Help talk:Cite

This needs to be cleaned up to not be as English-Wikipedia-centric. All mentions of {{Reflist }} should be removed, for starts. ^demon 19:42, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Reference problems in the absence of error messages

How can references be made to work if they simply fail to refer, without error messages? Such as these:

http://scientific-method.mediawiki.com.scientific--method.com/index.php/Observsign:_Curved_space_with_non-warped_time

http://scientific-method.mediawiki.com.scientific--method.com/index.php/H/T:_Hydrogen-helium_retention_as_terrestrial/neptunian_threshold

-- 37.250.29.55 12:11, 15. Jan. 2017‎ (UTC)

If I understand this correctly, you did not install the necessary extension: Extension:Cite, as you can check here: http://scientific-method.mediawiki.com.scientific--method.com/index.php/Special:Version. Regards --HirnSpuk (talk) 18:46, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

Translation excluded

Some parts of the document are excluded from translation, that is not really helpful, because there are some parts, that would need translation, too. For example the word content between the ref-Tags should be translated.

There are some Formatproblems as well. For example what's the meaning of the single ref-Tag at the start of the document ({{tag|ref|open}})? I'm sadly not experienced enough to take care of the stuff myself. Regards --HirnSpuk (talk) 17:51, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

Missing info ?

Hi there,

Wikisource makes use of a <ref follow="xyz"> tag for the Page namespace, where "xyz" is of a named reference in the previous page. This "follow" attribute is not documented here. And are there any others ? --Jerome Charles Potts (talk) 15:36, 29 May 2018 (UTC)

Documentation for |follow= has been added by Johanna on 2019‎-12-02. Up to this point it had been documented at Extension:Cite since 2014-07-18. It is used in the Page: namespace at Wikisource and in the en:Template:R referencing system in the English Wikipedia.

There are two more such tags for <ref>: |dir=ltr/rtl apparently exists since about 2008 [1] but was finally adopted officially in 2017 [2]. |extends= exists since ca. 2018/2019 as part of the "CiteBookReferencing" extension, but is only enabled in beta clusters (conditional $wgCiteBookReferencing).

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 15:35, 10 September 2021 (UTC)

Updating the pages Extension:Cite and Help:Cite

Hello!

The Technical Wishes team from Wikimedia Germany is currently working with the Cite extension to add a new feature to it: A new attribute will make it easier to cite different parts of the same source (please find more info on the project page). We're planning to deploy a first version of the new feature to the beta cluster beginning of December.

For this, we also want to update some of the documentation about the Cite extension. Part of this will include moving the "Usage" and the "Customization" section from the Extension:Cite page to Help:Cite, and possibly moving some information from Help:Cite to Extension:Cite. The reasoning behind this is that the extension page usually focuses on purely technical information, whereas the help page usually contains information about usage and customization.

Please let me know if you have any strong objections to this. -- Best, Johanna Strodt (WMDE) (talk) 14:09, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

(the "#fragment" portion of) a hyperlink ...no longer working (a dead link?)

There is a section of text that says << "the same output as the first example above," >> in the help page [section] Help:Cite#Separating references from text ... (at least, in the most recent version of it ... the "21:38, 2 December 2019‎" version of it).

The hyperlink in that section of text points to "Help:Cite#Example", even though it is displayed as "first example".

That hyperlink -- at least the "#fragment" portion of it, "#Example" -- no longer works.

I suspect that (a) the place to which that hyperlink was intended to link, used to have some kind of "label" or section name, -- (which was, at that time, spelled << "Example" >>), -- but that (b1) the spelling of the destination name has changed (from "Example" to some other character string) or ... that (b2) the destination no longer exists, or that (b3) the destination does still exist, but it no longer has any name or label, or that (b4) the destination has been moved to a different file or document ... e.g., in an episode of "archiving", or something like that. [Please forgive me if there are other possibilities -- (b5) through (b99)? -- that I have omitted, by mistake or out of laziness or ignorance.]

Where should this be reported?

Any suggestions? --Mike Schwartz (talk) 19:36, 5 December 2019 (UTC)

It looks like the text was coped from Extension:Cite, where the target "Example" header was removed in April 2015. I added an anchor for it to go to the intended part of the text. Anomie (talk) 14:30, 6 December 2019 (UTC)

Refined references not working on mobile

I was invited to leave feedback here, so I do so. I happened to try this function on mobile, and it’s hardly usable: MobileFrontend creates a little popup on the bottom of the screen when tapping a reference, and that popup only contains the refinement—nothing from the refined reference, not even a link to it. Please fix this before releasing this software anywhere. Apart from this issue, it’s a huge improvement, keep going! —Tacsipacsi (talk) 07:55, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

Extension Cite

hi, do you know how to change the icon of the Cite extension?

Link : ibb.co/nDQ6RmN Bomyy (talk) 14:50, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

Refs in templates

Since I upgraded to 1.39 (directly to 1.39.4), I have the <ref> tag doesn't work when it's inside a template. Or am I missing anything? DonPaolo (talk) 19:45, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

What is 'the older format'

In the sentence "This format cannot be used interchangeably with the older format—you must pick one or the other." I cannot understand what is meant with 'older format'.

Please explain,

14:05, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

JanEnEm (talk) 14:05, 16 October 2023 (UTC)

I just removed that to avoid confusion. Tactica (talk) 12:44, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Customizing references

Hi, I want to customize cite so that there is no space between "group" and "num" in the references.

Current^{[m 1]} Desired^[m1]

Any ideas?

Ronald Weiss (talk) 11:20, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

I dont think so. I think you have to fork the extension and manipulate the original code. There are just two attributes for Cite and none of them can fix it. Juandev (talk) 16:01, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

You can abuse MediaWiki:Cite_link_label_group-⧼name⧽ (as described in Help:Cite#Grouped references) to achieve this; no cleaner way exists currently, the space is hardcoded. However, I believe this should be fixed in Cite, not in a fork: the hardcoded space is Western-centric, languages like Chinese and Japanese probably don’t need it, so there should be a MediaWiki message to make localization possible – and that MediaWiki message would conveniently also enable local customization. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 19:17, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

The list of messages is out of date

It seems like the list of messages indicated in the Customization section is obsolete. For example, cite_references_link_prefix does not appear at https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AAllMessages&prefix=Cite_ref&filter=all&lang=en&limit=300. Is there any way to understand why and when the behaviour changed? Seudo (talk) 13:52, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

FWIW, I just removed the list altogether. Tactica (talk) 14:21, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

@Seudo: You can browse through the the history of the English messages in the source code repository to find out why and when the messages changed. That specific message was removed without replacement (i.e. the ability to customize was removed) in January 2024 due to the message being confusing, virtually unused, and causing maintenance burden. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 20:40, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

Punctuation after ref tags (ja wikis)

Ref tags come BEFORE punctuation in ja wikis: that means all the sample texts mislead ja users to make errors. Can we think about reflecting language varieties anyhow? See the details with my latest check on Help:Cite/ja page please.

Appreciate anybody position punctuation to correct order. Omotecho (talk) 13:58, 22 August 2024 (UTC)

The only purpose of the help page is to document how to use the tags added by the extension. Matters of style are entirely up to the user, including translations of this article. Tactica (talk) 14:01, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

Headings broken by anchor additions

@Adam Wight (WMDE) : I unfortunately do not master MediaWiki translation, but your latest change breaks the parsing of the 2 relevant headings. Chealer (talk) 20:52, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

@Chealer Thanks for noticing—it should be fixed in this change. Looks like the <translate> tag eats the first newline it sees, so the wikitext was broken by === not appearing at the end of a line. Adam Wight (WMDE) (talk) 13:14, 31 March 2025 (UTC)