "list-defined references" (WP:LDR, using {{reflist ref=...}}) to display what appears to be a list of references (full citations). I say appears, because what you really have there is a list of notes. Such a list appears to be a list of references only because that is what the notes contain. This is yet another "lazy" technique which ends up being harder because the references are still scattered through out the article. It really is easier to collect all of the bibliographical information in one area and link to it with short cites, rather then trying to force the notes (<ref>s) into making those linkages. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:05, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

I have not been following this (very long) discussion. Having twice spent time and effort implementing enhancements to WP:Cite.php and proposing their incorporation via WP:Bugzilla, only to have that work overtaken by the event of the incorporation without discussion of changes which had not gone through Bugzilla, I feel as if I've been through the wars on changes to the way Refs work. Generally, my opinion about that is, "That way lies madness" (hence my not having followed this discussion).

I do think, though, that tightening up this content guideline by better defining different citation styles and, possibly, by describing some particular citation styles as "preferred" would be a good thing.

Also, I think that confusion re citations, especially for newbies, grows out of WP:GTL as much as or more than it grows out of this content guideline. WP:GTL#Notes and references says: "Editors may use any section title that they choose. The most frequent choice is 'References'; other articles use 'Notes', 'Footnotes', or 'Works cited' (in diminishing order of popularity) for this material. ... Several alternate titles ('Sources', 'Citations', 'Bibliography') may also be used, although each is problematic in some contexts: ...". I think that work ought to be done on that before addressing questions here such as "Why not link a short cite inside the note to the full citation?". Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 23:39, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

While MOS:LAYOUT (aka WP:GTL) is certainly part of the problem, I think it is rather peripheral to the core issue of how editors think citation should be done. And that can't be sorted out until folks take a closer look at what they are doing. Which is the point of my question. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:28, 22 September 2014 (UTC)

Your speaking of a thing called a "note" prompted me to mention GTL. Definition of terms is important, especially in explanations intended for newbies. The terms note and reference in particular have a confusing number of meanings in the world of WP -- or so it seems to me. My digression there was uncalled for (but not, methinks, irrelevant).

More on the topic of this discussion section, one lesson I learned in my past life writing software (going back to before the coining of the term "software engineering", I think) was the importance of controlling scope (of awareness and of action in this case). That lesson learned has been very useful to me outside of the world of a code geek. As I see it, the job of cite.php (Refs & friends, that is) is to put "stuff" into footnotes, to render the footnotes and their forward and back links, and to do some housekeeping in aid of footnote reuse. to make cite.php aware of such things as page numbers (or any other details about the internals of the "stuff" in the footnote) would, in my mind, violate sensible scoping restrictions. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 02:52, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

In support of Wtmitchell's comment, the more the capability of separate but related bits of software overlap, the more difficult it becomes to make improvements in the future, because one find that a proposed change that works with one bit of software will break a different bit that is addressing the same capability. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:56, 23 September 2014 (UTC)

Exactly. Like the Unix philosophy of "one tool, one job", meaning a tool does one job, right, rather than all sorts of things half-assed.

A slight quibble with Wtmitchell: the various cite.php templates citation templates ({{citation}}, {{cite xxx}}, {{harv}}, etc.), such as handle page numbers, do not put stuff into footnotes: they format stuff and make links, etc., but only where an editor has put them. That could be in a footnote — or in the text, or in an image caption, infobox, etc. Cite.php (<ref> tags) puts this and other kinds of stuff into endnotes, but does not process any of it. Scoping is indeed a very relevant concept here, as processing footnotes and processing citation stuff have quite different scopes. Combining those functions makes about as much sense as having my laptop brew coffee. That anyone should consider combining <ref> (cite.php) and citation functionality I attribute to very poorly understood notions of those functions. (And non-programming backgrounds. :-) ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:15, 23 September 2014 (UTC) Clarified. 21:35, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

@J. Johnson: I'm a bit confused here. What are "the various cite.php templates"? Who is suggesting "combining <ref> and cite.php functionality"? --Redrose64 (talk) 07:21, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

See the first comment in this subsection "I've been talking off and on to James F. ...". -- PBS (talk) 09:27, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

@PBS: Was that a reply to me, or to J. Johnson? If it was to me, I know what cite.php is: it's <ref>...</ref> and <references /> - it has no templates ({{reflist}} was created by en.wp as a wrapper for <references /> but is not itself a part of cite.php). Indeed, if you make a link like Misplaced Pages:Cite.php or meta:Cite.php and follow it, you are directed to mw:Extension:Cite/Cite.php, which is a redirect to mw:Extension:Cite (as is mw:Cite.php), where <ref>...</ref> and <references /> are described extensively. Reading that, I see four templates mentioned: these are {{reflist}}, {{rp}}, {{ref}}, {{note}}; of these, the last two are only mentioned in the section Comparing ref/note style and Cite.php style where it is clear that the two templates are not part of cite.php. It's also clear that <ref> is already an inseperable part of cite.php, and so the phrase "combining <ref> and cite.php functionality" has no meaning because the one is already a subset of the other, and as far as I can tell, has been right from the start. --Redrose64 (talk) 11:37, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

I assumed that J. Johnson's line about "the various cite.php templates" actually meant "the various WP:Citation templates", which are technically unrelated to cite.php. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:02, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I was speaking broadly, even loosely. Sorry. Yet another example of why terms should be used carefully and precisely? ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:20, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

 I'd rather see the page rendering system take on more of this responsibility. The renderer could easily decide, e.g., to include a full citation for the first short cite of a separate reference. Whether the editor used rp with a named ref or sfn should not affect the appearance of the result. Such presentation decisions should be made consistently across an article, or better as part of each reader's preference (with an appropriate default). I would personally be thrilled to have a preference setting that put notes and refs on a separate tab, so that when I'm just reading I don't have to see them (wait for them to be rendered) unless I want to go there.

For that reason, I just want a very shorthand way to set things up. I strongly prefer cite/sfn, as it keeps things concise and doesn't bloat an article with repetitive long cites. I just finished cleaning up a long article that cited the same few works many times. The notes section is now much shorter and the references section is only slightly longer...

Here is a proposal I recently made:

Editors could save much tricky syntax with templates like:

{{cite gb|asdf|ref=harv}}

and

{{sfn gb|asdf|p=1}}

In my dreams the former would work like {{cite doi}}, producing a global, editable reference, and the latter would link both to the cite and separately (using the page number) to the appropriate page number in Google books.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Lfstevens (talk • contribs) 08:22, 24 September 2014‎

To which I replied "please can we avoid creating yet more citation templates? See small-font comment by PBS dated 19:06, 20 September 2014 at Misplaced Pages talk:Citing sources#Should we improve ref tags?" The same still applies: even more strongly, because that comment by PBS is in this very thread. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:48, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

The feature request for page numbers is Template:Bug - Page number attribute for <ref> tags. The discussion there has no description of how this should look in practice. When used with Citation Style 1 templates, I don't see how the Cite page number would be injected into the COinS metadata.

If there is a real push to improve cite.php, then page numbers would not be my first priority. We have a long list of bugs and feature requests. We have older bugs that keep getting rediscovered by new editors (and sometimes I forget and have to relearn why something is broken). There are several issues with error checking, the new Template:Agrl is messy, but the most egregious would be Template:Bug - Nested refs fail inside references block.

If we really want to improve cite.php, then my recommendation would be to get together a task force of editors who technically understand how it works. Then clean up the bug list (I've been working on this for a while), start fixing the broken issues, then work on feature requests. --  Gadget850 09:29, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

the reflist at the bottom of the page could be integrated into the current layout quite easily by changing the layout of WP:APPENDIX to recommend that the notes/footnote section is placed as the last section on the page. I used to place a Footnotes section at the bottom of the page, but a discussion (if memory serves) among less than a handful of editors decided to place it above the References section simply because the majority of those editors liked the notes adjacent to references but also wanted further reading adjacent too. A big advantage of placing footnotes last is that all those footer templates can then also contain reference tags, which at the moment tend to be treated as an exception to WP:V for the convenience of the WP:FNNR layout. -- PBS (talk) 12:06, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

If you browse through Template:Agrl you will find that there are five related bug reports. And I was just using it as an example of broken tings we should fix before moving to improvements. --  Gadget850 13:06, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

The fundamental problem with doing citation at WP is not that cite.php needs fixes, improvements, or (yikes) new features, but that we don't have a clear concept of what we are trying to do. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:50, 24 September 2014 (UTC)

My later comments were in the spirit of thinking about the bigger picture. I understand that the real picture is bigger still (how indeed should we link content to sources...endnotes seem a bit dead tree- suitable for printing only, don't they? E.g., why not have the source appear when you hover over/touch the text to which it applies? That way it wouldn't matter where in the text a cite appeared. The hover/touch would produce the cite material, not the sfn smidgeon.) Thinking out loud. Lfstevens (talk) 08:35, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

@Lfstevens: They can already do exactly that. At Preferences → Gadgets, enable " Reference Tooltips: hover over inline citations to see reference information without moving away from the article text (does not work if "Navigation popups" is enabled above)". --Redrose64 (talk) 09:31, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

There is Template:Bug - Footnotes content should appear in a tooltip (add ReferenceTooltips to Cite as default/option). Code was added to cite.php for this but never enabled and recently removed. We now have the ReferenceTooltips gadget or the newer Preferences → Beta features → Hovercards. --  Gadget850 11:25, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

The tooltip shows the sfn content, not the related cite content. Wrong! While we're at it, even though the cite has no page and the sfn does, if I click on the cite it should take me to the correct page. And if you have the option, there is no reason to add the cites to the bottom of the page. Lfstevens (talk) 12:09, 25 September 2014 (UTC)

Italics and non-Latin languages in titles

I come to this topic from discussions at Module talk:Citation/CS1#non-italic titles.

Citation Style 1 templates automatically put book titles in italic font. WP:NOCHINESEITALICS says that Chinese characters should not be italicized. WP:CITEHOW says that book titles are italicized. I suspect that it may be desirable to render Japanese, Korean, perhaps Cyrillic script, Hebrew, Arabic, the languages of southeast Asia in upright font. If this is so, should the guidance at WP:CITEHOW be changed to somehow qualify the use of italics in titles and other places where it specifies italic font?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:58, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Is close paraphrasing acceptable?

Opinions are needed on the following matter: Misplaced Pages:Village pump (policy)#Is close paraphrasing acceptable?. A WP:Permalink to that discussion is here. Flyer22 (talk) 19:25, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

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