Wikipedia talk:Citing sources

RFC on preferring templates in citations

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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Should the text of Wikipedia:Citing sources be changed to prefer templates over hand-formatted citations, while welcoming contributions from editors who continue to format manually? 23:53, 6 May 2025 (UTC)

Specific changes proposed:

1. Change "(Note that templates should not be added without consensus to an article that already uses a consistent referencing style.)" to "(Templates are preferred, but contributions with manually-formatted citations are welcome.)"
2. Add "change citations from manually formatted to templates, without admonishing of contributors" to "Generally considered helpful"
3. Change the line starting "adding citation templates to an article that already uses a consistent system without templates" in "To be avoided" to "removing citation templates that are used correctly"
4. Change the first paragraph of WP:CITECONSENSUS to: "Citation templates are preferred in situations where they exist and can be used as designed. They keep citations formatted in a consistent way and are more machine-readable for a variety of purposes. Contributions of manually-formatted citations from editors unfamiliar with or who simply do not care to use templates are welcome, and may be reformatted into templates by other editors without notification beyond a polite edit summary."
5. Add to "Generally considered helpful" the line: "Adding or enhancing templates and modules for recurring situations where citations would be otherwise left manually-formatted due to lack of support"

Discussion: RFC on preferring templates in citations

• Proposer rationale: This proposal would still allow any citation format to be used consistently throughout an article, but would allow interested editors to move from hand-formatted to template-formatted citations for the following reasons:
  • Much more consistently formatted output, tolerating variation in human-written input, resulting in a more professional and trustworthy appearance for articles.
  • Automatic output of COinS metadata for browser plugins and web spiders that power data aggregators.
  • Automatic detection of errors, such as dangling references, incomplete or vague citations, putting the wrong information in the wrong place, or using disfavored formats (such as for dates).
  • Automatic improvement by bots (e.g. adding archive URLs, adding missing data and links to full text).
  • Much easier to make future changes site-wide to formatting if consensus changes.
  • Much easier to change an article's citation format (if consensus finds the wrong one was chosen) simply by substituting templates or (with module support) simply adding a "mode" declaration to the page. This also makes it easier to move citations between articles that have different citation formats. (We can already set "mode=cs1" or "mode=cs2".)
  • Inexperienced editors (or those who simply prefer them) can use graphical tools like VisualEditor to add and edit citations without having to know wiki syntax or the formatting details of the specific citation style used by an article. Editors who use the source editor will still be under no obligation to use templates in new citations if they dislike them.
  • Manual formatting of citations should not be used as a workaround to avoid mangling by a bot. An explicit bot exclusion is a better way to handle this because it alerts future editors to the bug and prevents them from stumbling into it again. This also facilitates research into bot improvements.

According to the previous discussion, about 80% of articles already use citation templates, so the result of this guideline change is not much different than simply implementing our existing rule that articles should use a consistent format. Upgrading citations also provides an opportunity to eyeball neglected articles and passages and remove any obvious garbage. -- Beland (talk) 23:53, 6 May 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose major change to WP:CITEVAR allowing the imposition of a new citation style at the whim of gnomes and encouraging gnomes to perform this imposition, regardless of whether the citations are already in a consistent format. Inconsistently formatted manual citations do not need this change; a consistent style can be chosen for them regardless. The only actual point of these changes is to impose machine-friendly human-unfriendly rigid templated metadata on citations.

—David Eppstein (talk) 00:42, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose addressing rationale: #1, #5 and #6 are disingenuous, don't care about #2, #3 and #4 are hopelessly naive, #7 is no different from present, and #8 is nonsensical. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 01:12, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose. In addition to the points made by David Eppstein and Airship, allowing manually formatted citations makes it much easier to copy them from external sources, and much easier to incorporate subject-matter experts into the community. Templates don't magically make citations look professional nor address vague or misplaced citations. And forbidding manual formatting of citations as a workaround to known problems is a non-starter. See also the thousands of words here explaining some of the issues with the concept of this proposal. Nikkimaria (talk) 01:20, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  Editors would still be allowed to copy already-formatted citations from other web sites. What problems are you seeing that require manual formatting as a workaround? -- Beland (talk) 03:23, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  Saying that others can clean up after them is not a good solution to something that's not a problem to begin with. As to workarounds, there seem to be several examples of issues provided in the discussion above. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:54, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  I looked into the situations mentioned in the previous discussion, and it seems they can all be dealt with by putting an HTML comment in the citation template that instructs the problematic bot not to edit it. That seems better than laying a trap for someone who later comes along and changes the citation to use a template for whatever reason, and it gets tread on by the bot again. -- Beland (talk) 04:14, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

• Strongly oppose – allowing style variations at authors' discretion and leaving decision to local consensus is one of the best ways Wikipedia avoids pointless conflict and churn. There's not much benefit for every page to be perfectly consistent in every aspect of style, and the potential harms of changing this are dramatic. Aside: every editor should at least read and consider User:Jorge Stolfi § Please do not use {{cite}} templates.–jacobolus (t) 01:53, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  If you want to render citations e.g. "issue 10" instead of "(10)", I agree that would be an improvement. It could be done across millions of citations in a single edit because they use templates and not manual formatting. We could also allow articles to easily choose to do this or not by adding a mode selector. -- Beland (talk) 03:21, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  Implementing a mode selector to "easily choose to do this or not" would require people to (a) notice a change in the template's behaviour, (b) figure out how to create the option to override it in the template, (c) get that template change implemented, and then (d) change the article. That's not a particularly easy process compared to just formatting refs manually. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:54, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  It's much easier than going through every single manually formatted citation and manually re-formatting them. -- Beland (talk) 04:09, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  No, it's really not. First off, if someone has already manually formatted a citation in a way that they feel is appropriate, no reformatting is required regardless of what changes in the template. If there is a desire to change the format, either way you'd have to go through every single citation - but the template approach adds a bunch of extra work to do that, because first you'd have to change the template and then change the citations in the article. Nikkimaria (talk) 05:00, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  Sure, I guess there are some scenarios where there is more upfront cost. If an article is already consistently formatted manually and wants to change to a different format, it will need to have all the citations re-formatted either way, and if it's done the template way and that style is not already supported, template upgrades will also have to happen. But compared to the number of articles (millions) the number of citation styles is quite small (less than ten?) so templates will seldom need to be upgraded to support new styles. The benefit of that investment in this scenario is only realized if there is a second style change where the entire page can be flipped with a mode setting.

  Maybe that happens with mature articles scoring high assessment grades, but I work on a lot of articles with detected typos, and I often see a mix of clashing citation styles on the same page. For those, most of the citations are going to have to be reformatted regardless of the chosen destination style. My thought is, why not make that destination style a template, so that we never have to do another mass-reformat no matter what changes about the preferred citation style? Also, a common way to fix poorly formatted citations is to use a script like reFill, which outputs templates. If we chose a non-template style, we'd have to do a lot of work to make up for the lack of automation, and then even more work after that to make up for the lack of automation finding archival URLs. -- Beland (talk) 07:10, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  There are literally thousands of citation styles that exist. I grant you that most are part of a long tail, but that's still a heck of a lot of template changes. Archival URLs are already automatically added on articles without templates, so that's not a benefit of mandating templates.

  If you're encountering an article with clashing citation styles, you're already allowed to make that consistent, using templates if that's what you prefer to do. Your proposal doesn't change anything about that use-case; it instead targets articles that already have a consistent style that just happens to not be template-based.Nikkimaria (talk) 22:04, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  It does prevent people from changing inconsistent articles to manually formatted citations, which is work that would have to be undone later if in the long term we are moving in the direction of using templates universally. And if that's the direction we're going, we might as well start on the manually formatted articles, too.

  I can't imagine people creating thousands of style templates for tiny variations; it would be a lot less work just to use templates for a popular style very close to one's preferred style. That also seems like a crummy experience for readers, looking at a thousand different styles and either having to learn to interpret a bunch of different conventions (extra difficult for those who are not native English speakers) or just being annoyed at what looks like sloppiness.

  I don't know of any bots that can operate on manual citations to validate date formats, find dangling references, create markup for COinS, fill in missing authors, or connect citations to databases like DOI. -- Beland (talk) 23:34, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  But we shouldn't be preventing people from improving citations, even if we might sometime eventually want to change how they've done that.

  I agree with you re: I can't imagine people creating thousands of style templates for tiny variations - that's why I don't think your proposal about template upgrades and mode settings is at all workable. What is more likely to happen is (a) users try to shoehorn their preferred formatting into citation templates and get into edit-wars with well-intentioned bots or gnomes (as already happens!), or (b) users manually format citations to get their preferred formatting, and then get into edit-wars as a result of your proposal. As to crummy experience for readers, I don't see any evidence that CS1 is a better experience for readers than APA, MLA, or any other format you could name - the page jacobulus linked has already suggested some ways in which a non-CS1 format might easier to interpret.

  Bots aren't the panacea you suggest - see Jc's comments. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:42, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

  If an article has two citations, and one of them is manually formatted and the other uses a citation template (assuming reasonably equivalent contents: they both have the source's title, a URL, etc.), is removing the citation template actually a case of "improving citations"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:52, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

  All else being equal, as much as adding one. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:00, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

  Maybe not?

  Because I think that eventually – maybe after I die, but some day in the future – citation templates will grow from "merely" 80% of articles having some to basically all articles using them for everything, and that means that the process will be:

  • Start with a 50–50 mix.
  • Switch to templates.
  • Done.

  vs

  • Start with a 50–50 mix.
  • Switch to manual formatting.
  • Eventually switch back to templates.
  • Finally done.

  And therefore I think that putting a finger very lightly on the scale in favor of citation templates will save time, net, in the end. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:27, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

  All else is not equal; templated citations are more useful for browser plugins, data aggregation, and more easily changed en masse. Which is why this proposal would define one direction as an improvement.

  I think it would be reasonable to call a truce among say, the top 5 or so most popular citation styles and support those with templates, for compatibility with various academic fields and major published style guides and what people learned to use at school. It's reasonable to ask people to pick one of those and not to force our readers to learn citation style #534 which they came up with one day while filling a complaint with the local dog catcher. There are hundreds of style rules; generally the way they reduce edit wars is by providing unambiguous answers to arbitrary questions. -- Beland (talk) 02:50, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

  That sounds very complicated and controversial, likely to waste vast amounts of effort and attention on style nitpicks. This discussion itself is already doing significant harm, insofar as the participants might otherwise be making productive content contributions. –jacobolus (t) 05:20, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  I accept your opinion that content is more important than style. As a community of editors, though, it seems we have decided that style is important enough to worry about that we do have a Manual of Style instead of willy-nilly formatting, and we have decided that it should be consensus-driven rather than saving a lot of time by handing it over to a benevolent dictator or style committee. I can't think of a way to reconcile those choices with the idea that we can't have this type of discussion because it burns time we should be spending on content. It's a valid concern, though I'm not sure we're spending "significant" resources on it given how many thousands of edits are being committed while we're having this discussion. Also keep in mind that not everyone who enjoys wikignoming also enjoys working on content. Part of the reason I do a lot of wikignoming fixing spelling and style errors is so that other editors can focus more on their area of expertise and interest and don't need to be distracted fixing small things that I could fix more quickly en masse. And some days I'm too tired or stressed to wrangle a lot of prose and I just need to relax by fixing a bunch of malformed punctuation or unconverted units of measure. -- Beland (talk) 07:31, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose per David Eppstein and AirshipJungleman29. We want people to leave citations that support the information they add. That is far more important than putting people off by insisting on using a cumbersome or alien format that they do not understand. And what to do with people who can’t work in templates? Are we going to punish them for adding what may be good content with a good source if they do it the old fashioned way? It’s unworkable and unnecessary. - SchroCat (talk) 03:46, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  I agree with your concerns. The language is meant to explicitly to welcome non-template contributions and advise against "punishing" contributors who do that. Specifically: "Contributions of manually-formatted citations from editors unfamiliar with or who simply do not care to use templates are welcome, and may be reformatted into templates by other editors without notification beyond a polite edit summary." and "contributions with manually-formatted citations are welcome". Is there some other language that would make that more clear? -- Beland (talk) 04:12, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  I get that you want this to happen, but there’s no need to bludgeon every comment that is made. - SchroCat (talk) 04:20, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  I'm trying not to bludgeon (and was actually hoping to just ignore this RFC for a few days); I'm answering the questions you asked. It was honestly unclear to me if you had read the proposed text which is supposed to solve exactly the problem you raised and upon thinking it through still came to the same conclusion, or if you were mostly just reacting to the title of the RFC? Maybe I'm missing something; do you think editors will feel that manually formatted contributions will be unwelcome when they read that templates are preferred, even though it also explicitly says those contributions are welcome? Do you think editors won't follow the guideline telling them not to complain about those contributions? Do you think just arriving at a page and seeing all the citations already using templates will put off potential contributors?

  I'm fine with this not happening - though I think it would be tidier and easier to maintain, I realize a lot of people have a lot of strong opinions about formatting. Hanyangprofessor2's questioning of the current guideline generated several comments favoring either encouraging templates or going even further and having a single citation style for all of Wikipedia. Seemed to me like it was time to check in and see if consensus on this has changed, but if it hasn't, there's plenty of work to be done cleaning up citations under the existing style rules. -- Beland (talk) 06:58, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  You really are bludgeoning this, despite saying you're not. Your name is already appearing far too frequently contradicting those !voting against this So far, I think nine people have commented in this thread and you've made nine comments throughout the thread, all to those who oppose it. Please just let please comment without interference. - SchroCat (talk) 07:48, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  This is supposed to be not merely a tallying up of opinions, but a discussion with the possibility of improvement and compromise. But if you are uninterested in exploring mitigation of whatever problem you are foreseeing and just want let your opinion stand, that's fine; I will sit in confusion given that we seem to be in agreement and disagreement simultaneously. -- Beland (talk) 08:59, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  I am NOT tallying up opinions - that's a complete mischaracterisation of what I have written, which is clear to anyone reading it. I was pointing out that nine people have made comments in this thread (that's tallying contributors, not opinions) and you have now made ten comments. To quote from the guideline: "If your comments take up one-third of the total text or you have replied to half the people who disagree with you, you are likely bludgeoning the process". - SchroCat (talk) 09:31, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

• @AirshipJungleman29, @David Eppstein, @Jacobolus, @Nikkimaria, @SchroCat: I wonder what you would think about a short, simple factual statement, like "While citation templates are the most popular choice, using them is not actually required". (If anyone's curious, we ran the numbers: about 80% of articles contain at least one CS1|2 citation template.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:28, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

• I think the proposal is not just a solution in search of a problem, but a positive backwards stop that will inhibit editors, particularly the less experienced from adding citations. I am a huge fan and use them in 95 per cent of the material I add, but we should not be creating artificial hurdles that stop people from adding sources. That's only going to damage us. - SchroCat (talk) 07:48, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  Based on the discussion above, I don't think that the OP has any interest in "creating artificial hurdles that stop people from adding sources". I think the goal is more like "if you put [https://www.example.com/source.html|Title of source] in ref tags, then let's have an official rule saying I can quietly turn that into {{cite web}} for you".

  Because, in practice, that's what happens. The manually formatted citations are almost never beautifully formatted examples of any style guide, they almost never form a "consistent" citation style, and they regularly do get converted to citation templates. We just sort of pretend in WP:CITEVAR that everything's equal, when it's really not equal. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:29, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  Unfortunately (as I think you've found elsewhere!) once the language is added it really doesn't matter what the OP's intentions were. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:42, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

  True, and I'm not wild about the proposed language. (For one thing, there's a lot of it.) But given the apparent intention, I think it might be possible to find language that meets the goal without making people think that it's a bot free-for-all. (Yes, that's an odd conclusion for text that doesn't mention bots at all, but I've had discussions in which I've told editors that if we moved one section of text out of a {{policy}} to another page, with no changes to the text and with its own copy of the {{policy}} tag on the new policy page, it would still be a policy, and they still thought it would result in the new policy page not being a policy. That's a plural they, by the way: two editors had difficulty with the concept. Wikipedia is one of the few sites on the internet that really does (and values) close reading, but we don't always pay attention.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:24, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose after reading through above. I'm a big fan of the templates, they help me input without much thought, and they help me understand what each piece of information is in others' sources. However, at its core, "This page in a nutshell: Cite reliable sources." It's gratifying when an IP editor adds a bare url, and if they want to manually add more information in plain text, this page should takes pains not to discourage this. Past a certain point of relevant information being included, the marginal benefit of encouraging gnoming to change manual sources into template sources seems limited. CMD (talk) 05:31, 7 May 2025 (UTC)
• Tentatively Support. As far as I can tell, this is how we operate by default in WP:MED, and I feel that the consistency of citation formatting is a big part of why medical articles tend to be easy to verify and to conduct further reading on. It also is pretty much immediately apparent when there's an "ugly duck" citation that is almost certainly subpar. I understand that not all of Wikipedia can or should be held to the standards of medicine, but at the same time, I think our pages are broadly a good demonstration of why this proposal has merit. That being said, I would like to hear what @Boghog has to say about this, and may well change my mind depending on what the medical citation master says. Just-a-can-of-beans (talk) 06:37, 7 May 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose. We need to be rigid about verifiability but not about how to write references. See the top of my user page which starts with a large quote symbol and Don't worry about formatting references; just get all the information in there. Effective editors work in different ways and it is a mistake to try to dictate what they should do when it does not affect the reading of articles. I happen to love reference templates, but the hard task is to teach new editors why references are important and how to find the right kind of sources. Lets focus on that. StarryGrandma (talk) 14:34, 7 May 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose Per Nikkimaria, CMD, and StarryGrandma. Ealdgyth (talk) 14:41, 7 May 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose implementation by bots, weak oppose in general. Previous discussion is full of complaints about what a bad job bots do of creating templates. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:05, 7 May 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose, per most of the comments above, particularly StarryGrandma. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:31, 7 May 2025 (UTC)
• Mixed
  • Support Encouraging use of templates and adding missing facilities. Use of templates makes changes in style easier.
  • Strongly Oppose any wording that encourages mass changes via bots. They break things too often. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 16:34, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  I don't see any wording encouraging people to use bots. Are you referring to "They keep citations formatted in a consistent way and are more machine-readable for a variety of purposes."? Would you like to have that sentence dropped? -- Beland (talk) 22:56, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  It isn't sufficient to not mention bots. The proposal should include language that strongly discourages bots. I'll add more on machine readability below. Jc3s5h (talk) 23:06, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  Isn't the bot approval process the right place to make that sort of decision? Normally that's done on a per-bot basis rather than a blanket rule, to take into account different pros and cons. -- Beland (talk) 23:37, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  The bot approval group is very pro-bot, and will be thrilled to approve citation-related bots with an error rate that many of us think is far too high. When is the last time a bot author was told "fix every mistake your bot made and do nothing else on Wikipedia until you're finished, on pain of a community band"? The prohibition must be in the guideline. Jc3s5h (talk) 23:52, 7 May 2025 (UTC)

  Are you talking about unsupervised bots or those with many human operators who are supposed to verify the output? I used to operate an unsupervised bot and administrators did not hesitate to block the bot if it made mistakes which I then had to clean up or explain as not mistakes. -- Beland (talk) 02:10, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

  From what I've seen, users who invoke supposedly supervised bots don't do an effective job of making sure the output is correct. A bot that tries to automatically change an article from free-form citations to citation templates would produce a mass of changes all mixed together, and the human thinking process just isn't good at checking that kind of change. Jc3s5h (talk) 02:16, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

  Nothing in this proposal suggests writing a bot to change citations from manually-formatted to template. The whole idea is that bots have an easier time after the conversion, because the humans have done the hard part of segmenting strings into appropriate semantic fields. -- Beland (talk) 06:59, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

  The current rule of not allowing changes from consistent non-templated to templates serves as a restriction against doing this with bots. So it does encourage the use of bots, even though it doesn't mention bots. Jc3s5h (talk) 09:41, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

  I suppose that's true, but only on the ~20% of pages (plus or minus those that use only one or two templates that violate an otherwise consistent style) that don't already use at least some templates. On most pages, bots could theoretically change citations from hand-formatted to template-formatted in order to achieve consistency or get rid of a style that violates the other rules of the MOS (like using all caps). Assuming that bot could get bot approval and be smart enough to actually do that. So it seems like that should already be a huge problem if it was something actually likely to happen. -- Beland (talk) 00:18, 9 May 2025 (UTC)

• Support, the technical benefits are overwhelming. But oppose bots; understanding is still needed to avoid errors. Ifly6 (talk) 16:54, 7 May 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose - a one-size-fits-all diktat is not helpful. As long as citations are clearly and accurately presented to our readers it does not matter a rap whether templates are or are not used. Tim riley talk 17:18, 7 May 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose - what matters is that sufficient information is given to allow readers and editors to know what the source is and to find the information. Enforcing citation templates (which this proposal will effectively mean even if it isn't wording that strongly or meant by the proposers) won't help this and will inevitably break some references as data is unthinkingly rammed into fields just to get it into the template - whether correct or not. In addition forcing some "One True Wikipedia Reference Style" will drive some editors away, because it isn't the style that the editors are used to / is standard in that field, and this is just the sort of annoying little thing that gets some people angry enough to quit.Nigel Ish (talk) 17:54, 7 May 2025 (UTC)
• support - "use whatever is easiest for you, and let someone else worry about reformatting it to get the many benefits of structured syntax" doesshould not be controversial (which isn't to say I'm surprised it is - I've opposed a lot of style standardization proposals in the past myself). I'm just having trouble finding a persuasive objection in the opposes as to why we should not have better archive links, why we should get in the way of the many tools that improve accessibility and verifiability, why we should make it harder for users of visual editor to work on citations, etc. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 22:44, 7 May 2025 (UTC)
• "They keep citations formatted in a consistent way and are more machine-readable for a variety of purposes." I've seen too much sentiment that being machine-readable and bot-friendly comes first, and the ability of the editor to write a cite for any source the editor has access to comes second. The book in the editor's hand doesn't have an ISBN? Let bots add an ISBN for a similar book. Source has a publication date that's not supported by templates, such as Michaelmas term, 2001? Issue an error message. The guideline should very strongly discourage changing a manual citation into a template if there isn't a citation template that fully supports the source, and if the editor who wants to make the change can't prove the correctness of the revised citation because the templatephile doesn't have the source in hand. Jc3s5h (talk) 00:03, 8 May 2025 (UTC) (fixed in light of comments)

  One boldtext vote per person please. FWIW I agree any act of implementing a template must retain all of the information in the citation. I cannot imagine that would be controversial, though. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 00:54, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

  Regardless of templates we cannot violate the MOS. Any instance in violation of MOS:DATE needs to be changed whether we use a template for it or not. PARAKANYAA (talk) 00:58, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

• Support per Rhododendrites, Chatul, Ifly6. The proposal doesn't call for the abolition of handcrafted citations or the use of bots to convert those. Some free-form citations are not well-"crafted" and need improving. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 00:44, 8 May 2025 (UTC)
• Support. I am surprised people have so many issues with the bots, I have never seen them change anything besides doi/hdl and curly quotes and archive urls. But even then, if the bots are the problem that isn't the fault of the template that's the fault of the bots. Reverting people for having a wrong format in their content additions is already prohibited in the policy, so that wouldn't change. The templates have a lot of benefit and inconsistency is a negative. PARAKANYAA (talk) 00:57, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

  They do sometimes make a mistake. One example of such a mistake is this edit. The bot added a URL pointing at a book review (whose title is exactly the same as the book) instead of the book itself. That bot can be triggered by any editor, who is supposed to then check the output (the instructions for that bot say "Editors who activate this bot should carefully check the results to make sure that they are as expected"), but not everyone does, and even if they do, we can't guarantee that they'd notice a problem like this every single time. (The editor who failed to catch it has been blocked.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:18, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

  Has a similar kind of thing happened with the CS1 templates, not {{Citation}}? I see why the universal one would have that problem because it thinks all documents are the same thing. PARAKANYAA (talk) 02:25, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

  Humans make careless mistakes no matter whether they are editing on full manual or semi automated. Given how many IP edits are vandalism, uncited rumors, heavily biased, ungrammatical, and so on, I would expect editors using semi-automated tools are reverted at a much lower rate than rando humans. -- Beland (talk) 03:07, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

  Parakanyaa, you can test it in a sandbox. Just copy that {{citation}} to a template, switch it to {{cite book}}, and trigger the bot for the sandbox page. If the bot makes the same mistake, you'll know that the problem isn't unique to the CS2 template. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:14, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

  Citation bot mixes up the cs1 templates all the time, converting one to the other, often getting it wrong, and even when it gets it right doing a partial conversion that makes the converted template erroneous. And in many cases, the human editors before the bot also choose the wrong cs1 template Having multiple citation types is just one more thing for humans and the bot to get wrong; I don't think it provides much useful bot guidance. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:28, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

  Humans also mess up citations all the time when they type things in, leaving off critical information, misspelling names, mangling the formatting, and leaving a lot of dangling references as pages get edited.

  Whether semi-automation makes humans more or less accurate and whether any mistakes are worth the massive productivity gains seem like questions for the bot approval process. The answer depends a lot on the bot. If you think Citation bot, for example, is doing more harm than good, then request to have its bot approval partially or completely revoked. Someone could easily write a more conservative bot that makes fewer mistakes for humans to stumble over, but which leaves more work undone. I don't hear anyone complaining that InternetArchiveBot, for example, makes mistakes. I wouldn't want to throw the IABot baby out with the Citation bot bathwater with an indiscriminate rejection of automation.

  I also can't imagine bots operating on manually formatted text are going to make fewer mistakes than bots operating on machine-readable templates. If we mandate supporting non-template citations forever, sooner or later every bot task that currently only looks at template citations is going to be attempted for non-template citations. -- Beland (talk) 06:56, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

• Support per Beland's proposer rationale, Just-a-can-of-beans, Ifly6, PARAKANYAA and others. Changing manually written citations to some template format is an improvement and should not be discouraged. Gawaon (talk) 07:24, 8 May 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose as written. Don't mess with people's citation styles. There are not many articles where this proposal would have a large effect (only those with consistent non-templated citations) but on those articles we should respect the WP:CITEVAR choices of the authors. —Kusma (talk) 09:55, 8 May 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose. Citations should be clear and complete. The template formats are often rigid and unhelpful. MOS:CITEVAR gets it right: If an article uses a clear and consistent format, it is a gigantic waste of time for people to come by and change it to their preferred template and start an argument about whether they even did that correctly. And, as others have noted, templates may discourage some users from contributing at all if they feel that they will have trouble using them. -- Ssilvers (talk) 15:05, 8 May 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose The citation templates are too fiddly and fussy and focussed on formatting. What matters most for the reader is not the format but the legitimacy of the citation. A relevant quotation from the source and a URL to link to it are the best value for verification but the citation templates tend to obscure this with bibliographic clutter. Andrew🐉(talk) 21:21, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

  I suggest the opposite is true. The formatting of a properly constructed manual citation requires special knowledge; filling in parameters of a template doesn't and results in proper and consistent formatting. Many sources don't have URLs and require other identification means – that's not "bibliographic clutter". Even for online sources, a mere URL is clearly not enough, and quotations are rarely required. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 01:04, 9 May 2025 (UTC)

  The purpose of a citation is purely functional – to verify a stated fact. My impression is that editors such as Michael regard formatting of citations as an end in itself – an elegant craft like calligraphy or concrete poetry. But form should follow function and the current templates don't assist the function. A functional template would contain semantic features such as AI verification and a specification of the claim being made. Anyway, it seems apparent that we disagree and so consensus is lacking. Andrew🐉(talk) 22:04, 9 May 2025 (UTC)

  Current templates do perform some validation which manual formatting does not, for example with date formats or if some parts of the author seem to be missing or incorrect, or if a web page is being cited but no URL is given. They highlight these errors in categories other editors can find, to help minimize the number of readers who try to use a broken citation. If we had AI capable of reading a web page and determining whether or not the content there supports the cited sentence, we probably wouldn't need templates because we could just have AI fix all the formatting errors and inconsistencies that humans leave. -- Beland (talk) 04:09, 10 May 2025 (UTC)

  My impression is that current AI technology is just about capable of confirming that a citation supports what an article says. And it might go further to assess whether other, uncited sources are in general agreement with the cited source. Automating the fact-checking of our articles would be better than providing selected citations and expecting each reader to repeat the fact-checking themself. Andrew🐉(talk) 16:23, 10 May 2025 (UTC)

  I'm an AI engineer; that's nowhere near true. -- Beland (talk) 18:00, 10 May 2025 (UTC)

  My impression is based on use of Gemini Deep Research which does a web search and then analyses the results. That seems somewhat different from a LLM and more relevant to validation of citations. Andrew🐉(talk) 09:22, 11 May 2025 (UTC)

  From what I can tell, Gemini Deep Research is simply a framework that organizes repeated LLM runs against a larger set of web pages than vanilla Gemini. -- Beland (talk) 22:19, 11 May 2025 (UTC)

  You could try testing 100 or so statements for yourself, but I expect high false positive and false negative results would make such a system not useful for a variety of reasons. 1.) LLMs aren't reliable even for comparing literal statements. That's compounded when the article is summarizing at a higher level than the sources, using very different words. 2.) If multiple sources are cited for the same sentence, it's difficult to know which parts of the sentence are supported by each source, and if all parts of the sentence are supported by at least one. 3.) Segmentation in general is difficult. Is a citation at the end of a paragraph for the whole paragraph or just for one sentence? If there is a citation in the middle of the sentence and one at the end, which words are covered by the first cite? We don't need AI to point out unreferenced paragraphs or sentences, and we already have a backlog of hundreds of thousands of manual tags for that. 4.) I don't know of any way to ensure that the AI hasn't been trained on Wikipedia content or web pages that reuse Wikipedia content; it could easily report all facts in Wikipedia are true simply because they appear in Wikipedia.

  There's also the practical considerations of cost and execution time. It currently takes over a day just to run a spell check of Wikipedia with a donated server. I haven't yet solved the engineering problem of running a full grammar check in less than a year of calculation time. It might be feasible to run an AI fact checker on a single page, but even that would require a large number of queries and someone would need to pay for a subscription beefy enough to handle that. We would need infrastructure to track which articles and statements had been checked, and I haven't even gotten that built for spell check yet. -- Beland (talk) 00:11, 12 May 2025 (UTC)

  I just asked Gemini Deep Research "Please fact-check the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wendt" as this is an article that I worked on today. Its action plan was quite sensible

Here's my plan to tackle that topic.

Research Websites

1. Access and thoroughly review the content of the Wikipedia article on George Wendt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wendt).
2. Identify the main factual assertions within the article, including but not limited to: (a) Biographical information (e.g., birth date, place of birth, education). (b) Key career achievements and timelines (e.g., notable roles, particularly in "Cheers", filmography, theatre work). (c) Awards, nominations, and recognitions. (d) Significant personal life details mentioned (e.g., family, marriage).
3. For each significant factual assertion identified, conduct targeted web searches using multiple reputable and independent sources (e.g., established news organizations, biographical databases, academic publications, official entertainment industry resources) to find corroborating or contradictory information.
4. Compare the information found from external sources with the claims made in the Wikipedia article, noting any discrepancies, inconsistencies, or unsupported statements.
5. Investigate any conflicting information by consulting additional reliable sources to ascertain the most accurate and widely accepted facts.
6. Evaluate the neutrality of the Wikipedia article's content, looking for any potential bias, unsourced opinions presented as facts, or overly promotional/critical language.
7. Examine the references and citations provided in the Wikipedia article. Assess their quality, reliability, and whether they directly support the specific claims they are attributed to.
8. Synthesize the findings to provide an overall assessment of the Wikipedia article's factual accuracy, highlighting specific claims that are well-supported, those that are inaccurate or misleading, and areas that lack sufficient credible sourcing.

• Analyze Results
• Create Report
• Ready in a few mins

• The results took about 5 mins and were quite voluminous -- pages of output. The details and analysis seemed consistently rational and to the point. I was especially interested in its comments on a passage that I had added myself. "Wendt, playing the character Norm, made a prominent entrance to the Cheers bar in every episode. He would be greeted by a cheer of "Norm!" and make a wisecrack as he walked to his barstool. This regular bit of business was a highlight of the show. Disparaging references to the character's wife, Vera, and the wretched state of his life were other running gags." I'd written this as a paragraph with a citation at the end. Another editor had subsequently merged this paragraph with others to make a wall of text. And another editor had cited a YouTube video in the middle of my paragraph which caused confusion.

  The issue in this case is that Wikipedia citations don't clearly specify what they are citing. The reader has to make assumptions from the proximity of the citation and the surrounding text and it's easy for this to become unhinged as the text and citations are moved around. A citation should capture the text that is being cited when it is added so that any subsequent drift can be understood.

  The overall level and quality of the AI analysis was debatable but seemed comparable with what one would get from an average Wikipedia editor. The advantage of the AI is that it can do it all mechanically and doesn't tire. There is clearly big potential here for such a tool to make systematic checks and highlight issues for investigation. This would be comparable with WP:EARWIG which is routinely used to check for copyvio.

  Andrew🐉(talk) 21:49, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

  Without access to the results of this automated evaluation, I can't say whether it was accurate or inaccurate. For example, you didn't quote what it said about the paragraph on Norm's entrances.

  It seems like many pages of textual output is not helpful in automating fact-checking, especially if it contains mistakes that can only be detected by human fact-checking. What would be helpful is having the system flag which sentences are and are not verified by the given sources. Having it go off and consult web pages which are not cited and thus have no bearing on the question being asked seems like a lot of wasted work, which may cause the human interpreting the results to have to do more work to sift through that. -- Beland (talk) 02:11, 22 May 2025 (UTC)

  The details are not important as it was a proof of concept. Running this tool is not as difficult or expensive as you seem to suppose so I encourage you to try it yourself.

  The point is that the current system of citations is quite weak as a form of verification. Whether they use templates or not, the burden is currently on each reader to read and make sense of the cited works. A system of verification and fact-checking which was performed for the reader -- either on-demand or as an offline process would be better.

  Andrew🐉(talk) 11:42, 22 May 2025 (UTC)

  I would argue the details are what make such a system feasible vs. infeasible. You only ran the AI on one article, but there are almost seven million articles, and it would by no means be feasible to do that if the goal is for editors to know what changes articles need to become 100% accurate.

  If the goal is for readers to fact-check a single Wikipedia article they are interested in, that's a different problem of a different scale. Readers cannot trust the output of an AI like the one you ran to be accurate or to detect errors in Wikipedia articles, especially since the AI may have been trained on bogus websites or erroneous Wikipedia articles. They would have to fact-check that output by checking its sources. For establishing truth there is no way around applying the traditional techniques of critical thinking, tracing citations, and evaluating the reliability of sources.

  Readers who want to do this anyway can already do it just like you did, and I don't see how their ability to do that has anything to do with whether or not our citations use templates. -- Beland (talk) 23:04, 22 May 2025 (UTC)

• Support. Metadata is useful; that's pretty much all there is to it. One day we should just use AIs to convert all citations we have into one uniform style, and do it dynamically. --_{Piotrus at Hanyang| reply here} 05:42, 9 May 2025 (UTC)

  If we have metadata, we should not use it to convert all citations into a uniform style, we should use it like a BibTeX database and allow displaying of the citations in any suitable style. There are massive differences in citation styles and practices between different academic disciplines and one size does not fit all there. —Kusma (talk) 07:38, 9 May 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose. Wikipedia needs to remain accessible. The majority of contributors don't use citations at all. The most important thing for increasing Wikipedia's reliability is to go from no-citations to relevant citations-of-any-format, not to format citations we already have perfectly. Doing this requires the barrier of adding a citation to be as low as possible - someone dropping off plaintext, simple citations needs to be encouraged. I use the citation templates myself usually, but the plain text ones are still fine and not a problem - the value add of microformats is way too small to outweigh scaring off contributors who want to use plain text and would find having their citations forcibly turned into the templates off-putting. (For the scenario where an editor would explicitly like some passing help in formatting their citations with the templates but isn't sure how, no problem with having some noticeboard to drop such requests off, as long as there is some "I am a major contributor" checkbox to avoid passing editors from dropping every single article with plaintext refs in there.) SnowFire (talk) 14:00, 12 May 2025 (UTC)

  Why not provide tools that make it easier to add citations in a standard format than to manually type in wikitext? There would be no need to say that they have to use the tools, just say that they might save the editor some time. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 15:27, 12 May 2025 (UTC)

  These tools already exist. Have you ever been to an edit-a-thon aimed at new editors? One of the words of wisdom is to run away from these citation tools as fast as you can and say "yeah if you become an expert you can come back and worry about this later." About the best case scenarios are tools which are "drop a raw URL in, get a formatted citation" but anything more complex than that is asking for trouble. If we make it a "mistake" to stop at a plaintext citation, some people will react by not adding citations, which is far worse a loss than the exceptionally minor gain of the auto-formatting. SnowFire (talk) 16:06, 12 May 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose as per various points mention above. In addition (citation) templates imho are often a pain for editors working across several language wikipedias, as each wikipedia tends to have its own non-standardized template zoo.--Kmhkmh (talk) 16:31, 12 May 2025 (UTC)
• Support. I've been using computers to edit and format text longer than most folks here. The idea that people want to hand-format references just blows my mind. Bibliographic citations are structured data and should be managed in ways which preserve that structure for all the reasons described above. On wiki, that means {{cite}} templates. And yes, I'm one of those "inexperienced" users who prefers the Visual Editor. The citation tools built into VE are infuriatingly clumsy, but still better than hand-formatting citations. RoySmith (talk) 13:21, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

  The idea that people want to hand-format references just blows my mind. The idea that people want to hand-format anything just blows my mind. I refer to the usual GUI software as What You See Is All You Get (WYSIAYG) and strongly prefer markup languages such as SCRIPT and LaTeX that allow automating complicated layouts. Will a GUI makes simple tasks easier, unless it provides a mechanism to expose and edit markup, it makes more complicated tasks inordinately more complicated. I believe that the best short term strategy is for VE to create the initial template but make it easy to edit the underlying wikitext. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 18:24, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

  There's two distinct things being conflated here: GUI (i.e. Visual Editor) vs source editing, and using citation templates vs hand-formatting citations. Those are orthogonal issues. Anyway, I'll see your LaTeX and raise you "bib | tbl | eqn | troff" :-) RoySmith (talk) 19:21, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

  Some editors prefer source editing and others prefer VisualEditor. Either type of editor might be the first to make a citation, so the other system always needs to be able to cope with the result, whether or not templates are used. -- Beland (talk) 19:51, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

  Those came late to the game; I started with punched cards and IBM Administrative Terminal System. SCRIPT was a huge jump forward. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 20:21, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

  As a follow-up to this, earlier today I wanted to know what the earliest dated reference in Modern flat Earth beliefs was. I was able to figure it out in a few minutes using standard command-line tools:

  % curl -s 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_flat_Earth_beliefs?action=raw' | sed -e 's/|/\n/g' -e 's/}}//g' -e 's/{{/\n/g' -e 's/</\n/g' | grep '^ *date *=' | sed -e 's/[ -]/\n/g' -e 's/date=//' | grep '\d\d\d\d' | sort -nr

  that would have been much harder with hand-formatted citations. RoySmith (talk) 15:20, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose as one of the most zealous CS lovers on Earth. Of all the times I've migrated a mixed-CITEVAR article or mostly debilitated manual CITEVAR article to templates, I've never had real pushback, because no one actually cares in articles they didn't personally contribute to and moreover polish considerably. That makes it obvious to me there's no reason to enshrine a thumb on the scale within site policy. If I ever for whatever reason preferred manual citations for an article, this is a potential headache it is simply needless to conjure. Remsense ‥ 论 16:07, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

  I think the desire for a rule is because some editors agree with you that badly formatted refs should usually be migrated to citation templates, but feel less bold than you. They're looking for written permission, in a model that Everything that is not permitted is forbidden. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:00, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

• Support per @WhatamIdoing, @Just-a-can-of-beans, @Chatul, @Ifly6 and @Michael Bednarek. I feel like a lot of opposers are conflating "use of citation templates" with "imposing one particular citation style", when this doesn't have to be the case. Just because there aren't currently (to my limited knowledge, at least) widely-used non-CS1 citation templates, doesn't mean that non-CS1 templates could never exist.
  Aside from the issue of citation styles, I would be hesitant to risk patronising new editors by suggesting citation templates are too difficult for them to grasp. The most commonly-used citation templates (cite web, cite news, cite book, cite journal) are already available by default in the editing toolbar via a form interface with prompts for clearly-labelled parameters that, in my opinion, can be easily understood, even by brand new editors.
  It's also worth noting that, per WP:CIRNOT, it's okay for new editors to make good-faith, constructive edits that don't 100% conform to the MOS; Articles can be improved in small steps, rather than being made perfect in one fell swoop. Small improvements are our bread and butter. So, if the MOS was updated to prefer templates (which is what this RfC is suggesting, not that we mandate templates and "punish" users for citing manually), that would just give future editors the ability to standardise these citations using templates while retaining the information added manually by the original editor. If anything, such a guideline might reduce edit warring, because it would reduce ambiguity, especially for articles where no citation style has previously been established.
  Apologies, this turned into a bit of an essay. If I've got anything blatantly wrong, I'm very open to corrections! Pineapple Storage (talk) 13:27, 15 May 2025 (UTC)
  • @Pineapple Storage: Well, since you offered... you phrased the matter as "patronising new editors by suggesting citation templates are too difficult." Now, there will always be dedicated people who love to grapple with this, but I'm sorry, this is just a factual issue. Please read https://xkcd.com/2501/ . I write this as someone who's been to edit-a-thons attended by smart, dedicated, interested people with college degrees and the like, and I can assure you that yes, messing with writing out citations is just factually difficult for many people. A problem with UI design is that it doesn't matter how much your 20% of power users reassure you that everything is fine, the 80% of quiet occasional users are hard to poll and much worse at handling your app / website / etc. than you think. Citation templates are not trivial. It would be an acceptable price to pay if the matter was very very important, but is it here? I really don't think so. SnowFire (talk) 21:39, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

    

    Auto-citing a source using VisualEditor, small

    Yes, but it's not hard to use a citation filler, and that's what most new editors do. Most edit-a-thons start by telling people to use the visual editor (older version of which is what's blinking at you here), but there's a citation filler in the 2010 wikitext editor, too. Even a newbie can paste a URL into a dialog box.

    And the question here isn't "Shall we tell people on their first edit that they should do this thing?" but much closer to "Do I really need to have a full-blown CITEVAR discussion on the talk page before I quietly re-format the citations?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:44, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

    • • WhatamIdoing: Did you read https://xkcd.com/2501/ ? Please do so. Wishes are not reality. Yes, it is hard, no matter how much we can tell ourselves it's easy. We are geochemists talking among each other about how it's actually easy to understand the nature of ionic bonds involving Calcium all day, and among the people already in the group, yes, it very well may be easy. But that doesn't mean it's true of the least-skilled-with-templates/wikitext 20% of Wikipedia editors (who are still a very useful and positive resource to have!), and certainly not true of the misty potential Wikipedia contributor who isn't great at the tech side but might be convinced to join up, if it doesn't seem like there's an insurmountable barrier of policies telling them that they're in error for everything they add. SnowFire (talk) 21:51, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

        I'm familiar with the comic strip. You, on the other hand, do not seem to be familiar with the visual editor, which is how newbies mostly get started these days.

        Imagine a world in which nobody says anything as incomprehensible as "Please use this thing we've called a citation template". Imagine instead that there's a "Cite" button in the toolbar, and when you click it, it has a little box for you to paste your URL in. And then it magically turns your URL into something that looks very nice, and all you have to to is click the blue button to insert it. You never see the "template" and don't have to even know what it is.

        Try it out. Go to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Sandbox&veaction=edit Mash the keyboard to put some text on the page. Click the "Cite" button in the toolbar, and either paste in a URL (https://www.example.com) or put in a DOI or an ISBN if you want to get fancy. See what happens. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:02, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

    @SnowFire I totally understand where you're coming from, and I think the xkcd comic is good and probably does apply to some more obscure/backend WP mechanisms, but I really don't think it applies here. I write this as someone who was a brand new editor less than three years ago, and my eleventh ever contribution was creating a page with 8 template-formatted citations. What spurred me to start editing was (if I remember rightly) seeing a typo on a page and thinking "Hmm, I wonder whether I could correct that...", so I clicked Learn to edit in the left-hand menu and went through the introduction. Help:Introduction to referencing with Wiki Markup/2 says To add a new reference, just copy and modify an existing one. and that was exactly how I started adding references to my sandbox draft. If anything, the fact that citation templates are so readily available made it far easier for me to start referencing, because I could just copy and paste {{Cite web |date=1 January 2001 |last=Smith |first=Jane |url=https://www.example.com/example_page |title=Example page |website=Example}} and replace the values with my own, without having to figure out how to format the citation myself: Smith, Jane (2001)."[https://www.example.com/example_page Example page]". ''Wikipedia''. 1 January. (Just typing that out was exhausting, let alone having to look up an entry in Harvard MOS etc.) I understand that there will always be new editors who don't want to spend any time reading through tutorials etc, and that's fine; this RfC is just proposing that, if they choose a manual citation format (for instance, one that doesn't comply with any formal citation style, which, in my experience, manual citations often don't) then other editors can come along and standardise them using templates later, without anyone jumping done their throat about WP:CITEVAR. Pineapple Storage (talk) 23:49, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

    By the way, for anyone curious about what the tutorials for new editors say about referencing/citations, and citation templates specifically, see Introduction to referencing with Wiki Markup § RefToolbar and Introduction to referencing with VisualEditor § Adding references. Pineapple Storage (talk) 09:27, 22 May 2025 (UTC)

  Re "there aren't currently (to my limited knowledge, at least) widely-used non-CS1 citation templates", I much prefer the CS2 template {{citation}}. The CS1 templates of {{cite conference}}, {{cite magazine}}, {{cite podcast}}, etc. seem absurdly baroque and confusing. I use the {{citation}} template as a simpler and more universal option. I'm surprised that there hasn't been more pressure to standardise on this. There's a similar issue with infoboxes and there's a lot of pressure to merge and consolidate those. Andrew🐉(talk) 11:57, 22 May 2025 (UTC)

• (de-indent, re WhatamIdoing) Correct, I don't like VE that much, other than messing with large tables. But yes, I have used it anyway when interacting with new editors. And yes, I've even shown off the "transform a URL into a citation" option before! But the very fact we're talking about the toolbar at all says a lot. Again, I'm not making this up, many new editors have trouble with the absolute basics of editing. Telling them "if you switch to VE and find the right button there's a tool that automatically generates well-formatted citations, which are useful because, er, microformats and machine readability" is a lot when someone is learning the basics. And again, there's a lot that newbies need to learn, but why insist on this one in particular? I don't know what to say other than that I'm talking about the 20% least skilled in wikitext contributors + the current non-editors but potential future contributors who are scared off by assuming that editing Wikipedia is very complex. I have multiple talented, smart, educated friends who just ask me to make simple text edits on their behalf, the kind that don't require knowledge of citations at all. Sure, maybe some would never edit WP and thus are irrelevant, but it is hard to overstate how imposing the very basics of editing are on Wikipedia. The people who have trouble with this are not going to find this discussion, but we should keep them in mind regardless and advocate on their behalf. SnowFire (talk) 23:14, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

  Why insist on this one? Because:

  • Nobody says the newbie has to do any of this. I know this has been repeated multiple times, but let's be clear: The goal is not to make the newbie figure out how to format any citations through any method at all. If the newbie can get a URL somewhere in the vicinity of the edit, even if it's just in an edit summary or a note on a talk page, the wikignomes will do their best to fix it. It happens that clicking a button in the toolbar (something most ordinary people don't find difficult?) will produce a satisfactory result in both the wikitext and visual editors, but in the visual editor, the newbie will have no idea that there's a template being used, and therefore cannot experience any of the disadvantages of citation templates. (For example, there's no "visual clutter" in the wikitext when you don't see the wikitext at all.)
  • The goal is for an experienced Wikipedia:WikiGnome to know whether, when faced with a mishmashed mess in an article, whether the community (a) would prefer the mess cleared up using citation templates or (b) would prefer the mess cleared up without using citation templates or (c) still feels that it's necessary to keep pretending that we're all 'neutral' about citation templates and that this stated neutrality will have any practical effect other than the wikignomes "randomly" choosing to use citation templates "on a case-by-case basis". Anyone who's been watching for the last dozen years knows that 'neutral' means citation templates in practice, but sometimes we have social/political reasons to say one thing while doing another.

  WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:46, 17 May 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose I'm a zealous supporter of templated cites as they are much, much less susceptible to data rot than the text based alternative. I would support a preferred status for templates, a light finger on the scale for their use, but I don't support the current wording - it goes to far. Currently if you find an article you believe would be improved by citation templates you only have to get consensus on the talk page for doing so. These nothing in CITEVAR that says it can't be changed, only that there has to be consensus for it. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 23:53, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

  I would be worried that certain WP:OWNers will fight to the ends of the earth on that. Ifly6 (talk) 19:57, 17 May 2025 (UTC)

  If one editor tries to own an article, it just takes two others to form a consensus for change. Styles are not set in stone, they are as open to changing consensus as much as any other article content. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 13:00, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

  A majority of 2 users against 1 is not "consensus". Requiring local consensus is a way to make global consensus impossible to implement. Nemo 12:52, 22 May 2025 (UTC)

  My comment was about a single article, not a global consensus. Local consensus about article content is quite normal. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 18:03, 22 May 2025 (UTC)

  I wouldn't describe a consensus formed on a talk page, affecting a single article, as "local consensus". That's "ordinary consensus". WP:LOCALCON is about Alice and Bob deciding that all of "their" articles are exempt from relevant policies and guidelines. It's not about three editors making an ordinary decision on a talk page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:59, 22 May 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose per jacobolus among others. Not everything needs to be filed away into templates. Plain text can be easier to format. Cremastra (u — c) 18:08, 17 May 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose, and I say this as a huge fan of citation templates who uses them almost exclusively. This seems like WP:CREEP to me and does not have any measurable benefit other than allowing scripts and bots to read metadata. It should be sufficient that citations are consistent within an article. Mandating that people use citation templates brings up various problems, not the least of which is that changing citation formats is a waste of editor time when citations are already consistent in that article. The main purpose of a citation is to verify text, not to be visually appealing. Epicgenius (talk) 14:42, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

  Allowing scripts and bots to read metadata sounds like a good enough reason to me. RoySmith (talk) 14:47, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

  @RoySmith, I agree, and if this were a smaller wiki that already used citation templates predominantly, I would support this without reservation. The problem is that mandating this on millions upon millions of articles seems to be very cumbersome, especially if existing hand-crafted citations seem to work fine. To be fair, I could still support this if the wording were toned down. However, as currently written, it effectively gives editors free rein to indiscriminately convert manual citations to cite templates—which could result either in a waste of editor time (due to the amount of time that is required to do this carefully) or sloppy automated conversion of citations (if they use a tool like VisualEditor or reFill). Epicgenius (talk) 19:09, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

• Support There’s a lot to read here (can’t claim to have read all of it), but I don’t see anything about the encyclopaedia reader. It is a lot easier to find where article content comes from with short references if templates are used (mouse over etc). Shouldn’t we be focusing on the reader experience? ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 19:53, 22 May 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose The citation templates are now extremely complicated, and really need a review and simplification before we move even to "encourage". If that were done I'd support some kind of gentle encouragement or at least discouragement from un-templating. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 14:05, 4 June 2025 (UTC).
  

Complicated is subjective. Writing a reference from scratch is probably easy for someone who has spent a lifetime dealing with academic references. But for the new, younger editors that we are trying to encourage, I would guess that a template is a lot easier. Once they realise that cite book or cite journal are usually automatically populated from an ISBN or a doi, they only need to deal with cases where that doesn't fit. The solution to that is to ask for help. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 16:16, 4 June 2025 (UTC)

It's also frankly not that hard to turn a Google Scholar formatted citation into a template. The parameter names just aren't that difficult. |title= is no Finnegans Wake. Ifly6 (talk) 16:42, 4 June 2025 (UTC)

They are fine if you are doing a simple citation, which meets the expectations of the template writer, and the vert small clique who understand the code behind the templates. But there is, for example, no {{Cite book review}} which is an essential use case for scholarly discussions. Moreover the obsession with emitting COINS metadata has made the templates less useful for editors and readers, throwing errors when something doesn't fit with the ontology, rather than when it would display something misleading. How for example do you credit something to "Staff writer" or "Uncredited"? All the best: Rich Farmbrough 18:30, 10 June 2025 (UTC).

In such cases one usually just omits the author fields, which incidentally also leads to nicer readable output. Gawaon (talk) 18:35, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

Notes

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

How to indicate the limits of a citation?

I don't know where it says this, but I've always worked under the assumption that a citation covers all the text between it and the preceding citation. Most of the time, this work fine, but falls down when you have uncited material. WP:CITE says that material likely to be challenged does not need to have a citation. As a more common example, most lead sections are almost entirely uncited except for direct quotes. For example, in the lead of Special:Permalink/1306036380, I have citations for a few quotes. But that makes it look like those citations also cover all the previous sentences in the paragraph, which is wrong. Is there a good way to handle this? RoySmith (talk) 16:20, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

My default when making a new article or redoing one is I'll just cite the hell out of everything line by line as makes most sense at the time, including the lede, and if I need to stack up multiple cites on one sentence at first like [1][2][3], I'll just go with it and clean up after, or break them up into separate ones. Sometimes the 'narrative' of the article makes more sense in the drafting like that.

That's how I rebuilt/expanded Abigail Becker as an example. This:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Abigail_Becker&oldid=1291082278

Is now this after another round of cleaning:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Abigail_Becker&oldid=1304810792

The more mature the article gets the more I end up pulling cites from the lede generally per MOS:CITELEAD. But that's usually at the 'end' relatively (for me). I can't imagine that article of yours being controversial to anyone but perhaps the most (irrelevant) fringe level social conservative, so I wouldn't even worry about it. Just cite the body, paraphase a bit more in the lede, and nuke the citations up there if the body covers it. I wouldn't even worry about it. Nothing in your article is even slightly controversial in a sane rational context that matters in 2025. — Very Polite Person (talk/contribs) 16:39, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

No, citations do not necessarily cover everything between it and the previous citation. Sometimes a citation only covers a specific sentence or fact.

While everything needs to be verifiable, not everything needs a citation. We only require a citation in 4 situations: 1) quotations, 2) material that has been challenged, 3) material that we think is likely to be challenged, and 4) certain statements in BLPs. Blueboar (talk) 16:42, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

If it's something you're writing, you could just say that it is for the quote. Like have a footnote be Quote from Plutarch, Marius, 15 (Perrin), which indicates just that. But in the wild I would imagine that won't happen. Ifly6 (talk) 16:55, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

Years ago, Anthonyhcole was working on something similar to Template:Citation needed span for this purpose. If a template ever got used, I'd expect it would have been used in the article on Pain. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:12, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

We did get something up. Give me a couple of days and I'll find it. I don't think I used it in Pain. Anthonyhcole (talk) 01:29, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

Can you link it for now so I can take a look? Ifly6 (talk) 02:21, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

I found one of the old discussions about it in Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 127#Requested new citation template feature: Hover the mouse over a footnote marker and the supported text is highlighted. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:24, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

That's it, WhatamIdoing. The template is called Ref supports2. Doesn't work in mobile but kind of does the trick on desktop. I used it on an earlier version of Victoria and Albert Museum Spiral [1]. Anthonyhcole (talk) 04:15, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

If citations are used in a way that they don't cover the text since the last citation, hidden notes at least help future editors. CMD (talk) 06:42, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

Julio and Marisol is a beautiful article, Roy. Thank you. Anthonyhcole (talk) 06:00, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, it was fun writing it (and I had excellent help in the form of many hard-working reviewers at WP:FAC). RoySmith (talk) 11:20, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

Is using an archive a good idea when citing sources?

I just want to know 49.185.208.86 (talk) 21:59, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

If the original source is no longer available it's fine. You probably want the WP:Teahouse when asking such questions, this page is meant to be for discussing improvements to the guideline. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 22:05, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

Proposal to change "Bundling citations" to discuss removing excessive citations.

In my experience bundled citations are a sign of citation excess or of smuggling editorial comments into content. At least in science-oriented articles I work on, one inline secondary and one historical primary reference is all that is ever needed. When more citations appear, especially 4 or more, it is likely that this is citation overkill. This is not a sign that citations need to be bundled but rather need to be deleted or distributed to other parts of the article.

At present the template points to Wikipedia:Citing sources § Bundling citations, effectively encouraging bundling rather than trimming excessive citations. On Template talk:Excessive citations inline § Most appropriate link target redirecting that link to the essay Wikipedia:Citation_overkill was dismissed because this page is the guideline page. Consequently I am asking that the guideline be changed.

I propose to change the following sentence:

• Sometimes the article is more readable if multiple citations are bundled into a single footnote.

To

• One or two reliable sources are sufficient to verify most content. Multiple citations are rarely needed and extra citations may be removed if they are redundant. If multiple citations are needed, the article may be more readable if multiple citations are bundled into a single footnote.

Johnjbarton (talk) 02:24, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

I think this is overstating the case - the presence of three citations does not mean one should be removed. Nikkimaria (talk) 04:00, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

All I am asking is not to recommend bundling as the only cure. If you want to say three, four, five, six, please let me know. Johnjbarton (talk) 04:03, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

I've bundled for a few reasons before. Most often to offer secondary and primary sources that verify something. I hope Phlsph7 does not mind if I ping them for input on this. I remember a featured article candidate of theirs having many bundled citations. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 04:31, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

I'm not proposing to remove any content related to bundling, only add a suggested alternative. Johnjbarton (talk) 04:36, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

The main reason I bundle citations is usually, 1) An article and its translation, or a primary source and a lay summary 2) A series of articles that support one statement. An example of the second being Diels-Alder reaction#cite_note-62. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:36, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping! I agree that there are many useful applications for bundling. I don't think our guidelines should imply overly strict demands on the acceptable number of references per claim. Phlsph7 (talk) 08:36, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

I agree. Additional citations may not be necessary in many cases, but they can rarely hurt and should not be discouraged except when it gets excessive. Gawaon (talk) 10:20, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

I am proposing this change exactly for cases of {{excessive citations inline}}. Johnjbarton (talk) 21:44, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

But that template already exists, so why then change anything at all? Plus while I would consider something beyond five or six references as "excessive", your wording would suggest that anything beyond "one or two" could be considered excessive. There are also cases where even more references are fine, say something like "Many more cases are on record", followed by eight or twelve references – those should certainly be bundled, but might otherwise be appropriate enough, due to the "many more". Gawaon (talk) 07:09, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

The template exists but its advice is incomplete because it does not suggest reducing excess citations. What if we change

• Sometimes the article is more readable if multiple citations are bundled into a single footnote.

to

• Sometimes multiple citations can be replaced by fewer, secondary references. If multiple citations are needed, the article may be more readable if multiple citations are bundled into a single footnote.

Johnjbarton (talk) 15:27, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

Not every detail needs to be spelled out in the guidelines, and common sense already says that multiple low-quality sources can be replaced with fewer high-quality sources. Gawaon (talk) 15:54, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

We have two long sections on bundling. I am asking for one sentence. Johnjbarton (talk) 16:10, 9 September 2025 (UTC)

Would it be easier to just retarget {{Excessive citations inline}} to WP:OVERCITE? As it already covers this in detail. Being targeted to WP:BUNDLING doesn't make sense, as that deals with how to bundle more than why you would bundle. It doesn't really explain anything about excessive citations. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 05:07, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

Thank you, I agree this is the best solution, but others want to point to a guideline and we have no guideline to address citation overkill. Johnjbarton (talk) 15:47, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

It's more fitting as an explanatory essay, as WP:V should never require multiple references. They become necessary not for verification but to show something is due inclusion or that it represents a mainstream view (both NPOV). So it makes more sense to handle this outside of a V related guideline. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 21:28, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

Again I agree. I just don't know how to convince others. Johnjbarton (talk) 21:45, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

• My experience is in bundling citations when citing published reviews of books by an author. These reviews are often the primary means through which an author is notable, so they are necessary both to make that notability apparent and to provide a multisided viewpoint on the reviewed books. Bundling helps reduce citation overkill by grouping them into easily-skipped blocks rather than making them show up one by one in the references list. Therefore I would strongly oppose deprecating it in this context. If we have citation overkill in some other situation (a simple claim that just needs one textbook source, not four primary sources) then it is the citation overkill, not the bundling, that is the problem. Just tag it as citation overkill and move on, or fix it locally. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:42, 8 September 2025 (UTC)
• I do find the proposed language to be true and reflective of existing Wikipedia norms. One or two citations is sufficient for most content (I would be fine with tweaking to three). We do generally prefer to remove redundant citations. Unlike David Eppstein, I don't see the proposal as deprecating any bundling practice. Most of the bundles I come across are needed, but I do see ones that are pointless, and it would be nice to have somewhere to point to when trimming. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 12:06, 8 September 2025 (UTC)
• Personally I'd rather see multiple citations than bundled citations. OTOH, I can easily see statements winding up with more than two citations when other editors are trying to incorrectly apply WP:SIGCOV to individual statements in the article that they disagree with—if people are demanding excess citations, then excess citations may well be provided. Anomie⚔ 15:32, 8 September 2025 (UTC)
• I disagree with the suggested change since I don't want to see the addition of a high-quality sources reverted with the comment "that statement has already two citation, so no more are needed". Such a revert would make Wikipedia worse (throwing away useful information), not better, so we shouldn't encourage it. Gawaon (talk) 15:36, 8 September 2025 (UTC)

How to cite embedded PDF?

I want to cite https://carnegiehall.github.io/archives-findingaids/namedcolls-fa/hopper.pdf. I could just use something like {{cite report}} but that just gives me the isolated PDF document. What it misses is that it's really part of the website with a home page of https://carnegiehall.github.io/archives-findingaids/. What I'm doing now is:

• "Finding Aids". Carnegie Hall Archives. Isaac A. Hopper Collection: Collection Guide. Retrieved September 11, 2025.

but that doesn't really seem useful, if for no other reason that it doesn't let me refer to specific pages in the document. Any better ideas? RoySmith (talk) 15:01, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

On a few articles I've seen where the main link will just go to the "abstract" type page (in this case that would be github) and then I'll just stick the archival link as an archive.org of the PDF. I'll also then toss the abstract-level page for good measure into archive.org > submit to collect a fresh archive of that too. I've seen a few other articles on technical topics do that too (that's where I picked it up--I think I've done it 2 or 3 times).

It seems like a reasonable splitting of the middle, preserves everything, and the PDF is really the most valuable thing. Then just do up the cite template to whatever fits best. — Very Polite Person (talk/contribs) 15:05, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

You can use page number with cite web. Use the URL and title of the PDF.
"Isaac A. Hopper Collection: Collection Guide" (PDF). Carnegie Hall Archives. p. 10–19. Retrieved September 11, 2025.
You can always add a link to the main website after the cite. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 17:20, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

Another possibility: with {{cite book}} you can use a contribution= and contribution-url= for the cited document and title= url= for the larger site it belongs to.

• {{cite book|contribution=Isaac Hopper Collection|contribution-url=https://carnegiehall.github.io/archives-findingaids/namedcolls-fa/hopper.pdf|title=Carnegie Hall Archives – Finding Aids|url=https://carnegiehall.github.io/archives-findingaids/|publisher=Carnegie Hall|access-date=2025-09-11}}

produces

• "Isaac Hopper Collection" (PDF). Carnegie Hall Archives – Finding Aids. Carnegie Hall. Retrieved 2025-09-11.

It doesn't appear that the cite web template allows a work-url parameter directly; I don't know why not. I know the citation is not actually to a book but at least it produces a visible appearance with links on both levels of document. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:07, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

And, just for fun, this is being served up by github, so I guess instead of url-access-date, I want to cite the version id or something like that :-) RoySmith (talk) 20:15, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

In cases like this where the serving host is from a different organization than the organization responsible for the document itself, I use publisher= for the document-providing organization and via= for the web-host-providing organization, so via=github . Not sure about version id but you can at least get a last-modified date from github and use it in the date= parameter. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:31, 11 September 2025 (UTC)

"Excessive citations" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Excessive citations has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 September 22 § Excessive citations until a consensus is reached. Thepharoah17 (talk) 07:12, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

WMF seeking feedback on Reference Check

Hi all! Relatively few newcomers know, let alone remember, to cite the content they are adding. In response, the WMF's Editing team has been working on developing Reference Check, a feature which prompts new editors to add citations before they publish an edit adding content to an article. We're hoping to bring it to English Wikipedia soon with an initial A/B test so that we can evaluate its impact and address any issues that arise. As the first stage of that, we wanted to reach out to gather your input on the feature and experiment's design.

Background

Reference Check is the first of a new set of features called Edit Checks, which aim to:

1. Give newcomers guidance while they are in the process of making an edit to help them abide by Wikipedia's policies and guidelines.
2. Reduce the amount of effort and attention experienced editors need to allocate toward addressing preventable damage.

In this case, it aims to address the problem that only 19% of edits adding content by new editors (those with ≤100 edits) include a reference. It has been in development since 2023, and is now deployed on every other language edition except for English.

How it works

Reference Check

Reference Check activates when a new editor adds a large amount of text in VisualEditor (on desktop or mobile) in an edit and clicks on publish without adding a citation. It creates a notice (see screenshot) prompting the editor to add a citation. If they choose to do so, it opens up the "Add a citation" box, and if they decline, it asks them to specify why, which is then recorded (and we intend will eventually be available for other editors to review).

Our research from other languages shows a positive impact: In an A/B test, editors who were shown the check were more than twice as likely to make an edit that included a reference, as well as less likely to be reverted and more likely to stick around and keep editing.

There have been several prior discussions where some editors have expressed interest in deploying it here, and we're now looking to follow up on those and complete the deployment in the near future.

Try it out

To test Reference Check, follow these steps:

1. Go to https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Moon&veaction=edit&ecenable=1 (or any other article in VisualEditor with &ecenable=1 added to the URL)
2. Create a new paragraph that is at least 50 characters long without adding a citation.
3. Press the "Publish changes…" button.
4. Interact with the prompt that appears.

Be sure not to click "Publish changes" (without the ...) from the "Save your changes" screen so that you don't actually publish the test edit.

Call for feedback

We’re hoping to run an A/B test showing the feature to a sample of newcomers who have made ≤100 edits so that we can evaluate its impact and address any issues that arise. We're interested to know what you think of this approach. Overall, does the check seem like something that would benefit the project? Is there anything you'd want us to look for or keep in mind during the test? (The current metrics we plan to track are documented on Phabricator.) We also continue to be open to more general feedback if there's anything else that testing it out brings to mind.

We'd also like to highlight that there are Community Configuration settings available for Reference Check, which allow any admin to adjust things like how many characters need to be added for the check to activate. Feel free to discuss existing settings options that you'd prefer, or to let us know if there are additional settings you'd like us to introduce.

We'll follow up after gathering input with next steps. And thanks as always for your collaboration!

Cheers, Sdkb-WMF ^talk 18:01, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

Notified: WP:Village pump (proposals), WT:Teahouse, WT:WikiProject Usability, Help talk:Referencing for beginners, WT:Reliable sources, WT:Verifiability. Sdkb-WMF ^talk 18:10, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

It looks for one citation per paragraph, which is perhaps the best that can be easily managed and certainly better than nothing, but will often be inadequate.

The four options offered when you decline to add a citation are insufficient. In particular, expanding from a preexisting source is quite common. Ideally when a new paragraph is used a NAMEDREF should be repeated, but newcomers may not expect that and an option that provides the opportunity to easily reuse an existing reference after an initial no is worth considering.

Some articles will not have any lead citations, bit of an edge case and maybe not worth the bother of an extra option but rewriting of leads is sometimes done by new users, especially if the existing one is self-evidently inadequate.

The other option offers no chance for further explanation which might be useful if for no other reason the data collection.

Because Moon is semi'd the instructions won't work for unregistered users, I employed [2] courtesy of Special:Random, but may be worth adjusting the instructions. 184.152.65.118 (talk) 19:18, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for sharing these thoughts; they are all very helpful!

For making it easier to reuse references, we'll discuss this and follow up with any updates.

For articles without lead citations, one of the Community Configuration options, ignoreLeadSection, deactivates the check there.

For the other option, the team had initially decided not to prioritize that because of the complexity it'd introduce, but it remains a possible future enhancement. @PPelberg (WMF) has created phab:T405683 to document that work.

Cheers, Sdkb-WMF ^talk 22:50, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

It shouldn't trigger on disambiguation pages or redirects, which do not need references and asking for them may confuse new editors. Thryduulf (talk) 21:23, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

Probably also pages tagged as a set index, as for example many chemical compounds are 50 characters long even without an accompanying description. Also applies equally to certain other pages that are purely navigational like lists of lists though implementation may be too difficult in practice and users are allowed to select no when queried as whether a reference is needed so maybe not that big a deal though data is limited. 184.152.65.118 (talk) 22:28, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

The check will not run on list items, so it shouldn't show on disambiguation pages. The newly-added paragraph has to be a root-level paragraph. ESanders (WMF) (talk) 11:15, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

This seems like a very useful tool, thank you to all those involved in making it. Out of curiosity, what does it look like when an editor chooses not to add a reference? Is the edit tagged with the reason they gave? Toadspike [Talk] 22:33, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

Great questions, @Toadspike. Responses below. Please let me know what (if any) new questions this brings to mind or leaves unanswered...

...what does it look like when an editor chooses not to add a reference?

When someone elects not to add a reference, Reference Check will ask them to express why (see screenshot).

Reference Check mobile decline survey

Is the edit tagged with the reason they gave?

At present, no. The reason someone gave is not visible on-wiki. Although, we are considering re-introducing^[1] this functionality in the future via T405132.

And I'm glad to know you see promise in the tool!

---

1. Emphasis on "re-introducing" because early in the development of Reference Check it was possible to see on-wiki why someone declined to add a Reference. Although, this tagging approach lost its meaning when it became possible for multiple Checks (of the same or different types) to become activated within a single edit. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 23:32, 30 September 2025 (UTC)

Thank you, PPelberg. I think it would be really great if we could make the reason visible to other editors. Toadspike [Talk] 05:01, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

Yay to A/B testing this!

One of the recurring concerns is to what share of new contributions are improved vs what share are introducing more subtle mistakes. I dont expect too many problematic subtle mistakes here, but getting a list of edits in the two groups and allowing the community to compare might be nice. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 16:53, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

...getting a list of edits in the two groups and allowing the community to compare might be nice.

Good call. And you know what, I think generating the lists of edits you described above will be possible using the Edit Check edit tags that are already in place...

editcheck-references: ought to return a list of edits that meet the conditions for Reference Check to be shown had it been enabled

editcheck-references-shown: ought to return a list of edits in which Reference Check was actually shown to someone in the course of publishing an edit

@DLynch (WMF): can you please confirm the above is accurate? And assuming David confirms the above to be true, @Femke do these two tags sounds like they'll offer the info. you think would be helpful for volunteers to see?

Yay to A/B testing this!

We're happy to know the prospect of this is exciting to you too ^ _ ^ PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 17:09, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

Yes, that looks correct. (And thus, effectively, editcheck-references + editcheck-references-shown on the same revision should mean a revision where someone was asked to add a reference and chose not to.) DLynch (WMF) (talk) 17:15, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

Yes, that should work! —Femke 🐦 (talk) 20:10, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

Update

Hi all! Based on the discussion above, we're planning to move ahead with the A/B test. The test is scheduled to run from Wednesday, 5 November 2025 to approximately 17 December 2025, after which we'll take some time to analyze the results, share them with you all, and decide with you how/if to enable the feature. Thanks for all your feedback above! We'll continue to monitor this thread, so if anything else comes to mind or you notice anything during the test, please let us know! Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF ^talk 21:31, 3 November 2025 (UTC)

In preparation for this, my colleague @DLynch (WMF) has suggested some community configuration settings that you might want to adopt. Any admin can implement them if they look good to you — courtesy pinging those from the discussion above, @Thryduulf, @Femke, and (not an admin when you commented above but one now!) @Toadspike. Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF ^talk 04:45, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

The synopsis section also doesn't require sources (as the work itself is considered the source). So that might be one to add too. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 07:58, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

Agree, we'll want some synonyms like "Plot" as well. Toadspike [Talk] 08:55, 4 November 2025 (UTC)

Automated citation generation problems

Somewhere there must be a bit of software that generates {{cite news}} citations from newspapers online, but it has a weakness. Here's a typical example (from Operation Prone).

{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/09/world/aug-20-cease-fire-8-year-iran-iraq-war-southern-africa-pact-set-too-angola-truce.html|title=AUG. 20 CEASE-FIRE IS ON IN 8-YEAR IRAN-IRAQ WAR: SOUTHERN AFRICA PACT SET, TOO; Angola Truce Now|last=Times|first=Robert Pear, Special To The New York|date=9 August 1988|work=The New York Times|access-date=2017-07-11|language=en-US|issn=0362-4331}}</ref>

It looks to me as though it sees ", Special to the New York Times" in the 'author' slot of the source, and assumes from the comma that it's in (last, first) format, and then makes "Times" the last name and everything preceding that the first name (this clearly isn't a fully correct explanation though). There are many similar examples (not just for the NYT). Does anyone know anything about this? Is it just on older citations, or are they still being generated? Can we do anything about it? Colonies Chris (talk) 10:13, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

Yes it has to guess a bit, as this is not details provided by the article, so guessing is all it can do. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:01, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

To be clear, the "Special to The New York Times" part shouldn't be in the 'author' tag of the original article, and isn't for newer NYTimes articles, but older articles are often shoved into a more modern straight jacket that doesn't account for all the variance in the history of the paper's publishing. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:08, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

What software is this - is it something written for Wikipedia, or provided by an archival website? If it's ours, could it be tweaked to spot the phrase ", Special to xxxxx" at the end of the 'author' and deal with it more appropriately when building the citation? Colonies Chris (talk) 09:15, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

@Colonies Chris, good question. I believe the tool that generates the citations is mw:Citoid, which in turn uses Zotero to "translate" website metadata from a given URL into the appropriate fields.

Since Zotero is open-source, I believe the way to address this issue would be to go to its platform and try to fix it there. Sdkb ^talk 22:22, 5 October 2025 (UTC)

There's more than one tool doing this. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:34, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

Taking a broader view, I think we do a terrible job of surfacing the fact that this is what's happening under the hood, which in turn makes it harder for people to report issues like the one you found. I'd be interested to hear from you and any editors with experience with Zotero: Are there places we could add this info? I'm thinking of something like a small notice in the editor after it autogenerates a citation with "Report a problem with this citation's formatting" that'd lead to somewhere that'd let editors work on fixing it. Sdkb ^talk 22:23, 5 October 2025 (UTC)

The problem is in the way that news outlet chooses to set up their HTML (the 'author' tag). Here's what any tool is starting with for that article:<meta data-rh="true" name="byl" content="By Robert Pear, Special To the New York Times"/> <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/robert-pear" class="last-byline css-ojhyzr e1jsehar0" itemProp="name">Robert Pear, Special To the New York Times</a>

With the website falsely claiming that this author has a name that's eight words long – and which a human, but not a bot, can see contains non-name information – there's not a lot that can be done by the tools, especially if you don't want to hand-code a thousand exceptions for all the different ways that all the different websites screw up their metadata. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:42, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

Yes, it's not practical to try to catch all exceptions, but there are some frequently encountered and easily identified patterns such as this one that could surely be fixed rather than propagated into our articles? It's common enough that there are hundreds of articles with citations such as the one I quoted. Colonies Chris (talk) 10:58, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Another common pattern is with items in the Google news archive, such as this one:

{{Cite web |title=Spokane Daily Chronicle - Google News Archive Search |url=https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=C5NYAAAAIBAJ&sjid=PvgDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6184,1800236&dq=long-island+golf+wright&hl=en |access-date=2022-11-23 |website=news.google.com}}

where the 'title' has been populated by the name of the publication, suffixed by 'Google News Archive', instead of the actual article title, which is nowhere to be seen, and the 'website' is somewhat misleadingly given as Google instead of the publication - and probably Google News Archive should be in the 'via' parameter. Colonies Chris (talk) 11:34, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing, as tedious as hand-coding exceptions to screwed up metadata is, I am with Chris in that it's still better than the alternative: hand-coding every citation to a site with screwed up metadata. And that latter task is much larger, since there will be e.g. hundreds of citations screwed up with the "Special to the New York Times" issue and ditto for every other issue. If we could easily point people to a system that'd allow them to write translators to fix these issues, and make that system easy enough to use, I think there would be sufficient editor interest to make it useful. Sdkb ^talk 17:52, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

That assumption has been proven false in the past. For the mw:citoid service, the system is Zotero, and anyone who wants to create, update, improve, etc. for any website at all is welcome to do so. We even provide instructions on how to do it. But I think I've only seen two editors do this in the last decade, and at least one of those had non-wiki experience with Zotero.

While fixing the Zotero translator is the Right™ way to do this, and would benefit not just us but all Wikipedias and even non-wiki people all over the world, given our skill sets, I think that if you want an automated way to handle a hand-curated list of known problems, we'd be better off asking for help 'after the fact' at Wikipedia:Bot requests. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:04, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Re That assumption has been proven false in the past, I'd argue that the assumption has not been properly tested, since I included in my hypothesis that we'd easily point people to a system and make that system easy enough to use. Right now, we are not easily pointing people to it (as evidenced by the difficulty Chris had in finding it despite being highly motivated) and we have not made it easy to use (as evidenced by the 5000-word "help" page you point to, as well as by the fact I looked into making a translator myself in the past and gave up after deciding it was too complex to be worth the effort).

Granted, the work of making Zotero easier to use is on the Zotero community, and there are probably some inherent complexities that limit how simple it could be made. But still, I don't think the reason people aren't making translators is that there's no interest in the task. Rather, it's that they don't even know it's a possible task in the first place, let alone how to do it. Sdkb ^talk 18:41, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Specific entry

The article said:

• If there are no page numbers, whether in ebooks or print materials, then you can use other means of identifying the relevant section of a lengthy work, such as the chapter number, the section title, or the specific entry.

But we don't seem to know what "..or the specific entry." means. @FaviFake @Peter coxhead Let's sort it out? Johnjbarton (talk) 17:39, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

I think quoting a bit of the content would effectively identify it. Johnjbarton (talk) 17:40, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

I agree that that sounds like a good method of identifying it. FaviFake (talk) 17:48, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping! Imo it means "quoting part of the specific entry verbatim", but since we're here, we might as well discuss the actual matter instead of guessing what someone meant a few years ago.

What should be another recommended way to cite a passage of material lacking page numbers (ebooks), besides the section title and chapter number? FaviFake (talk) 17:47, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

Quotations are a valid way to indicate a place, but they are by no means the only way to indicate a place. These are "specific entries" that do not use quotations:

• For a dictionary, encyclopedia, or other book with short pieces, give the name of the short bit: "example". Little's Little Dictionary.
• For a codified law, give the code numbers: U.S. Const. art. III, § 2, cl. 3.
• For a table or image in an unpaginated book: Give the title or number of the desired piece: "Table 3: Comparison of formatting techniques", The Style Book.

These examples are what we meant by "specific entries". It tells you where to look, using some method other than page numbers, chapters (which may be titles or numbers), section headings, or quotations. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:54, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

This sounds great! I think the second one is the same as chapter number, but the other ones are interesting. I think we should add them as additional examples. FaviFake (talk) 19:04, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

I have also interpreted the older wording to mean an entry in a reference work. Quotations, "code numbers", the "title or number of the desired piece" or "the name of the short bit" are probably all effective alternatives when a page number is not available. For example:

Page number(s)

Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010). Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford University Press. pp. 1199–1200. ISBN 978-0-19-957112-3.

Entry

Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010). "Night". Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-957112-3.

Quotation

Stevenson, Angus, ed. (2010). Oxford Dictionary of English. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-957112-3. night → noun 1 the period from sunset to sunrise in each twenty-four hours: a moonless night

Any of those would be enough for verification, Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 19:13, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

So

• "... such as the chapter number, the section title, or the specific entry."

should read

• "... such as the chapter number, the section title, or the name of a specific entry".

Johnjbarton (talk) 19:27, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

"U.S. Const. art. III, § 2, cl. 3." is not "the name of the specific entry". AFAICT U.S. Const. art. III, § 2, cl. 3. doesn't have "a name". I think we should just go back to the original wording, and if necessary, link to something that defines "dictionary entry". If you want to be more vague, then consider "the relevant part of the source".

(Also, Favi, "chapter" has a different meaning in laws. The US Constitution doesn't have chapters.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:37, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

Your example, "U.S. Const. art. III, § 2, cl. 3." is an example of a chapter number. The chapter. number is entirely adequate to identify it. Here is the specific entry:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New-York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three.

I submit that this "specific entry" is completely useless as a citation label. Johnjbarton (talk) 22:56, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

Document/article/section/clause is not a "chapter". Code/division/part/chapter is a chapter. Here, for example, is a chapter explaining, among other things, how to store ice cream scoops if there's a lull in customer traffic.

In terms of people understanding what's meant by "specific entry", I think that giving the example of a dictionary entry is probably the simplest. But we could just use other words. The point is to tell people that they need to use whatever is suitable and relevant for the source, even if the source does not have any chapter numbers or section titles (or if it has them but they are too large to be useful). If you can think of a better way to express this, then please feel free. What we don't want is for editors to think "Hooray, there's no chapter numbers or section titles, so I don't have to bother providing |at=details!" WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:17, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

First to the point: "If you can think of a better way to express this, then please feel free. " I have proposed two different solutions: 1) Omit the confusing phrase "..., or the specific entry." 2) suggest the obvious: "...or the name of a specific entry". Here's 3) "...or the headword of a dictionary entry or its equivalent". 4) "...or any identifying word or succinct phrase." Lots of options. I don't understand why you are fighting for the existing mess.

Next, to the argument: I disagree on both points.

First, document/article/section/clause is entirely equivalent to a chapter number. I believe most editors will understand that whatever numbering system the source uses should be adopted in citing the source.

Second, the meaning of an "entry" is something we can agree because we have reliable sources. For examples OED terminology or Interpreting a Dictionary Entry. Including the entry for the purpose of identifying the entry is not sensible. Johnjbarton (talk) 04:49, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

Uh, isn't naming the entry the obvious means of identifying the entry? Gawaon (talk) 07:28, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

This whole discussion is making me think we should use other words that are less vague than entry. FaviFake (talk) 10:53, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

Suggestions? Blueboar (talk) 12:19, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

"verbatim quote", "cited passage", "number of the table/image", "dictionary definition", "chapter/section number/name", "paragraph number"...

Any or all of the above come to mind. Just don't use "entry" alone. FaviFake (talk) 12:32, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

A "dictionary definition" would actually be a "verbatim quote", right? That sounds needlessly complicated when just specifying the entry (i.e. the headword) is sufficient. Gawaon (talk) 15:13, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

fine, then "dictionary entry"? as long as there isn't "entry" alone it's fine FaviFake (talk) 15:21, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of "dictionary entry". I gather that some editors believe that "dictionary entry", or "entry" for short, is the headword alone. However the word "entry" refers to all of the content that a dictionary gives for the headword. From that same source:

entry Entries are the primary building blocks of the dictionary. Each entry represents all the meanings of a given headword, throughout its recorded history. The entry is structured to show the evolution of meanings and uses over time. In most entries there is also a pronunciation section where relevant, an etymology section, and various other sections. Homographs are treated as separate entries.[3]

Thus "dictionary entry" won't solve this issue. We could use "headword of a dictionary entry", "name of an entry", or other wording that clarifies the intent to identify rather than quote the item. Johnjbarton (talk) 15:46, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

How about "specific headword"? That a headword is part of an entry seems clear enough. Gawaon (talk) 16:58, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

Works for me. Johnjbarton (talk) 17:02, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

For dictionary or glossary entries, 'Chicago Manual of Style' used to recommend s.v. which means sub verbo or sub voce, Latin for "under the word".[4]. However, §14.130 of the 18th edition abandons that recommendation, and suggests giving the headword of the entry in quotation mark. Some of their examples are

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. (1980), under "salvation."
• Dictionary of American Biography (1937), "Wadsworth, Jeremiah."

Jc3s5h (talk) 17:16, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

Also, either Help:References and page numbers should have a section on citing sources without page numbers, or there should be some separate page like Help:Citing sources without page numbers. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 17:30, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

So @Jc3s5h would agree that we should change "specific entry" to "specific headword"? @FaviFake@WhatamIdoing? I just want to make some kind of infinitesimal progress. Johnjbarton (talk) 03:31, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

Yes, as well as other examples, if needed. FaviFake (talk) 04:19, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

I have changed it. Gawaon (talk) 07:17, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

Huh? What the f*ck is a “headword”? Policy should use terms that are readily understandable. Blueboar (talk) 12:17, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

Policy should also be precise as to not be misunderstood. I've linked the word to wdictionary. FaviFake (talk) 15:09, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

I don't really like "specific entry" because people are obviously confused by that. The passage I cited above from Chicago says "item". I'm not sure that would be understood in this context. I also agree with Blueboar's comment, 'What the f*ck is a “headword”?' Jc3s5h (talk) 15:59, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

"The headword is the main word at the top of an entry". Thus we could say

• If there are no page numbers, whether in ebooks or print materials, then you can use other means of identifying the relevant section of a lengthy work, such as the chapter number, the section title, or the main word at the top of an named entry.

I added the word "named" because the OED source which is quoted above is specific for a dictionary and I think adding "named" clarifies the context for this third item on our list. Johnjbarton (talk) 16:24, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

"Item" is also appropriate for lists. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:31, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

So how about

• If there are no page numbers, whether in ebooks or print materials, then you can use other means of identifying the relevant section of a lengthy work, such as the chapter number, the section title, or the main word at the beginning of an named item.

Johnjbarton (talk) 17:23, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

i'm sorry but this really sounds wayy to convoluted to me. headword works FaviFake (talk) 17:24, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

I would just use “or other brief identifier”. Blueboar (talk) 17:38, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

I'd say "headword" wins over "main word at the beginning of a named item" and "brief identifier" for clarity, conciseness, and precision. Gawaon (talk) 07:46, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Fully agreed especially after the link to wdictionary FaviFake (talk) 15:14, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Meh… Even with the link, I find “headword” obscure and confusing. However, I can’t think of another word, so I won’t object strongly. Blueboar (talk) 15:28, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Since many of the things that need to be pointed at don't have headwords, I don't think that's an adequate substitute. "...such as the chapter number, section title, headword, or other brief identifier" would work for me. There is no rule that says we're limited to three examples. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:07, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

But since we already say "such as", there's also no need to strive for completeness. Gawaon (talk) 21:11, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

How is this a good idea?

To avoid me getting into a big argument elsewhere, please would someone tell me whether they think this[5] edit is reasonable?

To me, it is entirely pointless to shorten the name of the publisher when the original reference writer either used a template or had the original work in front of them. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 22:12, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

It's a matter of taste but I think the edits are reasonable. "Penguin" is the part of the publisher name that actually identifies the publisher; "Penguin Books" would also be reasonable; "Penguin Books Ltd." adds information that is not so much part of the name but a description of what type of corporation they are. Editors could in good faith choose to use any one of those three forms. Prior to the edits the names were listed inconsistently ("Ltd." for one publisher, "Limited" for another, just the shortened form "Scribner's" for another not visible in the diff) so it would be difficult to argue that there is already a consistent style choice that should not be changed without discussion. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:36, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

I'd have kept it to Penguin Books myself, but Limited, LCC, Ltd., Private Ltd., GmBH, etc... are just corpolegal gibberish no one cares about. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:44, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, just "Penguin" or "Penguin Books" is entirely sufficient, there's no need for more. As I remember it, reliable style guides like the CMOS recommend omitting stuff like "Ltd." in such cases. Gawaon (talk) 07:31, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

IMO the company names are basically obviously superfluous. Books/Press/Publishing should generally be kept as it helps to distinguish and is also generally the most expected name. PARAKANYAA (talk) 22:45, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

What is interesting is to use the isbn to generate the reference with {{citebook}}. Then you discover that the publisher of the Bombing War is Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Group. So this is a case of impetus to impose a style failing on the accuracy of who the publisher is. The imprint name can often imply (or otherwise) the reliability of a source.

Incidentally, there is a difference between "Ltd" and "Limited" in the UK. This is not stylistic inconsistency, it is a matter of fact. It is always incorrect to swap one for another. Which is why I would resist omitting this element of a name. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 23:02, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

I'd agree with David Eppstein, this is a matter of taste. I wouldn't suggest going around enforcing one style or the other, but otherwise it's of little importance. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 23:10, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

A quick web search suggests that Limited and Ltd are the same in the UK, except that whichever the company uses, they're expected to be consistent about it. That doesn't sound like something we need to worry about, though. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:23, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

The point is you don't distinguishing between Penguin Books Ltd, Penguin Books Limited, Penguin Books LLC, Penguin Books GmBH, etc. because these are neither meaningful distinctions, nor do they represent different entities than Penguin Books <nothing>. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:15, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

All of those (assuming any of them exist) are the same as Penguin Books as far as we're concerned, but the first two in your list would refer specifically to the British corporation, the third to a US corporation, and the fourth to a German corporation. We don't care, but a contracts lawyer probably would (and shouldn't be using a citation in a Wikipedia article to figure out which entity they're dealing with, so again: we don't care, even if a very small fraction of our readers might,). WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:37, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Kelynge&gesuggestededit=1# Iwanted to add a link to the source in the article

I wanted to add a link to the source in the article, but it doesn't add and I'm not sure of its significance. However, in terms of citation, it matches word for word. Smart Andrew (talk) 20:33, 12 October 2025 (UTC)

@Smart Andrew, what's the URL you want to add? Could it be one of the many Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks? Do you get an error message when you try to publish your changes? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:48, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

No, that's a different site. I already posted a link to it. Smart Andrew (talk) 09:28, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

The site you attempted to add appears to be https://www.pepysdiary.com/encyclopedia/11343/. Near the top of the page on that site this statement appears:

This text was copied from Wikipedia on 16 August 2025 at 4:10AM.

That means that page is a mirror of Wikipedia and must not be used as a source for a Wikipedia article.

See the verifiability policy and the Wikipedia:Citing sources Jc3s5h (talk) 14:20, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

Conflict between advice here and MOS:WEASEL

Our advice here says that we should use formulations like "Researchers announced the new tissue type in 2012". Our advice at {{who}} says that we should not make 'attributions to vague "authorities" such as "serious scholars", "historians say", "some researchers", "many scientists", and the like', exactly in contradiction to this advice. And MOS:WEASEL adds that "A common form of weasel wording is through vague attribution, where a statement is dressed with authority, yet has no substantial basis". The existence of a citation after the sentence is not enough; it will generally support the claim that certain specific people announced the tissue type, but not that a general class of "researchers" did so. The attribution should be made specific, in-text, not indirectly through parsing what the footnotes might mean.

Is there some way of resolving this by choosing better examples here? Or is this a fundamental contradiction where the advice here really is what it seems to be, to change specific attributions into exactly the kind of attribution to vague authorities that MOS:WEASEL argues against? —David Eppstein (talk) 21:42, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

From recent Featured Articles of the day:

Clownfish

"A 2005 study found that anemones grew and regenerated faster in the presence of clownfish groups, and attributed this to ammonium from clownfish waste."

Tell es-Sakan

"The archaeologists who led the excavations at Tell es-Sakan, Pierre de Miroschedji and Moain Sadeq, proposed that there were three areas of Egyptian expansion into the southern Levant during the late 4th millennium BCE, and Tell es-Sakan was one of the major settlements in the region."

Spaghetti House siege

"Peter Waddington, in his study of policing, writes that the police's "reputation for restraint received dramatic vindication by the way in which two highly publicised sieges were handled by the Metropolitan Police"."

Hurricane Ophelia (2005)

"The Climate Prediction Center determined four primary factors driving the season's activity: the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation, the reduction of atmospheric convection in the tropical Pacific, record-high sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic and Caribbean, and conducive wind and pressure patterns across the western Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico."

Redshift

"Arthur Eddington used the term "red shift" as early as 1923, which is the oldest example of the term reported by the Oxford English Dictionary."

Through the Looking-Glass

"Among more recent comments on the book, Daniel Hahn in The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (2015) writes that sentimentality plays a larger part in Through the Looking Glass than in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland."

Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 02:02, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

I agree that

• Researchers announced the new tissue type in 2012.

is a both a weasel and news. An encyclopedia should include dated items a part of a history which requires context to explain significance (which would of course be available in the secondary reference). All of the examples posted by RjjIII are better. Johnjbarton (talk) 02:20, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

It's also at risk of falling afoul of WP:MEDSAY, assuming Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles applies. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:44, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

We should always attribute inline for biased statements of opinion as WP:INTEXT says. For other types of statement I think it's up to editor discretion and consensus at the relevant talk pages. If the wording used implies that an opinion is widespread, but in fact that is not the case, then that has to be fixed, and attribution is one way to fix it, but it's not the only way. A relevant recent discussion about an edit to CLOP is here, and the discussion it refers to at WT:CITE is here. I think the force of WEASEL should be that omitting attribution is a tactic that can (and should not) be used to inappropriately give authority to some statements, not that omitting attributions is always a bad thing. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:41, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

Even for biased statements of opinion, we shouldn't always attribute inline if there are big groups holding the opinion. I often use wording like "arguments in favour are X" and "arguments against are Y", without name dropping like our policy seems to suggest. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 16:56, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

For something that's really an opinion (e.g., "This is a good book", "This politician is important"), then I think the hierarchy ought to be something like this:

• Ideal: Talk about established groups associated with known viewpoints.
  • Consequentialists say that the ends justify the means, but deontologists disagree.
  • Republocrats say that this bill solved the fiscal problem, but Demicans opposed it as merely postponing a problem.
  • The rock opera was praised by critics as a light-hearted romp, but was criticized as irreverent by religious organizations.
• Good enough: Identify a couple of individual people and their views.
  • Alice Expert said that the book was "a valuable contribution to our understanding of just how big the Sun actually is".
  • Bob Business said that blue-green widgets are a new preppy aesthetic.
• Bad idea #1: Hyping the people who are given as examples.
  • Book expert Prof. I.M. Portant, chair of the Learned Department at Big University, said that it is a good book.
  • Chris Celebrity, who is famous for having cameo parts in television shows, said that it is a good video.
• Bad idea #2: Using WP:INTEXT to draw WP:UNDUE attention to small facts.
  • According to a 2016 non-randomized internet-based survey sponsored by Good Organization of people who self-report having autism and who were recruited primarily through social media advertisements, the organization's own membership, and word of mouth, most people with autism like watching videos online.

WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:08, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

Bad idea #3: Asserting opinions with no poll taken, eg

• Wikipedians commonly engage in long arguments.

This form I see a lot. Johnjbarton (talk) 18:12, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

Polls aren't the only way to determine that kind of fact. It should be cited but doesn't require any particular method. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:07, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

Oh, and to be clear, the frequency at which something does/doesn't happen is actually a fact instead of an opinion. An opinion would sound like "Wikipedians spend too much time on long arguments" or "Wikipedians have unreasonably long arguments over unimportant things". WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:08, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

Like Johnjbarton I see this form a lot, often unrelated to Wikipedia, in examples that say some position, terminology, or methodology is common or widespread but sourced only to one or more individual publications that take that position and do not say anything about how common it is. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:42, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

I've seen that mistake, too, but that's a problem of {{failed verification}} (the source is an example of the claim, but does not WP:Directly support any claim about the commonness of the claim) rather than a problem of WP:INTEXT attribution. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:40, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

Concrete proposal to address the original post: replace the example

• N In an article published in The Lancet in 2012, researchers announced the discovery of the new tissue type.
• Y Researchers announced the new tissue type in 2012.

with

• NIn his book The Mathematical Theory of Relativity Arthur Eddington first used the term "red shift".
• YArthur Eddington used the term "red shift" as early as 1923.

Johnjbarton (talk) 18:23, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

We should use a more recent (last couple of years) example, and a 'smaller' source (an article instead of a scholarly book). WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:06, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

So change

• Y Researchers announced the new tissue type in 2012.

to

• Y The discovery of the new tissue type was reported in 2012.

Johnjbarton (talk) 01:50, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

 Done WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:03, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

"Wikipedia:Unreferenced" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Wikipedia:Unreferenced has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 October 27 § Wikipedia:Unreferenced until a consensus is reached. -Samoht27 (talk) 19:32, 27 October 2025 (UTC)

url-status=unfit

Copied from User talk:Graeme Bartlett after I realized there was a better place to ask:

You gave advice to someone here and I wanted to see how it worked for myself. It did not.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 22:54, 27 October 2025 (UTC)

Hmm, it should work, per Template:Cite_web, but you're right, it fails in your sandbox example. 'Usurped' isn't working per the documentation either. Schazjmd (talk) 23:00, 27 October 2025 (UTC)

Did you read the template documentation?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:03, 27 October 2025 (UTC)

I did now, but it doesn't seem to help.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 23:09, 27 October 2025 (UTC)

Really? Are you sure? Here is the reference from your sandbox:

{{cite news|url=https://www.opb.org/article/2025/10/19/a-peaceful-day-of-no-kings-protests-across-oregon-ends-with-a-show-of-force-in-portland/|url-status=unfit|title=A peaceful day of No Kings protests across Oregon ends with a show of force in Portland|work=[[Oregon Public Broadcasting]]|date=October 19, 2025|access-date=October 26, 2025}}

The template documentation says:

'requires url and archive-url' – emphasis in original

Your template does not have an archive snapshot so there is nothing for the control-switch parameter |url-status= to switch to. But, if you add |archive-url= and |archive-date= then you get summat that looks like this:

{{cite news |url=https://www.opb.org/article/2025/10/19/a-peaceful-day-of-no-kings-protests-across-oregon-ends-with-a-show-of-force-in-portland/ |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20251027231843/https://www.opb.org/article/2025/10/19/a-peaceful-day-of-no-kings-protests-across-oregon-ends-with-a-show-of-force-in-portland/ |archive-date=2025-10-27 |url-status=unfit |title=A peaceful day of No Kings protests across Oregon ends with a show of force in Portland |work=[[Oregon Public Broadcasting]] |date=October 19, 2025 |access-date=October 26, 2025}}

"A peaceful day of No Kings protests across Oregon ends with a show of force in Portland". Oregon Public Broadcasting. October 19, 2025. Archived from the original on 2025-10-27. Retrieved October 26, 2025.

If |url-status=unfit is working, you should see that the citation title links to OPB's main page; there is no link to the original url.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:29, 27 October 2025 (UTC)

I missed the archive-url prerequisite too, my mistake. Schazjmd (talk) 23:40, 27 October 2025 (UTC)

All I saw was what came after that.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 16:33, 30 October 2025 (UTC)