Wikipedia talk:Template index/Sources of articles/Citation quick reference

Redirect

This page was redirected to Citation templates. I can't find any discussion about this. If there is, please point me to it. If not, then please don't make this kind of change without consensus. It has already inconvenienced one user.[1] Tyrenius 19:51, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

Three Quotes Needed In Title?

The {{cite book}} and {{cite journal}} examples on the project page show three quotes on each side of the required title, but this causes bolding of the title which others have found irregular.

  | title = '''REQUIRED''' 

Should these bolding quotes be removed from the examples? Skeet Shooter (talk) 12:37, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

I changed that. -- Tomdo08 (talk) 16:54, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

help (what to cut and paste)

Do I have to cut and past the whole template each time? Or should I be able to just put in cite web inside curly bars and then the fields appear? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.82.33.250 (talk) 06:54, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

I think the question would then be, do you want ALL of the fields to appear? I find it more useful to create several "boiler plate" templates configured to what I usually want, and then copy them in as needed. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:51, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

coauthors

This page documents |coauthors= but does not identify it as deprecated. As a "quick reference" would most often be used for new citations, would there be any objection to removing |coauthors= completely here? Evidence of the need for some change can be found on my talk page, here. ―Mandruss ☎ 18:53, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Done. Also removed |month= and |origmonth= (no such parameter).

—Trappist the monk (talk) 19:25, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

No fuss, no muss! Thanks. ―Mandruss ☎ 19:30, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Good. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:47, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Yes I object strongly to removing coauthors -- PBS (talk) 19:26, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Objection noted, but three users disagree with you, which would preclude a unilateral revert. Also it's unseemly to revert someone without notifying them, and there is good reason to doubt that Trappist the monk is watching this page. Finally, you have "strongly objected" without stating any case for said objection. ―Mandruss ☎ 20:45, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Pinging PBS. ―Mandruss ☎ 20:48, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

I should've looked at the edit history before editing. I effectively reverted your changes, PBS. What reasons do you have to object?   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅contribs ⋅dgaf)  20:48, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

One occurrence of coauthors remains. ―Mandruss ☎ 20:50, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

coeditors is an extremely useful parameter for those who wish to simplify the relationship between the long citation templates and the short citation templates. The template interfaces are already daunting for editors who have know knowledge of scripting and making them needlessly complicated does not help persuade editors to use them. -- PBS (talk) 10:01, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

@PBS: The |coauthors= parameter has been deprecated for many years, as were many of the parameters you re-added with your revert. You may wish to re-familiarized yourself with the usage of the cite templates. Jason Quinn (talk) 20:53, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

@Jason Quinn I am familiar with this issue. Can you back up your statement with diffs that "|coauthors= parameter has been deprecated for many years"? because to the best of my recollection it has not. Secondly if you think there is a consensus for its deprecation show me where it is. I have raised this point on several talk pages, and to date no such discussion has been presented. At the moment there is not agreed process for either promoting or removing any of these parameters other than among a very few editors on some obscure talk pages. For those of you who are professional programmers, you must be familiar with organisation/user specifications, functional specifications, etc. While a modified process is needed, making changes such as removing the separator parameter and introducing the mode parameter was done with next to no consultation and within days of the proposal, the wider user base for the long citations was not consulted before that change was made, this is not how a consensus based project ought to be handling changes to templates that are used by many users. -- PBS (talk) 10:01, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Most of the the documentation for the cite templates themselves explicitly say |coauthors= is deprecated and have since mid-2012. For example, Template:cite book/doc (changed to deprecated on 15 July 2012), Template:cite web/doc (changed to deprecated on 16 July 2012‎), and so on. Further, Template:Citation_Style_documentation/doc has explicitly said |coauthors= is deprecated since 6 October 2012. These change were made by the people who actually care most about the cite templates and how have maintained them. They have persisted with insufficient resistance to their implementation and are now firmly established. An implicit consensus exists for their deprecation. This is backed up by policy: read WP:EDITCONSENSUS. If you counter with a cheap argument claiming that there was no formal RfC reaching consensus therefore no consensus exists, I will consider it as having a bad understanding our policy on consensus, especially the pragmatic wisdom contained in WP:EDITCONSENSUS on implicit consensus. If you wish to argue that there has not been an edit consensus, which you seem to want to do above, the onus must to be on you to convince others. If you want |coauthors= not to be deprecated. You can try to change all that work but I'm guessing you'll quickly receive great resistance and furthering your effort would actually require a formal procedure. Regardless, why are we even discussing this? Wanting to keep |coauthors=, at least for most of the cite templates, is a very very bad idea. It is a semantically borked concept in two ways. Linguistically, the very distinction between an "author" and a "coauthor" usually is not well defined and even when it is, it's often difficult for external parties to make it or use the distinction properly. Mark-up wise, the tag requires the user to enter the formating between authors which defeats the purpose of having cite templates in the first place (consistency). In other words, |coauthors= harms the presentation of references instead of helping them. I am aware of no compelling reason to keep it. Even if an editor wants to be lazy and "copy and paste", they could just do it into |authors=. It was a huge mistake for |coauthors= to have been introduced. For that reason alone, this whole debate is uninteresting: you are arguing to keep something that is almost purely negative. There may be specific discussion about the deprecation of tags somewhere but I believe that has been slower, more organic process. For something like the cite templates, I think its also unrealistic to require a formal discussion for change to every little detail, there's just too many of them. This is why there's wisdom in WP:EDITCONSENSUS. Jason Quinn (talk) 11:27, 15 March 2015 (UTC)