Wikipedia talk:Citing sources

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view · edit Frequently asked questions Why doesn't Wikipedia require everyone to use exactly the same style for formatting citations on every single article, regardless of the subject? Different academic disciplines use different styles because they have different needs and interests. Variations include differences in the choice of information to include, the order in which the information is presented, the punctuation, and the name of the section headings under which the information is presented. There is no house style on Wikipedia, and the community does not want to have the holy war that will happen if we tell people that they must use the style preferred by scientists in articles about history or the style preferred by artists when writing about science. Editors should choose a style that they believe is appropriate for the individual article in question and should never edit-war over the style of citations. What styles are commonly used? There are many published style manuals. For British English the Oxford Style Manual is the authoritative source. For American English the Chicago Manual of Style is commonly used by historians and in the fine arts. Other US style guides include APA style which is used by sociologists and psychologists, and The MLA Style Manual which is used in humanities. The Council of Science Editors and Vancouver styles are popular with scientists. Editors on Wikipedia may use any style they like, including styles they have made up themselves. It is unusual for Wikipedia articles to strictly adhere to a formally published academic style. Isn't everyone required to use clickable footnotes like this[1] to cite sources in an article? Not technically. Footnotes (<ref>...</ref>) are by far the most popular method of placing citations. A few older articles may still use a now-deprecated form of inline parenthetical referencing. Manual systems, usually using symbols† or lettersA, are used in a few articles (example). A very short article might not be required to use inline citations. See Wikipedia:Inline citation for more information. Why doesn't Wikipedia require everyone to use citation templates in every single article? Citation templates have advantages and disadvantages. They provide machine-readable meta data and can be used by editors who don't know how to properly order and format a citation. However, they are intimidating and confusing to most new users, and, if more than a few dozen are used, they make the pages noticeably slower to load. Editors should use their best judgment to decide which format best suits each specific article. Isn't there a rule that every single sentence requires an inline citation? No. Wikipedia:Verifiability requires citations based on the content rather than the grammar. Sometimes, one sentence will require multiple inline citations. In other instances, a whole paragraph will not require any inline citations. Aren't general references prohibited? A general reference is a citation listed at the end of an article, without any system for linking it to a particular bit of material. In an article that contains more than a couple of sentences, it is more difficult to maintain text-source integrity without using inline citations, but general references can be useful and are not banned. However, they are not adequate if the material is one of four types of content requiring an inline citation. The article Early life of Joseph Smith, Jr. is an example of a featured article that uses some general references. Can I cite a sign? Yes, signs, including gravestones, that are displayed in public are considered publications. If the article is using citation templates, then use {{cite sign}}. You may also cite works of art, videos, music album liner notes, sheet music, interviews, recorded speeches, podcasts, television episodes, maps, public mailing lists, ship registers, and a wide variety of other things that are published and accessible to the public.

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There has been insufficient discussion for a change of this magnitude in my opinion. To be more specific the question answered in the close was not the question asked, therefore people did not address that question. This change would require a full RFC at the very least. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 13:57, 4 June 2025 (UTC).[reply]

Rich, do you mean that there was insufficient discussion to prefer "<references>" over "{{reflist|refs=" (the consensus that was actually reached in the discussion), or do you mean that there was insufficient discussion to prefer normal/non-WP:LDR over occasionally using LDR (a possibility mooted early in the discussion that proved to be overkill, and so was abandoned in favor of a much smaller change that met the goal)? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:10, 4 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

1. This is consensus about a major decision, which probably requires a widely advertised RFC.
2. The decision wasn't on the headline question.
3. The decision is against the last 20+ years of moving from HTML markup to Wiki-markup.

I'm not going to weigh in on the argument itself, I might even support it, but reintroducing <<references>, except as a temporary patch will add more confusion to wiki-source.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough 18:24, 10 June 2025 (UTC).[reply]

Though <references> might look HTML-like, it's not actually HTML markup. Gawaon (talk) 18:32, 10 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The <references/> tag is exactly as HTML-like as the <ref> tags themselves. I am doubtful that it will cause significant confusion, and even if it is unfamiliar to someone, I think they'll figure it out as easily as they figure out the use of {{sfn}} instead of ref tags. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:33, 11 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It was in the subheading and made up at least three quarters of the discussion. Even if there was a problem with that, I find it frivolously WP:Buro if we needed to have this extensive discussion on the appropriate forum be re-done in the even–more–time-consuming form of the RfC. Especially when I don't see anyone—who had a glance at the top-level ToC thanks to the unrelated Cent-listed discussion below—not interested to weigh-in on discouraging list-defined references (as mentioned in the h2 headline) yet interested by deprecating {{reflist|refs= (a feature only affecting list-defined references). Aaron Liu (talk) 01:00, 11 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The solution that ultimately found consensus was proposed early on under the title "New proposal: deprecate {{reflist|refs= in favor of <references>?" and it was discussed extensively, so this outcome seems fine and fair to me. Gawaon (talk) 07:28, 5 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Really? Maybe long, long, ago, but isn't now the consensus that citation templates use is best practice? Semi-random ping to @SandyGeorgia - are modern FAs allowed to have no citation templates? _{Piotrus at Hanyang| reply here} 05:53, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I prefer citation templates, and I don't know if the requirements at FA are different, but text based references are still somewhat commonly used. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 08:31, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The lack of a uniform citation style is the most glaring style problem in Wikipedia. What we permitted years ago to encourage the expansion of the encyclopedia under the banner of "everyone can edit" now makes us look embarrassingly amateur. We should decide on a preferred style and make plans, with the help of intelligent bots, for adopting it universally in the long term. Zero^talk 10:27, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have used citation templates exclusively for years, so yeah, so I will support anything that moves WP to more use of templates. A plan to gradually adopt templates as the standard for citatons is more likely to reach consensus. Donald Albury 14:29, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I would also support a default for switching to CS1 citation templates with default short citation formas in {{sfn}} – imo {{rp}} is just bad – with explicit proviso that custom anchors are permitted. Custom anchors are needed to deal with sources that don't have years (eg Suetonius, Augustus) as is common in classical studies. They can similarly can be used if an article benefits from shortened anchors (eg CAH² 9) or general short cites by title.

One of the huge benefits of the {{sfn}} "ecosystem" is the ability to produce full listings of missing anchors and sources. You simply can't do this with the text-based anchors. A text version of the citation Smith 2000, § 3.14 with no corresponding bibliographic entry for Smith 2000 is nonsense and we really need ways to track this automatically. Then we can actually go and solve those problems. Though, for some certain self-contained corpuses of citations this can be unnecessary. Eg Plutarch, Marius is evident by convention. A tag here is useful mostly for people who don't know that convention and I usually try to provide it for such sources cited more than once or if translated.Ifly6 (talk) 15:17, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

We should consider the new parameter, details, being developed for the <ref> tag, currently under development. See my example on the Beta-Cluster. Also see m:Talk:WMDE Technical Wishes/Sub-referencing#Request for feedback. If successful, this could eliminate the need for {{sfn}} and its ilk. (For the Beta Cluster you might have to sign up for an account. Also, it isn't always working.) I am not a developer; maybe one of these days they will officially designate me as a pest. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:46, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That seems a bit restrictive in terms of narrative footnotes which say something like Gruen 1995, p. 123, however notes that Dio, 3.14.15, contradicts the narrative in Suetonius, Julius, 1.2.3 or But see Woodman 2021 for alternative views on blah blah. While {{sfn}} is somewhat inherently restrictive, ref + {{harvnb}} essentially solves. One of the developers notes that those notes automatically merge, though, which is a must-have. I'm also not a huge fan of the anchors; imo anchors should match display text. Ifly6 (talk) 15:53, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid a talk page is not the right medium for Ifly6 to convey their point. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:57, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I would strongly oppose any push to require citation templates, because (1) the citation templates more and more over the years have been pushed into a rigid format that makes it very difficult for human editors to edit by hand and get right, (2) this rigid format makes it frequent that what you want to cite does not fit into that format and should not be distorted to make it fit, and (3) we have bots running rampant over our articles repeatedly massaging templated citations into what they think is the corrected version of the same citation, but the bots often misunderstand citations (especially when the citation is to a review of another citation or to a reprint of another citation) and formatting a difficult citation manually can be a deliberate defense against those bots. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:23, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Can you show an example of this for illustration? Ifly6 (talk) 16:36, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Just trawl through the history of User talk:Citation bot and you will find many errors of these types. Often they get fixed, meaning that the exact circumstances that caused this behavior will not immediately trigger the same error. This does not fix the general issue. (The same issue extends to gnomes as well as bots; I had to today revert a gnome who tried to insert repeated fake titles on a collection of book reviews that had no title and were properly formatted using citation templates using title=none, presumably because that parameter value lists the article in CS1 maint: untitled periodical. Manually formatting the book reviews would have avoided that problem and in part because of that I have been manually formatting book reviews more often recently.) —David Eppstein (talk) 23:29, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Making a {{cite book review}} would help bots and people distinguish between an author incorrectly being put in the title vs. the name of the author being reviewed being part of a correct title. Using a template like that would make it easier for downstream machine consumers (like sites that aggregate references to a work or an author across many sources) to parse these weird cases as well.

I expect most people prefer to use HTML forms or wizards to make citations rather than raw wikitext, unlike us long-time editors. It is difficult to implement that without machine-writable templates. If templates don't support pretty much the full universe of cases, then we're discouraging a lot of editors from properly citing their work, so we should make an effort to flesh them out. Personally, I find it's a big pain to remember what punctuation to use where; it's much easier to use templates that tidy up after me. It also would be soooo much easier to change the output later across millions of pages if consensus changes about the punctuation and formatting.

-- Beland (talk) 09:43, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The current status is one may follow a printed style manual (like The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), and other editors will respect that choice. (Actually respect, not just tolerate). If an editor makes up a style just for a certain article, theoretically it's allowable, but in practice other editors can't follow it because they can't read the original editor's mind. The nearest thing we have to a style manual for citation templates is Help:Citation Style 1, but it has problems.

1. It doesn't purport to be complete. On many points it defers to the style in a particular article, such as sentence case or title case for titles of works cited, giving full first names for authors or just initials, etc.. It is only 25 pages long when exported to PDF, compared to 177 pages for the relevant chapters in CMOS 18th ed.
2. There is no policy that the implementation of the citation templates follow the documentation. If a graduate student at a US university submitted a paper that was required to follow a published style manual, but the citation software used by the student flagrantly deviated from the manual, the student would fail the course. In Wikipedia, some comments would be put on some talk pages and nothing would happen.
3. It is absolutely fundamental that a reliable source should never be disqualified because there isn't a citation template to support it. Hand-written citations must always be allowed in this case. But there is no manual to follow when writing such a citation.
4. Since 2020 parenthetical referencing has been deprecated on Wikipedia. As a result, the only acceptable remaining style is endnotes. Respectable published style guides that recommend endnotes or footnotes separate citation elements with the comma, as in "James II of England". But most Wikipedia articles separate them with periods, as in "Nato phonetic alphabet". This should be fixed.

Jc3s5h (talk) 16:27, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If we want to change the "neither encouraged nor discouraged", then we probably need an RFC.

I suggest keeping it simple and focused. For example, despite what @Ifly6 says, mentioning {{sfn}} will provoke opposition (because it is not used in ~98% of articles and is not wanted in subject areas that rely primarily on short articles instead of books/sources that need to give specific page numbers), and it is largely irrelevant, so it shouldn't be mentioned.

The simplest is probably to use the "change X to Y" format. For example:

• Should we change "neither encouraged nor discouraged" to "gently encouraged but not required"?
• Should we change "neither encouraged nor discouraged" to "preferred but not mandated"?
• Should we change "neither encouraged nor discouraged" to "by far the most popular choice, but not required"?

I have, in other areas (e.g., MOS:APPENDIX), had good success with declaring a given option to be "popular" rather than "preferred". Editors tend to choose the popular/normal/usual approach. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:00, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

When wording the RFC, keep in mind that if it succeeds, some editors will try to interpret the new wording as license to change articles to citation templates without seeking consensus, just as one may now change an article from parenthetical referencing to endnotes without seeking consensus. Jc3s5h (talk) 17:14, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps the entire WP:TEMPLATEREFS sentence (or even the whole/short paragraph) should be in the RFC. The specific sentence currently says: The use of citation templates is neither encouraged nor discouraged: an article should not be switched between templated and non-templated citations without good reason and consensus – see "Variation in citation methods", above.

That could be changed to something like "The use of citation templates is popular, though not required. However, an article that predominantly uses a non-templated style should not be switched without prior discussion – see "Variation in citation methods", above" (example text only; write whatever you think would be helpful). WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:39, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

(1): I don't see much ambiguity about when to use sentence vs. title case; the CS1 page has guidance for which fields use which. For the "first initial vs. first name" question, it seems to me we should always put the full name, unless only the initial is available, for disambiguation purposes - especially given that Wikipedia citations have machine consumers that correlate authors. Are there only a few remaining questions we could easily answer? Or would we want to pick the third-party style guide closest to general Wikipedia practice as a default? Or provide a short list of third-party guides and let articles pick one?

(2): Isn't it common sense that if a template does not match its documentation (or the MOS), one or the other should be changed? Making that common sense into a policy wouldn't magically summon volunteer labor to do the implementation work.

(3): If we decided to go full-template, presumably if there are situations not covered we'd add parameters or additional templates. Situations not covered in the meantime would simply remain non-compliant. We could, if we wanted, designate a third-party style guide as a default or allow an article to choose from a short list of popular third-party styles.

(4): I think what you are describing is Citation Style 2? I would support merging these two styles so that there is more site-wide consistency, but I have no opinion as to the most "respectable" punctuation. -- Beland (talk) 09:25, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

FAs are allowed to have any consistent citation style, whether produced by templates or handwritten. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:34, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Pinged here ... agree with Nikkimaria. I don't see a need for any change; not broken, doesn't need fixing. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:32, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I would support changing guidance to say templates are "preferred" and letting people change articles to use them without any further discussion. This makes formatting more consistent because there's less room to be sloppy, automates the process of finding some incomplete or bogus citations, makes it possible to write user-friendly GUI tools that hide the raw wikitext, significantly simplifies the parsing downstream consumers have to do thanks to COinS (e.g. citation aggregation sites, author profile builders, archive.org). Clarifying badly-formatted citations will probably help with the enormous task of fact-checking all our content. This process will probably also shake out some citation styles that should not be used on Wikipedia because they are so radically different from what is done on the rest of the site. And maybe one or two we want to keep but give them their own templates. -- Beland (talk) 10:01, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Does the community actually want to be "letting people change articles to use them without any further discussion"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:32, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I would support doing an RFC to find out. I often do so for one or a handful of citations at a time, and I don't remember anyone reverting that on the grounds the article doesn't use a template-compatible citation style. (I do remember some confusion about how to cite web pages that are only accessible from archive.org.) Often I'm switching to templates because they handle square brackets in titles without awkward escaping. -- Beland (talk) 19:26, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I suggested a couple of possible alternative wordings above. Do any of those appeal to you? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:30, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I would go for the full throated version - change "neither encouraged nor discouraged" to "preferred", not "preferred but not mandated" or the other suggestions which seem to leave a lot of wiggle room for arguments to break out. -- Beland (talk) 19:42, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I realized another benefit of going full template - just as we have the ability to set "mode=cs2" once for an entire article, we could add "mode=chicago" or "mode=mla" or whatever alternative styles the community can't bear to part with. This would let us change styles for an article very easily (except perhaps if downcasing is needed?) if consensus changes about which articles need which style, and it would also strongly enforce per-article consistency without forcing any particular citation style. I like the idea of having a short list of approved styles, because readers encountering a very rare citation style are likely to be confused or maybe assume it's the result of sloppiness. The fewer citation modes the better in my opinion, but this might be a compromise of the sort you're looking for in order to widen support. -- Beland (talk) 19:48, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

All I can say is that if we go “full template”, I will no longer be able to contribute to Wikipedia. Perhaps I am too old. I still think in terms of sentences and paragraphs, not data parameters and fields. I never learned how to use templates, and don’t really have any interest in learning now. I still format citations by hand. I am fine with others following along after me and inputting my citations into a template, but I’m never going to create a new citation using one. Oh well… time to catch the early bird special at the Golden Corral and then go watch Matlock. Blueboar (talk) 20:25, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Blueboar:All I can say is that if we go “full template”, I will no longer be able to contribute to Wikipedia. You appear to be assuming that you'd have to type these templates out by hand, which has never been true. Polygnotus (talk) 01:44, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There's no reason for you to quit Wikipedia; even if the MOS says templates are preferred, I (and I hope all other editors) will be happy to accept your hand-formatted citations, and leave converting them to templates to a wikignome. -- Beland (talk) 20:55, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've inquired about the prevalence of citation templates at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Prevalence of citation templates, and it looks like ~80% of articles use the main citation templates.

I hope that if the community decided to officially "prefer" citation templates, they would also choose to reiterate the main behavioral goal: While you should try to write citations correctly, what matters most is that you provide enough information to identify the source. Others will improve the formatting if needed. Or, to put it more simply, do your best. Nobody should get hassled about how they format a citation so long as (a) we have enough information to identify the source and (b) they don't revert if someone comes along after to "fix" it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:20, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If the community decides to officially "prefer" citation templates, it should only do so at a time when the citation templates are capable of fully formatting all citations. That time is not now; the citation templates are too inflexible, and too prone to raising errors in common use cases (such as that we wish to cite the original publication of a book source but include the isbn of a reprinted copy of the same book). —David Eppstein (talk) 00:17, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't that already possible? There's no validation of ISBNs, but you could always do {{cite book |title=Original book |year=1901}} etc. for the original copy, followed by a separate {{ISBN|1234567890}} if you wanted to keep them apart. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:39, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Blueboar Few thoughts (speaking as someone who remembers time before the Internet, too...). First, I'd expect that "old geezers" from my and older generations are familiar with forms to be filled in. Templates are just that. I don't think filling in a form takes longer than writing a citation by hand. (I am assuming, of course, the use of VE or such, doing this by typing the code is painful, please don't). Second. Templates enable various uses of metadata. They make citations better just like hyperlinks makes text better, or computers enable Wikipedia. They are a step in the right direction. That third, my third point - frankly, conversion of citations from free flowing whatever written format into templates is something that AIs should be able to handle. I don't know when we will have a bot or gadget for that, but just run ChatGPT or such in a window where you run a task telling it to turn it into Wikipedia citation template code, and voila, you should get a well formatted code to paste back into wiki in a second. So, errr, there's no need to leave or such. Learning how to use the better system (and yes, because of metadata, it is strictly better, no ifs and buts) in this case is not hard - just fill in a simple form, or have AI give you a code. Look, I understand the issues (annoyances) of unfriendly new interfaces well, but in this case, it's easy to move from old, inferior output to the new, superior one. Really. Try it. _{Piotrus at Hanyang| reply here} 04:47, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Forms work great for a database… not an encyclopedia. Blueboar (talk) 12:13, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Huh? They work perfectly fine for me and all others who use VE, or tools like TWINKLE... _{Piotrus at Hanyang| reply here} 13:25, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There have been similar entertainings regarding other styles in the CS1 module (MLA and Vancouver particularly), and they've either just gotten nowhere or I suspect more commonly were not friendly to integrate with the current structure of the module set and so were given up on. Were something like this to be done, I suppose it would be possible to place them in their own modules and then call those only when a certain parameter is provided to the CS1 module, but even today there are some checks that CS1 makes very early in the execution of the module which may be inapplicable in other older/recognized citation styles. So you might as well start your own module. Module:Cite LSA used to exist as one attempt at this, and there are a few Bluebook style citation templates that have a bare minimum of centralization. For what code sharing might be possible because arbitrary style does ask for a review, I've mused before on the CS1 help talk page, but I suspect those have gone nowhere for time and little or no known potential users. (For example, the ID and access date checking that CS1 does. Of course, then we're imposing some burden both on CS1 and external users of CS1, primarily at our sister and sister language wikis.) Izno (talk) 23:04, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@David Eppstein: you mentioned above that the current set of citation templates are not ready to be preferred because not all works can be cited with these templates. It seems to me they're really not ready for use at all, because at any time a need to add a new citation to an existing article that already has a long list of citations, but no existing template is suitable for the work to be added. The problem is all the existing template documentation is focused on which template to use, and how to set the parameters. It's hard to find examples of how citations should look when they are rendered; any such examples are scattered and disorganized in the documentation.

If proper documentation existed, an editor who had to add a citation for something that isn't supported by any existing template could decide which template is the closest fit, and hand-write a template that generally resembles one of the existing templates. Jc3s5h (talk) 01:05, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's a fair point that existing templates don't handle all use cases, but that may be because there is no guideline pushing people to use them in all cases. My expectation if templates are "preferred" would be that unhandled cases would be left hand-written until someone created a template to handle them. Based on this feedback, maybe we need to say that explicitly. How about:

The use of citation templates is preferred for situations the templates are designed to handle. Templates should be expanded or created to cover the remaining situations that would otherwise need to be manually formatted.

"Situations" might include the need to support rare citation styles, though I hope this is not the case. I see templates supporting CS1, CS2, Vancouver, Bluebook, and Harvard. Do we know of any articles that consistently use a style that is not one of these?

I don't see why extensive documentation is needed, though some basic points are helpful. But if you need to create a new template and you want to see how e.g. the CS1 templates render something close to your use case, just plug the relevant parameters into a template and preview it or put a copy in your sandbox. Adding too much documentation increases the risk that the code and the documentation get out of sync, which will not help someone trying to expand the system.

In any case, I think the existing templates cover 80-90% of what is needed, and I'm sure we have plenty of work converting those to keep us busy while template builders expand support. -- Beland (talk) 02:23, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There are plenty of FA-level articles that use nontemplated styles. Many people who do scholarly work off-wiki can comfortably format citations consistently by hand, so I don't know why we would do "plenty of work" to change them. And it's trivially easy to create inconsistently formatted citations using templates. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:47, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Those scholars can continue to contribute hand-formatted citations, and if you don't want to do any work on this, you don't have to. A good reason to change them is that they are not emitting COinS metadata, and thus are slightly less useful to downstream consumers. It's easier for scripts to validate the contents of individual fields than it is to make sure that all the punctuation and italics and everything in a hand-formatted citation is done correctly. I mean, how would a script be able to tell the difference between a chapter in a book and an article in a journal if the formatting can't be trusted because it's what's being checked? Featured articles are about 0.1% of the overall encyclopedia. The fact that they're nice and tidy should be celebrated, but that doesn't obviate the problem of the millions of untidy articles. -- Beland (talk) 08:18, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I personally think that millions of articles looking untidy is a feature, not a bug. What a focus on compliance with the MoS even for poorly written articles that cite unreliable sources does is put a huge amount of precisely defined lipstick on pigs. Unifying the citation style of articles should not be done before checking the actual content of the citations. —Kusma (talk) 08:42, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I see your point, and I do actually use poor formatting as a proxy to automatically identify articles with dubious content, though that's usually a pile of unreferenced strings. But it would be awkward to try to preserve this potential signal as long as possible by making a rule that wikignomes aren't allowed to clean up spelling, punctuation, citation formatting, etc. without verifying the claims being made in the prose they are tidying and that the sources are cited accurately. Often that happens naturally, and it's easy to catch glaring problems when doing that, but fact-checking takes so much longer than tidying up, it lags by decades. We also don't have a way of checking which passages have already been fact-checked, which would lead to a lot of redundant work. At the very least I do tag prose I've just made from a pile of dubiousness into a clean, grammatical flow as needing citations if it doesn't have any.

The Guild of Copy Editors does actually reject unreferenced passages; these do tend to change a lot when the first sources are added, which is extremely healthy. But after that, as soon as someone has put in enough effort to make plausible footnotes, the text is considered stable enough to deserve tidying.

If I had to guess, I'd say we have greater problems with claims not matching cited sources with mature citations rather than when the citation is first added. People tend to edit article prose without verifying that the new claim is still supported by the footnote at the end of the sentence, and sometimes sentences get combined or split and footnotes wander around. -- Beland (talk) 09:38, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Jc3s5h, can you give me an example of a work for which "no existing template is suitable"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:58, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

{{Cite map}} requires a title. Suppose a map doesn't have a title. Style guides typically say to give a description of the map where the title would usually go, but not use quote marks around the description, and not use italics, so readers can tell it's just a description. Jc3s5h (talk) 04:32, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Trappist the monk, what would you recommend for a CS1 template that doesn't require a title when the work is untitled? WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:24, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Jumping in randomly here...my first thought would be we could add a "no-title-desc" parameter to {{cite map}}? I would also be tempted to put parens instead of quote marks like, (untitled map of Massachusetts Bay Colony) but perhaps this is not common practice in professional citations. I'm also wondering if this has actually come up or if this is speculative? Text works with no title (as used to be common practice) are named by the first few words; see MOS:INCIPIT. -- Beland (talk) 08:27, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

cs1|2 journal templates support |title=none which suppresses the rendering of the article title. That was intended to be used for en.wiki articles that followed the citation tradition wherein the title of the cited article is not made part of the citation. I suspect that most if not all uses of |title=none are not used to maintain that traditional substyle.

I once suggested that cs1|2 might support a |description-in-lieu-of-title= sort of parameter (in need of a better name) that would render an unstyled description in place of |title=. That suggestion died aborning.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:30, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Trappist the monk, are you sure about that? This: "none". doesn't look like suppressing the rendering of the article title to me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:55, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

cs1|2 journal templates support |title=none

{{cite journal |title=none |journal=Journal}} → Journal.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link)

—Trappist the monk (talk) 21:27, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps that feature should be extended to {{cite map}} (or generally; there are webpages with no titles, too). WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:06, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Journal templates do not support title=none when there is a url present. In general, webpages are going to have urls and urls are going to block the citation templates from supporting title=none even if that support is extended to non-journal templates. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:28, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That makes sense because we need a title for the link.

Not putting the title of the article being cited in the citation to the article...sounds crazy when I say it out loud? Is there an article with an example of this? -- Beland (talk) 01:10, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sometimes there just isn't a title. Consider a sign: Maybe it will have a title, and maybe it won't. A letter is another source that often doesn't have a title. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:39, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, but a sign is not an journal article. What I'm scratching my head over is why a citation wouldn't have the title of a journal article when one exists. I feel like I need an example for context. -- Beland (talk) 02:46, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There's plenty of solutions for this, see Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 98#Handle title=none with url better.

Why those aren't implemented is beyond me. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:53, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Another example that I run into all the time is book reviews, which don't usually have titles, or are labeled with things formatted as titles that are not really titles like "Reviews - Euler’s gem, by David S. Richeson. Pp. 336. £16.95. 2008. ISBN 978 0 691 12677 7 (Princeton University Press)". When the review is published in a journal and has only a doi link, then the cite journal template can handle it with title=none, but most other formats of book reviews cannot be handled by the templates without making up a nonexistent and therefore false title. We should not be putting false information into the encyclopedia, not even in references and not even because the template doesn't work without it. And the bots that run around "improving" citations will often get confused by citations to reviews and mix them up with citations to the thing being reviewed or vice versa (an egregiously bad example from today: [4]). To avoid both problems I've taken to frequently formatting references to book reviews manually instead of with the templates. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:53, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It's unclear to me if the example you link to is a problem with the bot or the human operating it? It's also unclear to me what the thing being cited is. Is it a book or an article or a review of a book or ?

If a journal publishes a book review just titled "War and Peace by Herman Melville" then I agree it might be confusing and arguably incorrect to put "title=Review of War and Peace by Herman Melville". It seems better to have output like:

"[Review of] War and Peace by Herman Melville". Archimedes Syracuse.

or

"War and Peace by Herman Melville" (review by Archimedes Syracuse).

or whatever the professional style guide specifies for these situations. It might be useful to have separate fields like "reviewed_title" and "reviewed_author" if we need to fabricate strings but make it clear they are not a word-for-word title the reader should be looking up. Or a separate template like {{cite review}} to take the same fields as e.g. {{cite journal}} but produce different output with "review" in there somewhere. -- Beland (talk) 08:50, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The example I link to was a perfectly good and perfectly normal citation to a book. Until Citation bot got to it. Citation bot somehow discovered the existence of a review of that book in the journal Nature and half-converted the citation into a Frankenstein citation half about the book and half about its review.

It is useful to cite things that have reviews. It is also, separately, sometimes useful to cite the reviews of those things (for instance in articles about the things being reviewed). Many humans are capable of distinguishing which kind of citation is intended and keeping them distinct from each other. The bots have demonstrated themselves to be incapable of this. This bot misbehavior makes it problematic to have templated citations to reviews because the bots are likely to misinterpret them and break them. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:47, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Huh. I would expect citations to books to use {{cite book}}. Still unclear to me if there is a human review step that should have caught this? -- Beland (talk) 01:13, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If you're referring to the fact that the bot citation damage involved a {{citation}} template rather than a {{cite book}} template: that is one of the key differences between Citation Style 1 and Citation Style 2. In Citation Style 1 editors have to figure out which of many different citation templates to use and the automatic tools frequently get it wrong calling them all cite web. In Citation Style 2, everything uses one template, {{citation}}. The other difference is. That Citation Style 1. Has many periods. That break up. The flow. Of the citation. Citation Style 2 uses commas, instead.

I'm surprised you wouldn't know this already. Am I misinterpreting your reply? —David Eppstein (talk) 07:46, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Either template can produce either output style with the "mode" parameter if the default output is not desired. I guess I'm just not in the habit of using {{citation}}; it seems a bit more vague, but of course it's not wrong to use it.

That really wasn't the important part of my comment. Since no one was answering my question, I went ahead and tested the Fundamental theorem of calculus scenario. Citation bot does not give humans a chance to preview its changes before it makes them, it only gives them a link to the diff afterwords. Though in this case, even if I had manually checked the source, it's unclear I would have noticed that it was a review and not the original work. Both the bot and the humans can be confused because the review has all the same metadata as the original work (with the complication that two authors are usually mentioned rather than one). I can't think of a good way to distinguish the two automatically, so humans just need to look out for this. It's possible looking for key phrases on the page (in this case, "review" isn't used, but "Books Received" is) could be used as a trigger to put up a red flag for the human user. This isn't 100% reliable because e.g. "reviews" would also show up on literature review articles. It's also possible the review is in fact what is being cited, so it's not great to use as an automatic exclusion. For now, I have added a note to User:Citation bot flagging this for humans generally.

The point of Citation bot is to provide readers with easier access to sources, gets get quite a bit of use, saves a lot of work, and works well in the vast majority of cases - so I would be reluctant to try to revoke its bot approval. Even this error will bring readers to a review of the source they are looking to read, which has a relatively straightforward recovery since they still have access to all the correct metadata once they realize what has happened.

There is no need to use hand-formatted citations to prevent the bot from altering a citation. Its documentation shows how to exclude the bot from an entire page or from a single citation known to be problematic (I would prefer the latter for ease of long-term maintenance). -- Beland (talk) 22:04, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

And then the people who maintain the bot go around removing these exclusions when they think they have fixed the very specific issue that caused the bot to misbehave once and be tagged for exclusion. But the problem is not specific bugs; it is that certain classes of issue require human understanding that the bot lacks. We have just this month had a Citation bot user blocked after an ANI thread because they thought the bot could be run without supervision and were blowing off complaints about the resulting bad edits. The bot is usually useful but occasionally causes problems, and needs checking. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:20, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've not seen people removing nobot exclusions, but if they do, it could help to put in the exclusion comment what to check after removal. But people could just as easily go around switching hand formatted citations to templates and not know that the reason they were hand coded was bot danger, rather than simply laziness. It seems better to explicitly declare bot incompatibility than lay a trap of a secret workaround. -- Beland (talk) 01:50, 4 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have started Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#RFC on preferring templates in citations. -- Beland (talk) 23:54, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

To what extent is a press release a reliable source? They are mentioned in passing in WP:RS, but I cannot track any direct comment on them.

In the case I have dealt with, I had excised comment on visitor numbers from Vasa (ship) with [5]. I have since seen statistics on museum visits in Sweden collated by a government agency ([6], table 23 in the spreadsheet). But the simplest "headline figure" that seems to encapsulate the number of visitors to the ship since her salvage is a Vasamuseet press release [7] giving a figure of 45 million to date. (Added with [8]) To my mind, this figure from the museum is validated by them having to report these numbers to a government agency. Simple arithmetic from the government agency report makes the 45 million entirely believable. For myself, I find the cited source totally sufficient. Clearly other press releases by other organisations may be different. In my specific example I have chosen not to contextualise the visitor numbers as "Scandinavia's most visited museum" which, I understand, is in their marketing material. I don't see marketing material as an RS, whilst a press release may well be.

I am wondering to what extent my decision-making is supportable by guidance on RSs. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 19:57, 25 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A museum's press release wouldn't confer notability under WP:SIRS, but for confirming uncontroversial statistics like visitor numbers, there's no real reason to expect or need an independent source. The relevant section is WP:SELFSOURCE, where organizations' statements about themselves are acceptable in some cases. Your citation seems perfectly fine (although if you went with "most-visited museum" you might run afoul of the rule against unduly self-serving); after all, we have {{cite press release}} for this reason. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 19:17, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Press releases are always Wikipedia:Self-published sources. They are almost always Wikipedia:Primary sources. They are usually not Wikipedia:Independent sources.

But: That doesn't mean they're WP:NOTGOODSOURCE. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:29, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I used the Template:Cite web for a webpage on the US Patent and Trademark Office's TSDR, and I was wondering whether there is a special way to cite a US trademark registration in an article. I saw that there's a template for a patent (Template:Cite patent) and was curious if there was something similar for a trademark as well. Appreciate any guidance. (Guyinblack25 ^talk 03:04, 29 April 2025 (UTC))[reply]

I've always "known" that direction quotations must be cited immediately after the quote, even if an end of paragraph citation would normally cover it. This leads me to write paragraphs like:

In 1916, Abramson designed the Home of the Daughters of Jacob on 167th Street between Findlay and Teller Avenues in the Bronx. The building consists of eight wings arranged radially around a central core, and has been described as "novel in design, being in the form of a wheel".^[1] The property consists of 36 lots which were previously part of Gouverneur Morris's estate; at the time of purchase by the Daughters of Jacob, it was still occupied by Morris's 1812 house which was torn down to make room for the new building.^[1]

where I put a citation directly after the "novel in design, being in the form of a wheel" quote, even though the exact same reference appears at the end of the paragraph. This has always seemed silly to me.

Looking at WP:INTEXT, I see it says In-text attribution may need to be used with direct speech ... An inline citation should follow the attribution, usually at the end of the sentence or paragraph in question which sure sounds to me like the extra citation immediately after the quote is not actually needed. Am I just mis-reading this? Can I condense duplicate citations like this into a single one at the end of the paragraph?

RoySmith (talk) 22:19, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe I've been doing it wrong? But I put the cite at the end of the content it supports, even if there's a direct quote in there. Schazjmd (talk) 22:25, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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"

• 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)[reply]

• 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)[reply]

• 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)[reply]

• 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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

• 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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

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

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

• 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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

• @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)[reply]

• 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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

• 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)[reply]
• 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)[reply]
• 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)[reply]
• Oppose Per Nikkimaria, CMD, and StarryGrandma. Ealdgyth (talk) 14:41, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• 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)[reply]
• Oppose, per most of the comments above, particularly StarryGrandma. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:31, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• 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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

  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)[reply]

• Support, the technical benefits are overwhelming. But oppose bots; understanding is still needed to avoid errors. Ifly6 (talk) 16:54, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
• 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)[reply]
• 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)[reply]
• 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)[reply]
• "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)[reply]