Extension talk:Cite/Wikitext archive (Cite.php)

Installation trouble: ver 1.6 upwards only / UTF-8 arrow bug / mising " ?> "
Sorry to top post, remove it if you think it's inappropiate:

The file to be downloaded at (CVS HEAD) in the External link section has three issues:
 * 1) It's for ver 1.6 upwards only, which should be mentioned prominently - it took some time before I found out.
 * 2) The trailing   at the end of the PHP file is missing
 * 3) On line 98/99   needs to be changed to , so a proper ↑ is displayed.

@Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason: Thx for the great work, but the info above was missing and spares a lot of trial & error for first time users.--Tickle me 23:10, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

I put Cite.php in my extensions directory
I put Cite.php in my extensions directory, and added the line "require_once("extensions/Cite.php"); to my LocalSettings.php, and now my wiki gives me this error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: wfmsgforcontentnotrans in mediawiki-1.5.5/extensions/Cite.php on line 572

Any ideas? --69.237.153.190 06:34, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Okay, I think I found out what was missing. includes/GlobalFunctions.php looks like it's old in mediawiki-1.5.5.tar.gz - I'm going to try grabbing just that function.  --69.237.153.190 06:55, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, it looks like it's harder than I thought to enable this on v1.5.5. I guess I'll wait till it is in the normal build. --69.237.153.190 07:15, 19 January 2006 (UTC)


 * It depends on changes in the parser itself, how hooks are added to the parser, hooks in the parser, behaviour in the sanitizer & parser all of which are in CVS HEAD and not in REL1_5 (that list if just of the top of my head), if you want to use it you'll either have to backport the needed changes or use CVS HEAD. I do work for hire if you need someone for the former;) —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 02:42, 21 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I have not understand. Same problem as above. Is the cite.php not for mediawiki 1.5.5 ? --Farm 04:13, 24 January 2006 (UTC)


 * No. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 08:43, 29 January 2006 (UTC)


 * The CVS HEAD source code has not the endding code "?>", why? 14:00, 24 Jan 2006 (UTC).


 * I forgot to add it. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 08:43, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Not working
I have v1.5.6 and it's not working. Can you tell me why? I did'nt understood what you previously wrote here.


 * In short because there have been massive changes in the MediaWiki API since 1.5 which this extension uses. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 20:25, 28 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Same for 1.5.7? But working for 1.6alpha? --Edi 22:22, 2 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Sorry if my question seems naïve, but in fact, is there anyway to make cite.php work with 1.5.6 or not ? If there's a way, would it be to difficult for you to explain how ? If it's not too difficult but that you don't have time, do you think you may have time someday ? Thanks. --Henrique 23:35, 2 March 2006 (UTC)


 * See my comment above for what needs to be changed, although I may have forgotten something, your best bet it to look at the CVS logs from that time if you want to backport it.


 * I don't plan to backport it. Backporting is boring and I'm doing this in my free time. But even if I did it would have to be released as a seperate patch because the 1.5 branch is accepting security fixes and other bug fixes only. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 16:57, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Options for newbie
I'm a beginner with MediaWiki v1.5.7 - it is important for me to use cite functions, but I'm not able to change code. What are the options at this time for a newbie? Chrus. 31 March 2006.

No response
I put the cite.php in the extensions directory and added the reuqired_one line in the localsettings.php and noting happens. No footnotes appear and the <ref... is shown in the article! Any suggestions? Thanks!

Multiple quotes from same source (&lt;ref/&gt; Wish)
I'd like to quote the same source multiple times. If there would be a &lt;ref name=id /&gt;, it could only generate the citation, but use the inner part of a previous &lt;ref name=id &gt;blahblah&lt;/ref&gt;. In the next step it would be great to use this for referencing definitions on other wiki pages, i.e. &lt;ref name=/TheOtherArticle/id /&gt;. Additionally generating a printable version or PDF from a wikipedia article gets easier, too. -- Herbert 19:40, 14 January 2006 (CET)


 * You obviously haven't tried doing that first part, because it works perfectly (and is used in the example here). I don't understand what you mean in the second part (sorry)… Jon Harald Søby 18:50, 14 January 2006 (UTC)

Wish
In my browser (IE and Firefox) in Win XP, I see:


 * Uranus's moons were observed to be declining in orbit[1], by the Hubble space telescope[2], the Martians were not avalible for comment on the matter[3]. The New York times[4] however reported[5] that ...


 * 1. ^ NASA


 * 2. ^ 1 2 December 2005 issue, page 12


 * 3. ^ 1 2 January 2006 issue, page 16

Could it be


 * ^ 1 NASA


 * ^ 2 3 December 2005 issue, page 12


 * ^ 4 5 January 2006 issue, page 16

,I mean, the number in the references should correspond to the number in the text?

Thanks193.52.24.125 13:29, 28 December 2005 (UTC)


 * You might want to reply on Ævar's English Wikipedia talk page, there's some discussion there about this right now: en:User talk:Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason. —Locke Cole • t • c 21:15, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Second wish
It's long been said by people opposed to increased usage of inline citation that inline citations damage readability. I'm somewhat sympathetic to that, and the easy solution is to have a way for the people that want to to make inline citations invisible. Would that be hard to implement as a user preference for example? Or is there a better way to do that? Thanks - Taxman 16:35, 31 December 2005 (UTC)


 * It's already a user preference, you just have to add
 * Or something like that to your user stylesheet. — 17:43, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
 * Or something like that to your user stylesheet. — 17:43, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

A better method may be to add another parameter that allows individual citations to be hidden. This would allow for an article author to fully reference each paragraph, or even every sentence, and still keep the number of footnotes generated at a reasonable level. If this is impractical to implement, we can still use HTML comments. --Allen3 23:36, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
 * The whole point of the extension is to be able to maintain an automatically generated references table just like one can maintain an automatically generated table of contents in the software, if you're not going to use that (the only) feature and don't want display any references in the article at all then you're probably best off with a simple inline comment, unless I'm misunderstanding you. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15:25, 12 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I would restate this a different way. Is it possible to have a citation level variable.  E.g. 0/1/2.. or none/default/all or none/few/default/lots/all where citations will be displayed according to the setting.  The default level would be a sensible level which gives reasonable citations without going overboard.  The "all" level would be something which makes fact checking very easy.  Mozzerati 22:10, 17 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Let's keep it simple. What about , and the specified class ends up included in the resulting span's class.  Then you can do whatever you want in CSS.  --P3d0

can't be used in image captions
Code of the form   misrenders disastrously. Snottygobble 12:06, 2 January 2006 (UTC)


 * That's a known issue with the parser and doesn't have anything to do with this extension in particular, except that it affects it. I made a known issues section at Cite/Cite.php to track these. – 07:02, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Bugs? Or operator error?
I really like this new feature, but I'm having trouble getting it to work consistently. This is particularly a problem when a single reference is used more than once. The article I'm trying to fix is Dixie (song). As you can see, there are six page citations that repeat at least once (Notes 4, 17, 28, 58, 69, and 84). However, when you click on the reference links by these repeaters, nothing happens (the page does not pop up or down properly like it does with the page citations that are used only once). Secondly, Note 17 should read "Quoted in Abel 36.", but currently it says nothing. Likewise, Note 72 should read "Abel 49.", but it too is blank. Can someone tell me if I'm doing something wrong? Thanks. . . . — BrianSmithson 19:25, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
 * This was a known issue with MediaWiki which happened not because you were using references more than once but because you were using a character (0x20) that needed to be escaped. I've fixed the issue in MediaWiki that caused this.
 * As for your other issue that is indeed a user error, you can't recall a reference later in the text by its content, only by a key you provide, so &lt;ref&gt;foo&lt;/ref&gt; &lt;ref name=foo/&gt; won't do what you seem to expect it should. But &lt;ref name=foo&gt;foo&lt;/ref&gt; &lt;ref name=foo/&gt; probably will. — 09:55, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

HTML format
This cite stuff is totally cool. But I have a few suggestions about the way the HTML code is formatted. —Michael Z.


 * Hi an thanks for the suggestions and sorry for the late reply, I saw this a few days ago but hadn't gotten around to replying. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:44, 9 January 2006 (UTC)

&lt;cite> element
Each note should be enclosed in an HTML &lt;cite> element, since it is a citation. Since the in-text citation marker is linking to the citation, perhaps the note ID should be an attribute of the cite, rather than of the list item (&lt;li>):

&lt;li>&lt;cite id="_note-NoteID">Note&lt;/cite>&lt;li>

—Michael Z.


 * If you check the history of the file you'll see that what you suggest used to be the default but after reading a bit more up on the element in the W3C standards (see links in the file) and after some comments on the English Wikipedia I changed it again.
 * The reason it's not in there is because the cite element should only ever be used for a direct citation, and since users are likely to do something like:
 * &lt;ref&gt;Page 52 of XYZ written by Foo, the only remaining copy of this book was lost in the great fire of Bar&lt;/ref&gt;
 * I.e. include something that isn't directly relevant to the citation (the fate of the referenced work in this case). If the software were to automatically wrap things in the cite element you'd end up with a lot of mismarked text, so now users are expected to simply write:
 * &lt;ref&gt;&lt;cite&gt;Page 52 of XYZ written by Foo&lt;/cite&gt;, the only remaining copy of this book was lost in the great fire of Bar&lt;/ref&gt;
 * —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:44, 9 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Okay, I see; this is also meant for footnotes, not just citations. But I don't see any harm in an HTML citation also containing a bit of explanatory text, like in your example.  —Michael Z.

Back-link text
The back-link text is currently the single character ^ (U+005E CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT)—this is not an arrow, and doesn't really look like an arrow. It's a circumflex, a diacritic used in some languages, and on its own indicates mathematical exponentiation in primitive ASCII-only displays. For the sake of its meaningless semantics (therefore poor accessibility), as well as sheer graphical ugliness, let's change it to ↑ (U+2191 UPWARDS ARROW), or ← (U+2190 LEFTWARDS ARROW).

See also:
 * Daring Fireball: About the Footnotes
 * Daring Fireball: Notes on Notes
 * Joe Clark: There’s no such thing as a footnote


 * I agree that a proper mark should be used, but the replacement you mentioned (↑) looks way too large and not as neat as ^, ← on the other hand doesn't convey anything meaningful, the link is up, not to the left. Do you have something like ↑ that doesn't look so big (a bit more like ^)? —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:44, 9 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I don't think there are any smaller arrows, although an arrow could be made smaller using CSS formatting. See en:Template talk:Ref for some of the others, but MSIE/Win has trouble rendering most of them, without extra help from CSS.


 * Putting the arrows at the end of the note will make them less prominent, because they won't be all lined up (see below). —Michael Z.

And the back-link text should definitely not be superscripted; typographers use that for in-text citations only, never for footnote labels. —Michael Z.


 * You're suggesting[1] stuff[2] like this instead (i.e. rendering it the same way as the surrounding text)? —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason


 * Superscripts are appropriate for the in-text citation references, but footnote labels should not be superscripts. "Back-links" don't appear in standard typography, but it makes sense that they should not be confused with citation references, possibly leading readers to look for another notes section below.  —Michael Z.

Back-link position
The back-link looks like a label at the beginning of each note. But the note already has a number label. The back-link is an interface feature attached to the note, and subordinate to it. It belongs at the end. Don't the examples 4 to 6 below look better? Or if the arrow alone seems like too small a mouse-click target, put it in brackets so it is graphically associated with the citation link, like example 7 and 8.


 * 1) #|^ Bloggins, Joe (2006). Old-fashioned carat back-links.  Oldville: Tradition.
 * 2) #|^ Brown, Sam (2006). At the beginning of the line: look like labels.  Oldville: Tradition.
 * 3) ^ #|3.1 #|3.2 Smith-Jones, John (2006). Attract attention and misalign authors.  Oldville: Tradition.
 * 4) The Great, El Borbah (2006). New-fangled back-links.  Newtown: Innovation.  #|↑
 * 5) Verne, Jules (2006). Citations start with authors name: just like in books.  Newtown: Innovation.  #|↑
 * 6) Who, Joe (2006). Back-links are visually subordinate to the note's content.  Newtown: Innovation.  #|↑6.1 #|↑6.2
 * 7) Heinlein, Robert (2006). Brackets look like the in-text citations.  Newtown: Innovation.  #|&#91;↑&#93;
 * 8) Asimov, Isaac (2006). Brackets help visually associate notes with back-links.  Newtown: Innovation.  #|&#91;↑8.1&#93; #|&#91;↑8.2&#93;

—Michael Z.


 * Mm, matter of taste really, I like having all the backlinks in the same row for quick jumping up & down in the article. If by "The back-link looks like a label at the beginning of each note. But the note already has a number label." you're referring to the rational numbers in #3 then you don't need to use numbers at all, the system allows for using custom labels (defined in cite_references_link_many_format_backlink_labels) in cite_references_link_many_format using the 3rd paramater ($3) so you could have something like this as well:
 * a b Text of citation
 * Regarding the different styling of arrows (again) I really don't like to put myself in the position of deciding what should be the default. I just used the styling that was being used in the Ref and Note templates in enwiki at the time and I think the manual of style talk page is a much better venue for discussing how it should look, if editors are generally happy with something else than the current default I'd be quite happy to change the default in the software. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:49, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Title attribute for the back-link
The back-link currently contains an empty title attribute, which prevents it from showing a pop-up 'tooltip'.

title=""

Readers are used to looking for tool-tips in puzzling interface elements. Why not put some meaningful information there, which would help users figure out what this is? How about something like:

title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text"

—Michael Z.


 * This is actually a "feature" of wikitext rather than this extension, and since it's basically just a macro that generates wikitext (from a final output point of view) the extension itself doesn't have control over the  attribute, it just sends wikitext to the parser for rendering. You'll notice that the same thing happens when you put code like   on a normal page. I've added this to the issues list so that people are aware of this. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 14:57, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Parsable ID, using hyphens
If the ID assigned to the notes used the hyphen as a separator (instead of underscore), then it could be parsed using the CSS2 Hyphen Attribute Value Selector. The current format is like the following:

&lt;li id="_note_NoteID">Note&lt;li>

If it instead used a hyphen to separate the parts:

&lt;li id="_note-NoteID">Note&lt;li>

Then all notes could be formatted using a CSS selector like this (in a modern browser; MSIE/Win doesn't support this):

li[id|="_note"] {. . . }

—Michael Z.


 * I didn't know you could do that, I've fixed it. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15:21, 12 January 2006 (UTC)


 * The hyphen-attribute selector is CSS2; supported by Firefox, Safari, Opera, but not MSIE. Thanks for changing it.  —Michael Z.

Order of references
Is there any way to control the order in which the references appear at the end ? In Maharajkumar of Vizianagram for instance, references 2-5 are in the different parts of the article but since they are all from the same book, they are listed together at the end. Will I be able to do the same with this scheme ? 208.246.215.5 00:04, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Flushing of previously-used references
One nice feature to have would be a  attribute to , so that using   would delete all of the previously-used citations. This would be useful in Comparison of operating systems, for example, where each section has footnotes. æle ✆ 20:53, 13 January 2006 (UTC)


 * That would actually be pretty neat, although it's hard to do because you can't guarantee top-down parsing (and it being consistent with other tags) when you have multiple tags. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 21:27, 14 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Maybe you could have "types" of references, so that you could have  and , then display them with   and  . You could then have   display absolutely everything, and   display those without a specified type. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 12:19, 17 January 2006 (UTC)

Wikitext is not HTML
This reference style is contrary to the spirit of wikitext, which is supposed to be free of such line noise. It renders pages uneditable (by novices and experienced editors alike) and unmaintainable. Is there a poll somewhere where this abomination can be opposed?

chocolateboy 05:30, 21 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Er.. well, a Wikitext way of handling this wasn't obvious, and there are other HTML/XML style tags in use in Wikipedia (see   for example, or , etc). I strongly disagree with your assertion that it makes pages "uneditable and unmaintable". HTML is well known, and it made more sense to use an HTML-like syntax than to use some "abomination" that was non-obvious or difficult to use/type. Using HTML-style markup also makes it easy to extend the syntax (add additional attributes to the psuedo-tags). —Locke Cole • t • c 08:55, 21 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Can you cite some specific issues you have with it? "contrary to the spirit of wikitext", "line noise", "uneditable" and "unmaintainable" are all big statements but you fail to provide anything to back them up. What exactly do you have an issue with and how should that be fixed? —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 01:40, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

---


 * a Wikitext way of handling this wasn't obvious

What's wrong with plain old and  ?
 * Which flavour of footnote did you actually have in mind?
 * This and this (and also this and this which describe obsolete systems which apparently are still operational even though deprecated) show no less than five tags for creating a reference (and I might have missed one):
 * &#x7B;&#x7B;Template:ref&#x7D;&#x7D;
 * &#x7B;&#x7B;Template:ref label&#x7D;&#x7D;
 * &#x7B;&#x7B;Template:fn&#x7D;&#x7D;
 * &#x7B;&#x7B;Template:an&#x7D;&#x7D;
 * &#x7B;&#x7B;Template:mn&#x7D;&#x7D;
 * each of which must be coupled with the correct corresponding tag for the footnote to work properly.
 * There are also various systems in place for renumbering footnotes; it is unlear which of the above tags each system will sort properly.
 * Replacing this lot with a single uniform method would seem to be an excellent idea. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 12:48, 23 January 2006 (UTC)
 * What exactly do you have an issue with and how should that be fixed?

Isn't it obvious? See the debate over HTML entities for endash and emdash on w:Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dashes) for long prior discussion of this issue. Wiki means "quick", and wikitext is supposed to be quick and easy to edit by nontechnical users. This solution betrays both of those principles. Sure, we could all write markup in XML, which would provide the ultimate in flexibility and expressiveness, but that's not the Wiki way:


 * The source format, sometimes known as "wikitext", is augmented with a simplified markup language to indicate various structural and visual conventions.


 * ''The reasoning behind this design is that HTML, with its many cryptic tags, is not especially human-readable. Making typical HTML source visible makes the actual text content very hard to read and edit for most users. It is therefore better to promote plain-text editing with a few simple conventions for structure and style.

&c.

Also, I don't understand why this is being discussed here rather than on Wikipedia.
 * Because "Wikipedia" (I'll presume you're meaning enwiki) is one of approx. 800 Wikimedia projects that use this and this is also used outside Wikimedia, the metawiki is an appropriate place to discuss issues relating to more than one project. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 16:44, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

chocolateboy 05:24, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Chocolateboy - please see the comparison between ref/note and Cite.php style I just added to the page. In fact, Cite.php is about as close to ref/note style as is possible, and it provides a number of advantages(which I can list, or you can just look at the page).  I suppose a syntax like text of note and  could be used, but really, is that so much more evil than and   in my css, what exactly happens? Will I be able to see the inline refs in the edit box? Regards enceph alon  00:34, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Suppressing a citation
A big problem with using Cite in a real wikipedia article is that when the citations are large, it makes editing the article difficult.

One workaround is having the ability to suppress printing the number of a citation. That way, an individual can put all the references for an article at the top, cite them in the article, and flush them at the bottom.

I was thinking of something along the lines of

The above should be rendered as a space or not at all (some sort of hidden attribute). In this way, all the references can be placed at the top of the article (maybe with a comment in the HTML saying that they should all go there), not get rendered at the top, get cited in the text, and flushed (shown) at the bottom.

Ksheka 13:21, 21 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Addendum - I notice that if the reference is defined in a comment, the reference number is not printed out. This is near-perfect!  The only problem now is that when the references are flushed, there is a backlinking pointer to the initial references (which is not visible.  Here is an example of what I am trying to do.  Notice that when editing the article, the text is easier to read (and edit).


 * If there was a way to disable the backlinking pointers from the reference section to the article itself, I would consider this a complete solution. Ksheka 14:00, 21 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Addendum 2 - I discovered the obvious problem with what I said, above. If the references are defined at the top of the article, they have to be in the same order as they are in the body of the article, otherwise the numbers are off.


 * I guess the solution is that the references have to be defined at the bottom of the article, and allow for references to be used in the body of the article without being defined yet. Ksheka 19:42, 21 February 2006 (UTC)


 * In which case do the references at the end need to be in order ? ie is the numerical order defined by their occurences up in the main text of an article ? If this works (?currently so, or could be made so) then the only required feature would be to suppress forward-links to the hidden list of citation details.  DavidRuben(talk) 12:55, 28 February 2006 (UTC)


 * What I mean is that, if the references are defined in a comment section at the top of the article they are assigned numbers based on the order they are defined there. So, if they are referenced in a different order in the body of the article, the references will be out of order.  Not a big deal, really.  It just means that in the text you might have reference #4 before reference #1.  The references will match up with their proper definitions, so no real harm done. (And fairly easy to fix, by just re-ordering the references in the comment section.) Ksheka 15:55, 3 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Do not do that, that's a bug in the parser that's going to be fixed. Relying on parser bugs to do what you want is a very bad idea. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 17:00, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Regarding pre-defined references
A lot of people have been suggesting using something like &lt;ref value=something silent=yes&gt;reference here&lt;/ref&gt; due to reference definitions inline looking like line noise.

I'm aware of the problem and will try to get to implementing it along with other improvements soon-ish, hopefully this weekend.

Sorry for the delay, busy with life;)

--Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 15:33, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Update
I implemented displaying named references as if they were anonymous references when only one is defined, i.e. you'll never see output like:


 * 1) a Ref text

If someone could update the ref example to reflect this that would be nice, I'm too lazy;) —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 22:15, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

Locating referenced articles?
One of the advantages of footnote2/3/4 along with several other systems was that since they used templates, articles using them could be easily located e.g. for updates / statistics / surveying / correction. This doesn't seem to work with. Is there an easy way to implement this? If not, would it be an idea to hide the actual ref tags behind a simple template which would make the articles locatable? Eventually, I guess, we would want to have the reverse. Locate articles which do not have references. Mozzerati 13:44, 26 February 2006 (UTC)


 * You can't encapsulate ref tags in templates due to limitations in MediaWiki, and even then it wouldn't be a good idea.


 * Regarding logging then yes, it's very possible. In fact I've been logging usage of it since it was deployed but I can't give users general access to the method I'm using due to scalability issues. But keeping a link table for parser extensions would be very possible and not a bad idea.. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 20:03, 26 February 2006 (UTC)

Problems with Cite.php
I have installed Cite.php on my fresh Mediawiki 1.5.6 installation. When I include a, it causes this PHP error:
 * Fatal error: Call to undefined function: array in [full path ommitted]/mediawiki-1.5.6/includes/Parser.php on line 427

Is there something I am missing here? -James Howard (talk/web) 23:07, 26 February 2006 (UTC)


 * See the section above. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 03:03, 27 February 2006 (UTC)


 * There is no section above, or am I missing something?Travb 03:38, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Syntax question
Is it necessary to include the whole stuff like:  wherever a citation occurs, or would it be enough to do   when the quotation is used a second, third etc. time? It sure would help a lot. Kosebamse 09:27, 2 March 2006 (UTC)

Update: It seems that  is what I was looking for, but thta is apparently not mentioned in the desription. I don't understand this well enough to rewrite the description, but this should be mentioned. Kosebamse 10:12, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Done. enceph alon 14:15, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Flushing out silent references
It has been suggested that an option be added to the  tag to allow a reference to be defined which does not appear in the text at the point of definition; these references could then be used by means of the   syntax. I would like to suggest that all such references which have not already been used or which have no name attribute should be flushed out during the processing of the  tag: they should be added to the bottom of the numbered list, as a non-numbered list.

So for example, a ==References == section like this (assuming that a silent reference is defined using ): ==References == —which would allow the particular section to be specified. Section references would be displayed as sub-lists of the main reference.

Taking the Mahatma Gandhi example as a guide, references might be defined like this: 
 * Some stuff &lt;ref name=source>Author, A.N., A book and some more stuff&lt;ref name=source section="Page 31"/>. Yet more stuff&lt;ref name=source section="Appendix 1"/>.

which might be displayed in the ==References == section like this: 
 * References
 * ^ Author, A.N. Some book or other
 * a Page 31
 * b Appendix 1
 * b Appendix 1

This would drastically simplify the interaction between "footnotes" and "references" which appear to function independently in many places because linking them is too complicated. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 09:06, 6 March 2006 (UTC)


 * YES. I would love to have this. It makes life so much easier, and you don't have to resort to things like ibid or op cit. Johnleemk 16:49, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Distinguish between references to same item
If you have several different references to the same item, you get "sub-reference" letters (a, b, etc) in the reference list: these link back to the various references. However there is nothing in the reference link to distinguish between these "sub-references": they all display as something like &#x5B;2&#x5d;. Is it possible to format these links as &#x5B;2a&#x5d;, &#x5B;2b&#x5d;, etc? HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 14:17, 6 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Yeah, it's not fun having people bitch at you about "ZOMG, the references are out of order!" Johnleemk 16:50, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

Refs in templates?
First, I really like the ref/reference format of referencing as opposed to all previous formats. However one problem I have is that if you include a &gt;ref&lt; entry in a template, when that template is included in another page the references to not show up in the &gt;references&lt; section on that page. Is this fixable? &mdash; en:User:Jdorje 65.184.68.155 22:58, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Possible bug
I've just noticed that if you put before, then neither of them will have a name at the bottom. This is a problem if you're going through and adding more citations later, as you always have to make sure that the cite with with the full name is first.


 * i am also having problems with this kind of bug. there is a discussion about it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnotes and one user suggested this:


 * I think a simple way to accomplish this would be for the software to use the first non-empty ref. Then, as long as you use empty references (like ) for all but one reference, the order doesn't matter.


 * would it be difficult to implement this? cheers. 62.177.95.239 14:02, 11 March 2006 (UTC) english wikipedia: [User:Zzzzz]

Also, in terms of chocolate boy's problem with this cite style, I do have a certain sympathy with him. When simply trying to edit an article for something small like a comma, it can be hard to scan past a full citation within the text, with all its commas, parentheses, and quotes. It's easy to read through a, but much more difficult to scan past. Just a couple thoughts, but I do really like this cite, nice work. Makemi 04:07, 8 March 2006 (UTC)


 * So write it like this:

Hey, here's a sentence that has a reference at the end. -- P3d0

And another thing
If you subst templates, even while they're in the ref, it works out fine. Mak emi 04:14, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Subst
Huh? I just came here to point out that subst:ing templates within a fails. Have a look at this old version of Wikipedia article Charles Fraser. To save time I have subst:ed in references that I use a lot, and the subst: has failed dismally. Snottygobble 04:28, 12 March 2006 (UTC)


 * You're right, I just tried it in the sandbox, but I could have sworn that that's what I did in this edit. Perhaps it has been broken since? I could be mistaken. Mak emi 18:37, 13 March 2006 (UTC)

What's wrong with numeric labels?
Trying to use a label containing only digits

gives an error
 * Cite error 1; Invalid call; expecting a non-integer key

Is it a bug or a feature? I don't see any reason to disallow numeric labels.

Anyway this should be documented. Maxim Razin 08:44, 14 March 2006 (UTC)


 * This is because the PHP datastructure I'm using would corrupt if I were to allow user input in the form of integers since PHP does not distringuish between (string)1 and (int)1 in array keys. This minor limitation makes the implementation a lot simpler because I don't have to use two or three datastructures to do basically the same thing. This is actually documented in the source code (with a comment). Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 11:58, 17 March 2006 (UTC)


 * I see - yet another reason why PHP sucks :) But it's easy to fix - simply append some prefix to all strings in keys. Maxim Razin 08:16, 18 March 2006 (UTC)


 * It's not a matter of PHP sucking at all, I have to use some keys for the automatically generated anonymous references which will conflict with the user-supplied keys if I don't reserve a namespace for them, of course I could just use anon_$key and user_$key or prefix user-supplied keys with something, but the idea is to have labels that contain as little excess content as possible. And reversing integers seems like an OK tradeoff. —85.197.228.236 21:01, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

discussion at en:talk:Cite journal
If some developers of cite.php could possibly take a look at the discussion at en:Template_talk:Cite_journal. Thanks, --Irpen 02:02, 21 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Also, could you take a look at the page: Featured article candidates/AIDS. Thanks. --132.239.240.95 17:56, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

A different idea
I mostly like the new references, but they have a lot of shortcomings. I used them for the first time in Red rain in Kerala, and these are the things I didn't like/ideas I had:

As well as red rain, some reports suggested that other colours of rain were also seen. Many more occurrences of the red rain were reported over the following 10 days, and with diminishing frequency until the end of September. becomes: As well as red rain, some reports suggested that other colours of rain were also seen. Many more occurrences of the red rain were reported over the following 10 days, and with diminishing frequency until the end of September.
 * 1) They interrupt the article text a lot more than other styles.  Content like:
 * 1) Editing the format of a reference requires finding where it is first cited in the article, instead of just editing the References section, where it appears.  This is confusing (especially to newcomers) and inconvenient.
 * 2) Section editing is useless if you want to change references.  You can't just edit the References section because that's not where the references actually are.  You can't just edit the section that contains the reference since that's not where the rendered references are (so they won't show up in the preview). You have to edit and preview the entire article to see the change.
 * 3) Since they aren't centralized, it's hard to know if a reference exists already, leading to duplicates which then have to be merged manually.
 * 4) Additional references that aren't created with the extension, but added to the References section (as per WP:CITE) do not continue the numbered list.
 * 5) I heard the reason for using brackets around the numbers was to increase the clickable area.  I think the brackets should be removed and the same thing done with CSS; increase the horizontal padding around the numbers and vertical arrows to make them more easily clickable instead.  Discussion was here: w:Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style and w:Wikipedia_talk:Footnote3.
 * 6) *Would this add space between the citation and the character immediately preceding it? If so, Wikipedia would have very non-standard citation locations (they always immediately follow the punctuation or word). --Spangineer 20:51, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
 * 7) If a named reference is used in an article, and another reference to the same document is placed before that one, it doesn't work.  The reference has to be moved to the first position instead of just using the name, since the text inside the first reference determines the displayed text.  This is a huge pain.
 * 8) * Agreed and already submitted. —Phil | Talk 12:17, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
 * 9) **But if this is "fixed", it'll be tough to find the reference and edit it (I won't know if it's under the first citation, the second one, etc.). Why not make the person adding the citation be responsible for the formatting? --Spangineer 20:51, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
 * 10) *** No, it wouldn't be tough at all. That's the whole point of this proposal.  The reference would be in the References section, where it is very easy to find and modify.
 * 11) *** I don't understand making one person responsible. We don't own articles on Wikipedia.  No one person is responsible for any piece of content.  It should be just as easy for someone else to modify the reference formatting as it was to add it in the first place. — Omegatron 00:30, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
 * 12) **** Regarding responsibility, you're right, but implicitly I "expect" that the person creating a redirect to a given article formats it properly and doesn't expect someone to come along and clean up after him/her. Same thing here; I'd expect the person adding the citation to pay attention to issues like this.  Also, I seem to be confused&mdash;you say below that under this proposal I won't have to load the entire page to add a citation, but here it seems that you say that I'll have to write something in the references section. I'm sorry if I'm missing something --Spangineer[en] [es] (háblame) 05:44, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
 * 13) ***** You can expect all you want; people aren't going to format references correctly and they're going to need to be tweaked, expanded, and corrected. We should be making this easier to do; not more difficult.
 * 14) ***** With my proposal, to edit a citation that is already on the page (which appears in the References section), you just edit the References section. To add a reference to the page, I thought we could implement a shortcut, where you can do a section edit and add the reference after a fact, like  .  When you press save, the reference would be converted into   next to the fact, and the text of the reference would be moved into the References section:  .  But apparently everyone hates this idea.  It doesn't need to be implemented; you could just add references by editing the entire article and putting the named ref in the article body and the reference text in the References section; I just thought this would be quicker and easier to allow section editing (which isn't allowed with the current system). — Omegatron 05:56, 31 March 2006 (UTC)
 * 15) (Curiousity; not a problem: Is there any reason why it has to look like well-formed XHTML?  Instead of, why not just ?  Is it thought that the functionality might be expanded?  Why wasn't it based on the syntax already in use for [external link references]?  Why isn't it more ?  Our syntax is quickly becoming completely impossible for the average non-computer scientist to edit.  No wonder we're accused of systemic bias.)
 * 16) * I would suspect that this makes it much easier to parse. —Phil | Talk 12:17, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

A better way?
A better implementation would have the context and format of the reference centralized in the references section, where it actually appears, and the context of the particular fact near that fact:

 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. == References == 

which would render as:  Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. 1 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. 2 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. 2 Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. 1

References

↑ Bar, Foo (1587). Research into the inclusion of references in online encyclopedias.  ↑ page 56</ol></li> R.L. Bar (April 30, 2005). Talking to your children about HTML addiction. URL accessed on July 6, 2005. <ol style="list-style-type:lower-alpha;"> ↑ pages 34–37</li> ↑ Section 7.1: Table of baz</li></ol> </li> </ol>

I think this might even be backwards compatible with the current syntax. (I can't demonstrate the padding method without editing the site-wide CSS.)

For ease of use, you could still insert full references next to a fact, like we do with [external link] references or the current ref system, but, on saving the page, it would be given a name (if you didn't give it one) and the actual content moved into the references section.

References could be merged by putting both names around the same content:

refs at bottom
I'm not a tec and I don't mind exactly how it is done but I would just like to add my support to the idea that it would be better if the contents of the ref's was in the ref's section rather then cuttering up the article text. It would make it far easyier to edit especialy for new users.--JK the unwise 16:44, 24 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Good idea! Like BibTeX, separate references from citations. - FrancisTyers 14:56, 17 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I disagree. I think it's more important to make it easy to add references than edit text that already has references.  Under both of the proposed methods, we're back to where we were a few months ago&mdash;if I want to add a reference, I have to load the entire page, not just the section where I'm adding the citation.  Also, I think that numbering and grouping of citations/references is a bad idea; just use two sections (one for notes and one for references), just like everyone else who writes a paper using endnotes followed by a work cited page. --Spangineer 20:46, 24 March 2006 (UTC)


 * I thought of that. That's why I said it should still be allowed to add references inline, and when you press save, it will be converted into a named note and the content moved into the references section.
 * Why should notes referring to a book be in a separate section from the title of that book? That doesn't make any sense at all to me.  — Omegatron 00:30, 25 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Presumably because the references (a bibliography by another name, essentially) are usually ordered alphabetically, while footnotes are usually in numerical order. Combining the two would therefore make finding either the correct note or the correct book more difficult; in your proposal, for example, the footnotes are out of order either in the article or in the reference section, neither of which is a particularly clean way of doing it. Kirill Lokshin


 * Why do the footnotes need to be in the order they were used in the article? What purpose would that serve? — Omegatron 17:55, 25 March 2006 (UTC)


 * That's the way it classically works. On a paper-based publication, footnotes would be included on the same page, on the bottom, for quick (though out-of-the-way) referencing. The validity/applicability of this method on web documents, however, has yet to have been determined. Ambush Commander 19:12, 25 March 2006 (UTC)


 * You are aware that people can print these articles, aren't you? The nice little hyperlinked numbers disappear when you do that. Kirill Lokshin 19:52, 25 March 2006 (UTC)


 * As I've said before, the content could be rendered in different styles, depending on user preferences or on the needs of the medium. All the information necessary to render a traditional, single-tiered ordered list is there, right? — Omegatron 05:59, 31 March 2006 (UTC)


 * In theory, yes: you'd just need to combine the content of the footnote (i.e. "pg. 27") with enough of the content of the reference (i.e. "Doe, John. My Book.") to identify the source. In practice, this would require (a) properly parsing the reference and (b) being able to deal with anything that gets put into the footnote (which may be more than just a page number); while nice, I'm not sure how feasible implementing something complicated like that would be here. Kirill Lokshin 11:03, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

&uarr; CSS class
The &uarr; should get a CSS class, so that it can be hidden in print styles, etc. æle ✆

Synopsis

 * — the quotes are only needed if id contains whitespace, where whitespace is one of
 * — repeated use of same reference may be done as before or in this format with no need to repeat the reference text. In this case the ID is mandatory.

I moved this to the talk page, I think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnotes#How_to_use which I cut and pasted here is much easier to understand. Travb 02:55, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Never ceases to amaze me
It never ceases to amaze me how badly written many of these wikimedia articles are. When I mean "badly" I mean they are filled with so much technobabble, only computer experts can understand them. I am trying to rewrite this article to be more easier to read for non-computer experts like myself.

Wikimedia users, please in the future try to "dumb down" your edits.

I don't have any doubt that many of your are super intellegent, it is just that many of you have a problem conveying information in an easily understandable way.Travb 03:02, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Separation
Would it be possible to implement a version of Footnotes that worked something like BibTeX ? I.e. you have the list of references somewhere in the document (my preference would be for at the bottom) and then you can just \cite (sorry, ) them. When you have long references in the article the text often becomes very choppy and difficult to edit. The way I'm currently working with Footnotes3 is to have the ref as the AuthorDate and then notes, but the main shortcoming with this is having to duplicate references in the Notes section (if a ref is cited twice) and the obvious problem of references getting out of order. - FrancisTyers 15:00, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Visual highlights
Maybe this is the wrong place to address this. But it seems a major problem with footnotes (use of "ref/references" or other means), is it's very hard to follow the screen focus. If I click on a footnote superscript, and go to the "references" below, I have trouble seeing which is the relevant item, unless I noted the number I clicked on. Now, I do note the number, because I am familiar with the system, but I'm sure newbies don't. They might have no idea what they are supposed to be look at. Ideally the entire selected reference would stand-out from the rest of the other references (maybe through color, or some sort of font thing). --Rob 04:03, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

When Harvard is (much) better
There are many times when Harvard references are preferable to m:Cite.php for a given article. Fortunately, Footnotes continues to reflect this fact. Specifically, in scientifically oriented articles, an alphabetical list of bibliographic references that may be multiply referred to by name is vastly better than an order-of-first-occurence list of references by number only. This was an issue recently on Retreat of glaciers since 1850, when it was on the front page, and overzealous WP:BOLD deleted the consensus opinion of editors. (see also its talk page for some discussion of this).

In general, m:Cite.php is very well suited to footnotes: i.e. annotation of the main article flow that elaborate on some specific point in the article but would disrupt flow. It is far less well suited to citations which are bibliographic in nature (where it is still relevant to support specific assertions by reference to specific external sources).

The current limitation in the MediaWiki software and m:Cite.php is addressable in prinicple. But it doesn't do what is needed as currently implemented. The system does allow named references as well as inline ones. The problem is just that it forces in-line description on first occurrence, which is too narrow. I think something that would solve the issues would be allowing an "invisible" section to layout the references as actually desired (alphabetical, etc). For example, if I could do this, I'd probably use it more widely:

== Main article == A number of experts contend Foo. . However, other experts believe Bar might hold. The intermediate, Baz position is sometimes held by both sides.

This would let us put all the references together in a block, including annotation to the citations themselves. But it would also allow easy reference by name, and in orders other than the prose sequence (and also repeated references to the same source). This particular solution would still require listing references at top rather than at bottom, which might be a disadvantage; probably more important is that it would still use numbered references rather than named ones.

Another improvement that would address this might be to provide an option to the

Result
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit[1], sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua[4]. ''Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit[2] in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur''[4]. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum[1].

......

(Foot)notes
1. &uarr; Sed ut perspiciatis. 2. &uarr; Totam rem aperiam eaque ipsa. 3. &uarr; Quae ab illo inventore veritatis. 4. &uarr; Unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium.

Regards, David Kernow 17:25, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Please help test Citation Tool
The tool (semi-bot) that I have been working on, Citation Tool] has reached a usable and useful state, I believe. The purpose of this tool is several fold, but the main (and implemented) goal is the detection and guided correction of errors in Cite.php markup.

As of this exact moment, the tool does the correct diagnosis of two types of errors. By later today, it should also be able to propose specific modified text that corrects the errors (sometimes requiring operator decisions). The web page for the tool also links back to the edit page for a given corrected article. Notice that any modification made based on the advice of Citation Tool is made under the user's own WP username. The two types of problems currently identified are:


 * 1) Multiple <ref name=...> tags with the same name but different contents (hence hiding all but the first in the rendered page).
 * 2) Empty <ref name=...> tags that occur before ones with content.  Same basic problem, but this is especially easy to inadvertantly create if articles are reorganized.

These type of errors seem to occur quite frequently "in the wild".

The proposed changes made by Citation Tool do not change the referencing style or technology used on a page (currently: plans are underway to aid insertion of Harvard references as an adjunct to footnotes, where a mixed style is appropriate). So as far as I can see, the changes proposed by the tool should be non-controversial. The only possible issue I can see is that editors might disagree about whether a currently hidden footnote content is or is not better than the one that had been visible; but that's a pretty regular editorial/content issue, per article.

Well... the other issue is that the tool might be buggy, since it hasn't been banged on by anyone other than me yet. That's why I'd appreciate some other people using it, and paying attention to results. If the diagnosis or proposed solution seems to be wrong for certain pages, that matter needs to be identified and fixed. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 21:41, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Grouping the references
At many cases, we have a few grouping of references (At each section), but the MediaWiki refer to all of them as one group so the code: Hello World Will generated : Hello World While we want (Of course with links): Hello[3] 1. ↑ try World [4] 1. ↑ try again This problem can be easy (at the user level...) solve by adding the a group paratemeter, so the full syntax will be : And: <references group="group name"/> Thanks, Troll Refaim 17:03, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Another one for the "known issues"...
tags aren't parsed when they are located in the descriptions of images inside tags :( --Grm wnr 00:30, 30 April 2006 (UTC)