User talk:Trappist the monk/Archive 8

Could you please explain to me what that template is trying to do? {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 03:02, 23 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Because that abomination that is ve requires templates to have two separate, redundant, yet wholly incompatible sets of documentation (whoever thought that was a good idea?), this template and its attendant module were experiments to explore the how one might create some sort of documentation format that would hold raw documentation data using complete wiki syntax to be formatted prettily for the template's doc page and from that same source, create ve-compatible TemplateData (stripped of wikimarkup and templates, etc). Discussion

—Trappist the monk (talk) 11:10, 23 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Seems to me to be redundant to Template:Format TemplateData. {{3x|p}}ery (talk) 15:14, 23 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. I'm trying to add a second |Ref= parameter (|Ref2=) for CS1, which if passed to the cite templates, will be concatenated to the existing anchor that is generated when ref=harv is set. I tried defining Ref2 in ~/Configuration and in ~/Whitelist, and concatenated Ref2 after the anchor in the main module too. But still it does not even recognize Ref2 as a parameter, let alone generating an anchor concatanted with it. Is there anything else that I need to do? Mensis Mirabilis (talk) 14:28, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

After you realized that this:

local Ref2;
sepc, PostScript, Ref, Ref2 = set_style (Mode:lower(), A['PostScript'], A['Ref'], A['Ref2'], config.CitationClass);

sets Ref2 to nil, you rewrote to this:

local Ref2 = A['Ref2'];
sepc, PostScript, Ref = set_style (Mode:lower(), A['PostScript'], A['Ref'], config.CitationClass);

Does it still not work?

How are you testing this?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:06, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I also defined Ref2 in the correct place in ~/Whitelist and the module now accepts it as a parameter. But it seems the anchor is not modified. I am testing it here where the inline citation template generates a "CITEREFDoe1397XYZ" (appends a "XYZ" to the "CITEREFDoe1397"), but it is not linked to cite book even though I have set Ref2=XYZ. Mensis Mirabilis (talk) 15:20, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

What is it to be? |Ref2= or |ref2=? cs1|2 prefers lowercase parameter names. In ~/Whitelist you specify |Ref2=; in ~/Configuration you specify |ref2=. These must agree. The concatenation is not happening because A['Ref2'] is an empty string.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:03, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, A['Ref2'] was empty, and it is resolved now by changing ['Ref2'] = {'ref2','ش'} to ['Ref2'] = {'Ref2','ش'} in ~/Configuration. Thanks. Doesn't ['Ref2'] = {'ref2','ش'} mean defining Ref2 as the main name of the parameter and corresponding |ref2= and |ش= to it as aliases? Mensis Mirabilis (talk) 16:13, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

No. In ['Ref2'] = {'ref2','ش'}, Ref2 is the key of a key / value pair in the aliases{} Lua table. This means that |ref2= and |ش= are aliases of each other but |Ref2= is unknown (as it should be). Lua table key A['Ref2'] gets the value from the first set parameter from |ref2= or |ش=. When you declare the local variable Ref2 you also assign it the value from A['Ref2']. In other words, if the cs1|2 template uses |ref2=XYZ, Ref2 should be set to 'XYZ'.

I think that ['Ref2'] = {'Ref2','ش'} is poor form. That aliases{} table assignment should be ['Ref2'] = {'ref2','ش'} so that only |ref2= and |ش= are accepted; this is in keeping with the lowercase-only convention for cs1|2 parameter names.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:49, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

 Done. Thanks for the suggestion! Mensis Mirabilis (talk) 17:09, 8 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm playing around with useful test cases for CS1 (because our current test case module has too many cases and doesn't explore all of the code paths systematically). I usurped what was the sandbox module at Module:Citation/CS1/testcases/errors. You can see the test cases there and the results on the talk page.

You'll note the two comments of puzzlement on the test case page.

Any thoughts? Worth solving? --Izno (talk) 01:34, 11 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

line 3481 of the live module:

z.message_tail = {};

so the table that had all of the accumulated error messages is not empty. I did not write this particular bit of code but I think that I agree with it; the essentials are missing so the empty citation message should be sufficient.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 02:47, 11 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Re: your edit: Actually, cs1|2 does find unrecognized_thing but, because unrecognized_thing is not valid, nothing gets rendered for it (error messages have not yet been rendered at line 3481) so the rendering at that point is an empty citation and the error message for unrecognized_thing was in z.message_tail until line 3481 where z.message_tail is blanked. This same holds true for |unrecognized_parameter=unrecognized. You can prove this to yourself:

1. comment out line 3491 in Module:Citation/CS1/sandbox
2. add Module talk:Citation/CS1/testcases/errors to Preview page with this module text box
3. click the adjacent Show preview button. All sorts of error messages.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:38, 11 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I believe you; I was being short there. "catches it but dumps it later for the empty citation notice" works too. :^) --Izno (talk) 13:41, 11 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Trappist the monk! In the article Balagan-Tas, I tried to add a relief map of the Russian Far East, where the location of the area would be shown in more detail. This map works in the Russian segment wikipedia, but for some reason it does not work in other segments. Maybe you have an idea how to make this card work?

Most likely this map will be needed for other articles in this region. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Modun (talk • contribs) 01:05, 14 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Balagan-Tas
Балаган-Тас
Balagan-Tas Sakha Republic, Russia
Highest point
Cinder Cone
Last eruption	1775

I think that what you want is this:

|map=Russia Far Eastern Federal District

and all other map parameters blank.

Maybe you have an idea how to make this card work? What is a card?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 10:49, 14 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, thanks. I mean “map”, not card--Modun (talk) 11:50, 14 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, can you take a look at

Not the fault of the cs1|2 templates or

The Tomb of Lu Xun were translated using mw:Content_translation and mw:Content_translation/V2, Zeng Fengnian with mw:Content_translation. You might comment at mw:Talk:Content_translation and mw:Talk:Content_translation/V2 where there is mention of referencing problems. Also ping the original translators and ask those editors to fix their work. May be related to phab:T209493

though that phab task is about copy/pasting named references using that abomination that is ve, but, if the translation tools somehow shares ve code... The symptoms are similar...

—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:15, 25 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I started a discussion on the talk page. Briefly, policy is not to change ref style; another editor made a sudden and in my view unjustified decision to impose Vancouver on this article in January, As I noted in an edit comment, this ought to be reverted. There is also no tradition of Vancouver in animal articles. All the best, Chiswick Chap (talk) 04:26, 29 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Just in case the ping didn't work, please see my post about "butt-deletion" on
  Lingzhi2 (talk) 01:43, 1 April 2019 (UTC)[reply
  ]

Discrete Fracture Networks (DFN) are very well known in Geoscience. What do your need to insert this abbreviation in the list? Regrettably there is no page in Wikipedia (yet) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jpvandijk (talk • contribs) 09:04, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

WP:DAB

.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 09:40, 2 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed you repaired the ref for the article in the Ira Glass. That is a very long interview with multiple pages, so to be able to direct readers where to find the quotes, I'm using page numbers. Thanks, but it wans't broken!--Esprit15d • talk • contribs 17:27, 8 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

As you wish. At the time I saw the article there was one broken {{sfn}} template which (had it worked would have) pointed to the cs1|2 template in §Works cited; seemed rather pointless. As I write this there are there are two {{sfn}} templates, one broken, one not, both referring to page 1.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 17:36, 8 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

down the list of the cited cites (phew) is a Levins with details, it's the only thing I could find and now someone has to find that too Dave Rave (talk)

Umm, what are we talking about? Neither of us appear to have edited Ahimsa.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 18:17, 7 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

you a busy man, it's okay ... this one, it shows a National Trust board report paper cite with

Levins, C. and C. Macarthur, J. Ecob, R. Marni, and T. Gilbert. 1995, 'Ahimsa - Cheltenham -Background Paper, Board Meeting no. 55, Agenda item 5j, ' National Trust of Australia, NSW, Sydney, National Trust Archives, Sydney.

and now that I think of it, why haven't I looked at her page, she has one, and an ADB with these details, and other links which make much better sense than a dim double link to a paper we can't read. SHe had a BDM note so theres probably a trove if we're lucky. Dave Rave (talk) 07:54, 8 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Is that ref really necessary? It's used only once here to support a single sentence that is also supported by this ref (at the bottom of §§Historical notes) which itself appears to rely on the Levin et al. mystery source. ADB agrees.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 11:02, 8 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

that supporting ref is the reason for this ref, trying to further validate that ref, which, from the link, is no validation because we can't read it. SHR do crap cites Dave Rave (talk) 18:49, 8 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Arguably there's no need for offensive edit summaries such as "remove pointless worldcat urls; fix buggered-up author/editor parameters". It takes only a small amount of imagination to reason that editors will be offended by such, and that being offended, will shy away from engaging with wikipedia. --Tagishsimon (talk) 15:06, 10 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Are the worldcat urls not pointless? Did not ve / citoid write malformed author/editor parameters? Show me that these things are not true and we have something to discuss. I do not go out of my way to offend people; that takes too much energy but, I shall not be censored.

I must presume that 'buggered-up' is the term to which you refer. Alas, that is a term with more than one definition. I am using in its 'broken, ruined' sense, not its sodomy sense; context is everything.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:34, 10 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

	Outstanding Contributions Recognition
	Your work and contributions are exemplary. With intelligent and most helpful inputs at the Help desk, you truly are an outstanding contributor. I don't think I've seen anyone provide such excellent responses for coding queries, as you do from time to time at the Help desk. Keep up the great work! :) Lourdes

Ditto. Eric ^talk 01:25, 24 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Your ref-cleanup edits were interleaved in a set of copyvios. I rolled back the article prior to the whole circus, which means some of your changes likely got lost. Some were in the content I removed--it was too difficult for me to selectively undo the bad edits. Sorry! DMacks (talk) 03:27, 28 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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You may remember that I was a bit cantankerous (for a couple of years) at

Were our interactions as heated as you suggest, surely I would remember them. I don't. I remember other discussions with other editors but I just have no memory of such discussions with you. I suppose that I'd rather things remain that way. So now that I have this olive branch, what to do with it? Are olives like poplars? If I push it into most ground will is grow into a tree?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:55, 4 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't recall the deets of various prior disagreements myself; you were just on my list of people to make up with. :-) I have a "black thumb"; probably couldn't keep a weed alive. I have no idea whether olive trees can grow from cuttings! Not sure it would be very convenient given all the pickling and stuff needed to make olives edible ...  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:17, 4 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Crowdus, Gary (1995). "Richard III by Laurence Olivier". Cinéaste. 21 (3): 53–54.

DrKay, the documentation for Template:Cite journal (and the help text linked in the error message) explains that the only acceptable value for |jstor-access= is free.

If you are objecting to |jstor-access= being listed in the |<param>-access= requires |<param>= section of the Help page, here is an example showing that |jstor= is required when |jstor-access= is used.

Crowdus, Gary (1995). "Richard III by Laurence Olivier". Cinéaste. 21 (3): 53–54. {{cite journal}}: |jstor-access= requires |jstor= (help)– Jonesey95 (talk) 19:20, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Help talk:Citation Style 1 is the best forum for discussion of that documentation. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:20, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) Editor Jonesey95 is so damn fast ...

By deleting |jstor-access= and |jstor= from the table at Help:CS1 errors#|<param>-access= requires |<param>= with the edit summary: doesn't work, you made an unsupported claim that something was broken in cs1|2. I take such claims seriously because I wrote most of the code that supports the cs1|2 templates; if something doesn't work, I want to know about it.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 19:28, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Jstor access to that article is not free. DrKay (talk) 20:36, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

No one said that it was. Your example above uses |jstor=41687396, a named identifier. Named identifiers are not presumed to be free-to-read; named identifiers are presumed to lie behind a paywall or registration barrier. Because of that presumption, |jstor-access=subscription would be redundant and therefore superfluous so cs1|2 does not support that parameter/value combination.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 20:54, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Jonesey has written "jstor-access=free" above. Anyway, you have confirmed that both my edit summary and my removal of the defunct parameter at the article was correct[1]. DrKay (talk) 21:10, 1 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Drive-by comment: It would seem to be harmless to enable |jstor-access=subscription, even if it's redundant, and it'd likely be helpful, since editors who don't work with jstor stuff all the time are unlikely to know or remember that the assumed default for this is subscription and that the parameter presently only supports free. Probably better to have a not-necessary but valid para/val pair show up and maybe get auto-removed by some tool (I wish there were one stripping out |lang=en, |lang=en-US, etc., more often!), than for the template to throw a red error.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  09:30, 4 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

|lang=en is currently hidden by the templates, just the way you suggest it should work here for non-default access parameters. It doesn't feel gross to me as a result to suppress rather than error here. --Izno (talk) 16:17, 4 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

ArbCom would like to apologise and correct our previous mass message in light of the response from the community.

Since November 2018, six administrator accounts have been compromised and temporarily desysopped. In an effort to help improve account security, our intention was to remind administrators of existing policies on account security — that they are

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For the Arbitration Committee, -Cameron11598 21:04, 4 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed the issue at Lonicera × bella, where I used a German language source in a CS2 citation. I only use CS1 when forced to by the established style, so I was surprised (and unhappy) to see the article categorized in Category:CS1 German-language sources (de), which I now see is only one of a set of categories with "CS1" in the title. Should they not all be called something like "CS1/CS2" sources? Peter coxhead (talk) 20:00, 12 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There is a lot of stuff that is uses the cs1 appellation: the module suite, error categories, maintenance categories, properties categories, Help:CS1 errors, |cs1-dates= in {{use xxx dates}}). Pretty much all of that is also used by cs2. Do you really want us to go around and rename it all? Is the effort rewarded with significant benefit? If you do, Help talk:Citation Style 1 (yep, another ...) is your venue...

—Trappist the monk (talk) 21:42, 12 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Monkbot 13 was approved. Happy editing! --TheSandDoctor ^Talk 00:32, 13 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

See diff:896938986. The bot removes the parameters but ends up leaving a blank line ("\n\n") behind inside the template invokation. I'm guessing the code has an assumption that citation templates are mainly unformatted and on one line; however, obsessive that I am, the cite templates on Hamlet are formatted like a source code block construct (multiline, one param per line). Depending on what your parsing approach is (regex based probably?), this may not be reasonably fixable but leaving those blank lines behind is… unfortunate. If the actual problem is not reasonable to fix, perhaps it can at least be detected and added to a log or tracking cat for manual cleanup? --Xover (talk) 06:04, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I have tweaked the bot to remove the trailing whitespace when it removes |subscription= or |registration=.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 11:06, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, hoping you can help me with a quick question.

local v = "List of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson episodes (1992)"
print(mw.text.trim(v:match("^(.*)%(%d+%)$")) == "List of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson episodes")

works and gives the correct true result, but

local exceptionList = {
	"List of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson episodes",
	"List of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno episodes"
}

local title = "List of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson episodes (1992)"

local function isOnExceptionList(title, exceptionList)
	for _, v in ipairs(exceptionList) do
		if (v == title) then
			return true
		elseif (mw.text.trim(v:match("^(.*)%(%d+%)$")) == title) then
			return true
		end
	end
	return false
end

gives me Lua error: bad argument #1 to 'gsub' (string expected, got nil) (can see this on my testcases). Any reason why? I'm not sure what I'm missing here. --Gonnym (talk) 11:25, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

When title is not in exceptionList ...

If you are trying to find 'Lost' in 'List of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson episodes' (or the other way round), you won't so string.match() returns nil. mw.text.trim() uses string.gsub() to trim whitespace; string.gsub() chokes when the first argument is nil. You might do this:

elseif (mw.text.trim(v:match("^(.*)%(%d+%)$") or '') == title) then

so that mw.text.trim() never gets a nil argument.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:01, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, obvious fix for that that I missed, but the issue with the equation is still there, where the top code works, but placed in the function it does not (eventhough, they both use the same values). --Gonnym (talk) 12:23, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

They don't both use the same value (if they did your code would not fail). In the testcases you have this:

{{#invoke:Infobox television season disambiguation check/sandbox|test|Lost (bad disambiguation)}}

so isOnExceptionList() gets 'Lost' for title. 'Lost' is not a member of the exceptionList table in Module:Infobox_television_season_disambiguation_check/sandbox. Your code looks at each member of exceptionList and tries to find 'Lost' in it. This is not the same as the very constrained test of looking for 'Johnny Carson' in 'Johnny Carson'.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:43, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure why you are looking at at completely different example than the one I've presented to you. Above there are 2 snippets of code. One uses the code that currently runs in the module/sandbox and one is a simple presentation of it. I pass to both pieces of code the same value as the title - "List of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson episodes (1992)", one works, the other doesn't. Leave "Lost" or any other series out of this discussion as it is irrelevant to the actual problem. --Gonnym (talk) 12:55, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I've added this as a testcase so you'll see the smaller code returns true. --Gonnym (talk) 13:00, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict)

Because you wrote: can see this on my testcases. I understood that explicit reference as the true root of your complaint because the error message was emitted there and, we both know this from our previous conversations, that contrived examples are often flawed. For example, these disections:

In your first example:

1. explicit title is: 'List of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson episodes'
2. explicit v is: 'List of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson episodes (1992)'
3. v:match("^(.*)%(%d+%)$") returns 'List of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson episodes ' – has trailing whitespace
4. mw.text.trim(v:match(...)) returns 'List of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson episodes'
5. List of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson episodes == List of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson episodes returns true

In your second example:

1. title is: 'List of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson episodes (1992)' – different from first example
2. first v from ipairs() is: 'List of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson episodes' – different from first example
3. the result of if (v == title) then is false
4. v:match("^(.*)%(%d+%)$") returns nil because dab is not present; dab is required in your pattern: ^(.*)%(%d+%)$
5. mw.text.trim(nil) emits error: bad argument #1 to 'gsub' (string expected, got nil); processing halts here

What I wrote before still applies; just as 'Lost' is not found in 'List of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson episodes', so too, 'List of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson episodes (1992)' is not found in 'List of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson episodes'.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:36, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Amazing. I can't believe I didn't notice I was working on the exception title and not on the current title. Flipped the check and it works. Thanks again Trappist! --Gonnym (talk) 13:53, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Re the original error message Lua error: bad argument #1 to 'gsub' (string expected, got nil): ~3 weeks ago I asked if we could get slightly less misleading errors @

dgaf)  14:07, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

Perhaps a phabricator ticket would get better results?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 14:13, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

 Done

Tracked in

dgaf)  15:49, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

Would be great if you could fix that. PMC numbers keep growing, and the 6500000 limit is not appropriate anymore. Cheers. Materialscientist (talk) 07:34, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Generally, minor changes like this are not done in the moment because each such change dumps several million articles onto MediaWiki's job queue. But, in this case, because nothing else changes in Module:Citation/CS1/Identifiers and because the next update will not occur before the completion of a couple of rfcs (here and here), I have made an exception to the normal rule.

The new limit is 7000000. Remind me before pmc gets to that number so that it can be reset before the numbers exceed the test limit.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 10:24, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! Materialscientist (talk) 22:10, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Appreciating your work deprecating the old parameters for citations. Such parameters add additional clutter to articles that makes them even harder to edit, so I am fully supportive of your work. Tom (LT) (talk) 03:42, 8 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, your bot made some changes to CS1 parameters in 2018 Winter Olympics article yesterday, some of which I want to query. Can I discuss here? Thanks. Rodney Baggins (talk) 14:58, 18 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Of course. I'll be out for the next few hours but will read and respond to whatever it is that you would like to say.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:06, 18 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I'm quite "into" citations and that's usually my first port of call when I come across a new article that wants some work doing to it, so I've developed a few preferences (and possibly bad habits). Take a look at this diff from yesterday...

BBC Sport and BBC News articles are specifically issued via dedicated web pages, as opposed to through an alternative news outlet such as a newspaper, hence I've always thought it correct to use the {{cite web}} template rather than {{cite news}}. I've understood the latter to be applicable to newspaper articles, online news items from news outlets such as The Guardian, The Telegraph, etc. even when they have an online presence. BBC Sport is a department of the BBC that provides online sports coverage, it's not a newspaper, not even an online newspaper. It's part of a corporation that publishes information online, hence {{cite web}} is probably more appropriate. Having said all that, it doesn't actually affect the way the citation is displayed so it's not really a problem in the great scheme of things. However, the thing that I'm most puzzled about is that your bot has substituted the 'work' parameter for the 'publisher' parameter in the case of BBC Sport and BBC News, which I disagree with. I've always gone with 'publisher' because these are divisions of a company, as opposed to newspapers or stand-alone websites. The 'work' parameter always italicizes the name (as an alias of the 'newspaper' and 'website' parameters), but 'publisher' doesn't. You can see that the BBC Sport and BBC News articles don't use italics in their titles for the same reason.

Reuters – same argument. I think this should use 'publisher' not 'work'

The Straits Times – I agree that this should not use 'publisher' because it's clearly a newspaper and it should use a {{cite news}} template with 'newspaper' parameter.

Business Insider – I agree that this is a news website and hence {{cite news}} template and 'website' parameter with italics is correct. Rodney Baggins (talk) 18:39, 18 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There is no fast and hard link between {{cite news}} and |newspaper= and little difference between {{cite web}} and {{cite news}} in the final rendering except that {{cite news}} will render |volume= and |issue= if present and does not require |url=. In cs1|2, the 'periodical' parameters, |journal=, |magazine=, |newspaper=, |periodical=, |website=, & |work= are freely interchangeable (they all map to an internal meta parameter called Periodical). The variety of names is mostly an editor convenience because template names that reflect the type of the source are more semantically correct.

Almost everything that is online can be cited using {{cite web}}. But should it? An online facsimile of a book: {{cite web}} or {{cite book}}? An online PDF of a scientific paper: {{cite web}} or {{cite journal}}? An online news article about Ebola in Africa, about monsoon floods in Bagladesh, about 2019 World Cup: {{cite web}} or {{cite news}}? The {{cite web}} documentation states:

This

citations

for web sources that are not characterized by another CS1 template.

I see BBC Sport as a publication that is an online news source focused on sports news and that is published by BBC. As such, {{cite news}} is appropriate. Because BBC Sport is not a |journal=, |magazine=, |newspaper=, or a generic |periodical=, either of |website= or |work= is appropriate when naming the publication in a cs1|2 template. I prefer |work= because |website= was pretty-much created to be a companion to {{cite web}} (the move to Module:Citation/CS1 made |website= promiscuous).

In periodical cs1|2 templates, |title= names the article; |work= and aliases name the publication; |publisher= names the corporate entity responsible for publishing the publication that holds the article.

There are technical reasons for the choice of |work= (or an alias) over |publisher=. cs1|2 produces metadata for each citation. These metadata are machine-readable versions of the visual rendering. The metadata standard to which we attempt to adhere is not as full-featured as cs1|2. It is important that the correct information from raw cs1|2 template parameters gets into their matching metadata key/value pairs. Most of the parameters in cs1|2 that have matching metadata keywords are not confusing to editors; |<periodical>= and |publisher= are problematic because editors have a variety of opinions (or confusion) regarding the format of the rendered citation and whether a publication belongs in |work= or a publication belongs in |publisher=.

The metadata standard is limited. In the metadata, the cs1 periodical templates {{cite journal}}, {{cite magazine}}, {{cite news}}, and {{cite web}} are defined as journal objects. Journal objects do not support the concept of 'publisher'; that is reserved for book objects (see the table here) so any data in |publisher= for these templates does not make it to the metadata. It is perfectly legitimate for these templates to have |publisher= but they must also have |work=. For readers who consume these citations via their metadata, omitting |work= from a cs1|2 periodical template is like giving the reader only the chapter name but not the name of the book that holds that chapter. An upcoming change to Module:Citation/CS1 will emit error messages when periodical templates do not have |work= (or alias).

Further, many many of the citations that Monkbot task 14 is fixing have italic markup. Italic markup is only allowed in |title= (so that journal article titles that include scientific names, for example, render correctly). It is the responsibility of the templates to format and render the final citation so that editors don't have to. To facilitate that, the templates require the correct data in the correct parameters, and that these data are free from contamination (wiki markup, extraneous text, ...).

Monkbot task 14 is working now to reduce the number of error messages that will appear at the next update to the module suite.

BBC Sport (and BBC News) in cs1|2 citations are publications that hold articles. In this sense, they are no different from The Straits Times (a publication) that holds articles. The article titles are quoted plain text, the publications are italicized, and the publisher (if present) is plain text. I do not think that

MOS:TITLE

should ever be recognized as a paragon of clarity; especially this:

"Website titles may or may not be italicized depending on the type of site and what kind of content it features. Online magazines, newspapers, and news sites with original content should generally be italicized (

Merriam-Webster Online

). Other types of websites should be decided on a case-by-case basis."

But, this part applies here:

"Online magazines, newspapers, and news sites with original content should generally be italicized..."

because BBC Sport is an online... news site with original content. It doesn't appear that the topic of italic title has ever been raised at those two articles.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:33, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your very comprehensive reply. I accept what you're saying, even if I don't understand all of it! My approach is clearly a lot more simplistic and, like I said before, I've probably developed some bad habits. The main thing that bothers me is the anomoly between rendering BBC News, BBC Sport, Reuters, etc. with italics in citations, but they are displayed everywhere else without italics, e.g. their article titles and all mentions of them in body text. Would it be correct to include both "website=BBC Sport/News" AND "publisher=BBC" because BBC Sport/News is the name of the website that is published by the BBC? In fact, to be more accurate, BBC Sport is a department of the BBC that runs its own website which also happens to be called BBC Sport, in which case the italics anomoly is not really a problem because the BBC Sport article is referring to the department as a whole, not just the website. Which brings me back to my original argument, which is that BBC Sport should be used as publisher parameter, because it is the publisher of the content, which just happens to be online! Interesting stuff. Rodney Baggins (talk) 07:45, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

When the name of the publication is largely the same as the name of the publisher, cs1|2 documentation suggests that |publisher= should be omitted; cf. {{cite news}}.

It can be confusing when the name of the publication is largely the same as the name of the publisher. Plain text shows that we are using the publisher's name to refer to the publisher as a corporate entity: Reuters. We use italics when referring to publisher's name as the publisher's publication: Reuters. In cs1|2 periodical templates, |title= is the 'article' inside the publication (|work= or alias); not inside the publisher (|publisher=). cs1|2 will soon require publication names in periodical templates.

So, BBC is a corporate entity that has a department BBC Sport. BBC Sport is also a corporate entity that publishes an eponymous online news site BBC Sport. BBC Sport is a publication that holds various news articles related to sports. BBC also has a department BBC News which has an eponymous publication BBC News for general interest news articles. Cite the article in the publication; publisher generally not required (except perhaps as some sort of disambiguator when publication name is similar to another publication name (|location= might a better choice for similarly named newspapers (cf. The Telegraph).

—Trappist the monk (talk) 11:56, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

OK, I think I get all that (just about). I have learnt that BBC Sport and BBC News are publications and as such should be recorded using the 'work' parameter rather than the 'publisher' parameter, and since 'work' is an alias of 'website' it makes it easy to remember that we're specifically referring to the online content of these publications. The wiki articles for BBC News and BBC Sport are about the individual business divisions of the BBC (responsible for radio and television output as well as online news coverage). Which brings me to my next question: Do you think the work parameter should be wikilinked through to the related article, e.g. work=[[BBC News]] ? This is essentially the source of my confusion because you see BBC News presented in italics in the citation, indicating the BBC News website, but the link takes you through to the wiki article for the BBC News business division, when the two entities are not logically equal. ...Oh dear, since writing that, I've just realised there's a BBC News Online article, so where does that come in? Should we be linking to that instead, and if so, why does that not have an italicized title? The equivalent for BBC Sport is the BBC Sport Online section inside the BBC Sport article. Still a bit confused but I guess I can learn to live with it! Rodney Baggins (talk) 17:53, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The purpose of citations at en.wiki is to help readers locate the source that supports the text of an en.wiki article. If a wikilinked work helps readers locate the source by somehow clarifying the source, then wikilink; if there is little to be gained by wikilinking, or if wikilinking might cause confusion, then do not wikilink. Generally, I think, it is not necessary to wikilink the publication.

BBC News Online may be a form of en.wiki disambiguation that distinguishes it from BBC News; the actual website at www.bbc.com/news/ does not use that name (perhaps it once did but now doesn't? maybe because the site's presence 'online' is obvious so 'online' as a name component is superfluous?). The website at www.bbc.com/sport/ doesn't use 'online' either. Perhaps editors who work on

BBC Sport Online

) – why uppercase O? – might consider moving BBC News Online to BBC News (website) and creating a BBC Sport (website) redirect.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 19:06, 19 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

OK, thanks for clarifying all that. I'll endeavour to use work in preference to publisher in future, and only wikilink if it's an obscure work that might need clarifying. I'm sure your bot will come across a few more articles that I've incorrectly cited, so I'll leave it to do its work. Have a nice day. Thanks again. Rodney Baggins (talk) 08:30, 20 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

AutoWikiBrowser, operated by Trappist the monk and who is it John Doe or who else? AVS (talk) 07:30, 26 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding diff:894063156 and diff:894063648. Why did you remove |via=… and |ref=none here? --Xover (talk) 19:34, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

|ref=none does nothing useful, so it's clutter, and |via=JSTOR is useless, since it doesn't matter if you choose to read the source through the DOI link, or the JSTOR link, both link to the same paper.

b} 19:42, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

Yep, ↑that's why. |via= attempts to minimize astonishment that can occur when clicking on a title-link where |publisher= says one thing but the reader ends up somewhere else. Clicking a JSTOR link and landing at JSTOR is not astonshing. For |ref=none: that parameter / value combination only has meaning for {{citation}} or when used in a cs1 template ({{cite book}}, etc) that also has |mode=cs2.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 19:54, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, no, |via= indicates that the citation is to a copy on a different service than the publisher's (i.e. a database provider like JSTOR or Questia). Why you think DOIs and the URL generated by |jstor= is relevant is beyond me. And |ref=none suppresses the generation of the CITEREF link target,[struck as embarassingly insufficiently thought through. --Xover (talk) 06:34, 28 June 2019 (UTC)] which happens to be a useful hook for quality control tools (think HarvErrors) to highlight ciitation problems (and would be even more useful if CS1 would add a CSS class for |ref=none to distinguish it from |ref=). --Xover (talk) 20:18, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Do

b} 20:29, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

Here are two simple {{cite book}} templates; one with, and one without, |ref=none. The important bit to look at is the <cite> tag in html view:

{{cite book |title=Title |author=Author |date=2019}} → Author (2019). Title. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)

'"`UNIQ--templatestyles-00000066-QINU`"'<cite id="CITEREFAuthor2019" class="citation book cs1">Author (2019). ''Title''.</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=book&rft.btitle=Title&rft.date=2019&rft.au=Author&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AUser+talk%3ATrappist+the+monk%2FArchive+8" class="Z3988"></span> <span class="cs1-visible-error citation-comment"><code class="cs1-code">{{[[Template:cite book|cite book]]}}</code>: </span><span class="cs1-visible-error citation-comment"><code class="cs1-code">&#124;author=</code> has generic name ([[Help:CS1 errors#generic_name|help]])</span>

{{cite book |title=Title |author=Author |date=2019 |ref=none}} → Author (2019). Title. {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)

'"`UNIQ--templatestyles-0000006A-QINU`"'<cite class="citation book cs1">Author (2019). ''Title''.</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=book&rft.btitle=Title&rft.date=2019&rft.au=Author&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AUser+talk%3ATrappist+the+monk%2FArchive+8" class="Z3988"></span> <span class="cs1-visible-error citation-comment"><code class="cs1-code">{{[[Template:cite book|cite book]]}}</code>: </span><span class="cs1-visible-error citation-comment"><code class="cs1-code">&#124;author=</code> has generic name ([[Help:CS1 errors#generic_name|help]])</span>

For comparison, same basic templates but with |mode=cs2:

{{cite book |title=Title |author=Author |date=2019 |mode=cs2}} → Author (2019), Title {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)

'"`UNIQ--templatestyles-0000006E-QINU`"'<cite id="CITEREFAuthor2019" class="citation book cs2">Author (2019), ''Title''</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=book&rft.btitle=Title&rft.date=2019&rft.au=Author&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AUser+talk%3ATrappist+the+monk%2FArchive+8" class="Z3988"></span> <span class="cs1-visible-error citation-comment"><code class="cs1-code">{{[[Template:cite book|cite book]]}}</code>: </span><span class="cs1-visible-error citation-comment"><code class="cs1-code">&#124;author=</code> has generic name ([[Help:CS1 errors#generic_name|help]])</span>

{{cite book |title=Title |author=Author |date=2019 |ref=none |mode=cs2}} → Author (2019), Title {{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)

'"`UNIQ--templatestyles-00000072-QINU`"'<cite class="citation book cs2">Author (2019), ''Title''</cite><span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook&rft.genre=book&rft.btitle=Title&rft.date=2019&rft.au=Author&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AUser+talk%3ATrappist+the+monk%2FArchive+8" class="Z3988"></span> <span class="cs1-visible-error citation-comment"><code class="cs1-code">{{[[Template:cite book|cite book]]}}</code>: </span><span class="cs1-visible-error citation-comment"><code class="cs1-code">&#124;author=</code> has generic name ([[Help:CS1 errors#generic_name|help]])</span>

Note how the first two and the last one do not have an id= attribute in their <cite> tag but the third one does. |ref=none in cs1 templates without |mode=cs2 contributes nothing to the citation.

cs1|2 does not have a Questia identifier so for a source at a Questia |url=, |via=Questia may be appropriate. Using |via= for the named identifiers is just repetition.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 22:54, 27 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This bot seems to be the fruit of sleepless nights! E.g. |ref=none is useless that's a totally shortsighted point of view. AVS (talk) 05:10, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@

b} 05:40, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

E.g. The ref is not yet available/found but will be added later – it's a place holding device which can also be detected easily. AVS (talk) 07:46, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You misunderstand the purpose of |ref= then, which is to create an

b} 07:59, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

@Trappist: Indeed, and had I given it half a thought I would have realized that what I wrote there was nonsense (and I've struck it). My apologies for that!

My motivation for using |ref=none is actually precisely because it currently does nothing in those cases: I'm hoping we can get to some point where |ref=harv is the default, and so |ref=none will actually start to have an effect. In the mean time, it is an awkward and inefficient (in that it requires parsing wikitext), but doable way to distinguish between a cite where |ref= was left out and one where it is deliberately omitted (because the template is used to format an entry in a "Further reading"-type list).

But |via= is not identifier (or URL) specific: it applies to the whole citation. It tells the reader that the article's author accessed the cited source through a copy at a third party rather than from the publisher directly, and that thus it may have changes or errors not present in the original. That one of the links and identifiers provided with the citation happens to be labelled by the template with a text string that is similar to the name of that database service is completely incidental: whether a journal article is cited with just DOI and HDL provided, or also with a URL to jstor.org, is immaterial to the WP:V issue of through which database it was accessed. --Xover (talk) 06:34, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It also goes against the purpose of |via=, which is to let readers now where a link will take them. Knowing where the article's writer read something goes against

b} 06:58, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

How is a reader to intuit from a citation with the 'via JSTOR' text that you, the editor, consulted the JSTOR copy of a source? To a reader, 'via' is a common English word indicating the path to the destination.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 10:47, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

More importantly, why should the reader care that you read a Physics Review Letters through a third party or not. It's the same article regardless of the method of access.

b} 14:48, 28 June 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

Monkbot/task 14 lists All About Jazz as being a magazine, so some citations are being changed, example here. But it's a website, not a magazine (although a connected magazine, All About Jazz – New York, was published into 2011). EddieHugh (talk) 15:25, 29 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Monkbot task 14's list of periodicals is hand currated (by me). I am human, I do err. My source All About Jazz is the en.wiki article – which is itself contradictory:

1. the lead says: "All About Jazz is a website..."
2. the infobox has: |type=[[Jazz]] [[music]] [[database]]
3. the article is assigned to these categories:
   1. Category:American online magazines
   2. Category:Jazz magazines
   3. Category:Magazines established in 1995
   4. Category:American music magazines
   5. Category:Music websites
   6. Category:Magazines published in Pennsylvania

Yeah, any online source is a website. Because the en.wiki article is undecided/uncertain/unclear, I took the decision that All About Jazz is an online magazine and I told the bot to call it a magazine.

Before the bot's visit, the two templates citing All About Jazz were {{cite news}} templates that were misusing |publisher=''All About Jazz''. How is {{cite news}} better or worse than {{cite magazine}} for this application? Both will suffice. If you want to rename the template to something else and use any of the periodical-alias parameters, do so. Please don't misuse |publisher=.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:05, 29 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Wait! Don't shoot! I'm only the messenger. I'm just passing on information. Your choice was a reasonable one, based on the evidence, as you say. Those weren't my original edits on the Zoe Rahman article, so I wasn't (as far as I know) misusing 'publisher'. It came up in my watchlist, so I used it as an example. I don't know the answer to your question, but I thought that, if the bot's role is to correct things, then it's preferable to get things as correct as they can be, which would be (as far as I can see) to use 'cite web' for AAJ, barring evidence to the contrary. So I pointed it out. EddieHugh (talk) 18:06, 29 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that I was accusing you of anything; certainly that was not my intent. I can see on rereading my post that it may have come across that way. I apologize for that.

I disagree that {{cite web}} is a better choice than {{cite magazine}}. Looking at the All About Jazz online presence, I see something that looks and feels like an online magazine. That is this human's judgement.

The bot cannot be made clever enough to arrive at its own judgement. The trigger for the bot is the words All About Jazz with or without italic markup in |publisher=. If there is no conflicting periodical parameter, the bot will make the fix that I told it to make. This is why I do not want you to change back to |publisher=''All About Jazz'' (and because the next revision of the Module:Citation/CS1 suite – the engine that drives the cs1|2 templates – will emit red error messages when it finds periodical templates without periodical parameters and italic markup in |publisher=).

—Trappist the monk (talk) 19:11, 29 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

You probably already know about this and I don't really know where to report it but in this edit it caused another cs1 error by adding "website$224dash.com" instead of "website=24dash.com". Trialpears (talk) 18:54, 5 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't, so thanks for the heads-up. Bug was only an issue with parameter values that begin with digits. Bug now squashed.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 19:45, 5 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

This is all redirected to Nzema and causing category redirects to be populated. Please can you amend the modules to prevent this. Timrollpickering (Talk) 10:32, 9 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Something must have been left out of your post. I have no idea what you are talking about. Please clearify.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 10:51, 9 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed the cat. Timrollpickering (Talk) 11:58, 9 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Trappist, nice to meet you ~ does Monkbot take care of citations that use 'work=' instead of 'newspaper=', 'magazine='? The reason I ask is this edit here I noticed the replacements ~ and I have been using 'work=' only in my citations ~ do I need to change my style or will the bot take care of it? once again ~ nice meeting you ~mitch~ (talk) 20:09, 13 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Mitchellhobbs: The template treats |work= and several other parameters (including those you mentioned) as synonyms. Don't worry if you use one or the other. The bot task is concerned with Other Things than what the name of that exact parameter is. --Izno (talk) 20:11, 13 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks @Izno: ~mitch~ (talk) 20:13, 13 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not convinced that changes like this to the |title= parameter of {{cite journal}} are helpful. There's no style guide, as far as I know, that recommends citing book reviews without making clear that what's being cited is a review – just giving the title as it's given at the top of the page is no doubt easier for automated citation tools but it runs counter to common sense. A citation that says "Buchanan, Tom (April 2010). 'The Spanish Civil War and the British Left: Political Activism and the Popular Front'" gives the impression that Tom Buchanan is the author of a work called "The Spanish Civil War and the British Left: Political Activism and the Popular Front", which isn't really the case. It's less of a problem in an article like this where it's clear that The Spanish Civil War and the British Left: Political Activism and the Popular Front is a book by Lewis H. Mates, because the book is the subject of the article, but it could certainly cause confusion in other contexts. – Arms & Hearts (talk) 13:11, 17 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Review articles have always been problematic within the scope of cs1|2. |title= should always hold the title of the article as the publisher of the article wrote it – that will be the thing that a reader most likely will search for in a paper copy of the journal; we shouldn't be making their search more difficult. Within a cs1|2 template one can do |type=Review or |department=Book Reviews, but the title should not be modified with extra text; in cs1|2 the square brackets are reserved to English translations of non-English titles (|trans-title= and related parameters).

• Buchanan, Tom (April 2010). "The Spanish Civil War and the British Left: Political Activism and the Popular Front". Book Reviews.
  doi:10.1093/ehr/ceq011
  .
• Ruiz, Julius (September 2009). "The Spanish civil war and the British left: political activism and the popular front. By Lewis H. Mates".
  doi:10.1017/S0018246X0900764X
  .
• Corthorn, Paul (July 2009). "The Spanish Civil War and the British Left: Political Activism and the Popular Front – By Lewis H. Mates". Reviews and Short Notices.
  doi:10.1111/j.1468-229X.2009.00461_29.x
  .

—Trappist the monk (talk) 14:03, 17 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough, I suppose. Thanks for pointing out |type= and |department=, which I hadn't previously been aware of – one or the other of those is good enough as a way to signal that it's a review. I don't really agree that |title= "should always hold the title of the article as the publisher of the article wrote it", and I think there are good reasons why this isn't standard practice elsewhere, but that's obviously a discussion to have elsewhere than your talk page. All the best, – Arms & Hearts (talk) 17:13, 17 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Ship prefixes

Hi Trappist the monk. Can you please add more prefixes to Module:WPSHIPS utilities? The prefixes are "KLD" - Kapal Layar Diraja - which translates to His Majesty's Sailing Ship (Malaysia), and "KA" - Kapal Auksiliari - Auxiliary Ship (Malaysia). Thank you. Shuipzv3 (talk) 14:54, 28 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Cite repair changes

Hi Trappist the monk. You made cite repair changes to

HighBeam links and their archiveurls. HighBeam links no longer work, but the citation templates still had Wayback Machine archiveurls like https://web.archive.org/web/20151101005121/http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-182605951.html and https://web.archive.org/web/20151101004941/http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-149844457.html that worked. Would you restore these archiveurls? Thanks, Cunard (talk) 21:39, 28 July 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

Yep, Highbeam is dead. Yep, archive.org has what appears to copies of the Highbeam pages. But, the archived pages are just the teasers that Highbeam used to get readers to signup for a subscription to read the whole article. At the bottom of the article extract on the teaser is a link: "To read the full text of this article and others like it, subscribe today!" Readers who follow that link and fill in the form, are, I suspect destined for disappointment.

You and I may see immediately that the archived page is an archived page, others may not. Nothing on en.wiki requires sources to be available on-line.

We should not offer something to readers that we cannot deliver.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 22:11, 28 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for explaining your reasoning. I think Wayback Machine links would be useful to be retained if the article extract they were able to archive verified the material in the text since that would provide some value to the readers. That was not the case for these two sources; the material was not in the teasers and were only in the full text, which is no longer accessible via HighBeam. I was able to find links from other websites for these articles, so I've changed the article to add them. Cunard (talk) 22:55, 28 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose that there is a slight chance that the teaser extract might support text in an en.wiki article but one is always left wondering about that which cannot be seen so, yeah, what you have done is best for the readers.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:06, 28 July 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Any guidelines against 'it's my school project'?

Hi, Trappist the monk! :)
I'm turning to you as an active admin for some help or directions on commenting good-faith but wrong-directed efforts of some newbies. The most recent example I spotted was User:Slicedpotato. The user explains at the User:Theroadislong's talk page (which I stalk) in section #Leather Seat that they have created a want-to-be an article ‘because this is my project in school’. This happens quite often that teachers at schools or even universities run such projects which require creating new articles at Wikipedia. They probably usually do not realize how difficult task it is to create an acceptable article here, hence that their pupils' efforts are most probably doomed (as it happened to User:Slicedpotato/sandbox).

Here my question comes: how should we direct pupils or students to teach or direct their teachers to some explanation on the problem? Most important, how to do it in civilized manner, which will still be civilized one step higher (I mean, not causing any misunderstaning or conflicts between the pupil/student and his teacher/professor)?
Best regards. --CiaPan (talk) 09:56, 12 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

PS. I'm starting to watch your talk page, so feel free to answer either at my talk page or here.

Way outside my bailiwick. Shouldn't this topic be raised in a much more public forum (one of the village pumps)? I found this which might be helpful.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 10:26, 12 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@CiaPan: I might recommend raising this question at Wikipedia:Education noticeboard. --Izno (talk) 04:17, 13 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

b} 04:20, 13 August 2019 (UTC)[reply

]

MonkBot

Will the MonkBot be operational again? BabbaQ (talk) 18:13, 14 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There is no MonkBot. Monkbot is not dead. Why?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 18:35, 14 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I hate bots!

Bots are noobs! CamdenFreeway295 (talk) 18:42, 14 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

FYI

I believe this might interest you (and you might be in a better position to accomplishing such): Template talk:Lang § Wikidata language item mappings. 50.53.21.2 (talk) 19:39, 15 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Notice of noticeboard discussion

There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The thread is "Is there a semi-automated tool that could fix these annoying "Cite Web" errors?". Thank you. In case you do not receive pings. Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 13:07, 3 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Cite template stuff

Hi Trappist, whatever the outcome of all of this Cite template stuff (like the change of deadurl to urlstatus), is there any way to have these ideas incorporated into the reFill projects and AWB? I don't know anything about the technical aspects of all that, but I thought I'd mention it in case you are so technically inclined. Seems like a simple bot working on this can be helped by humans. Regards, Cyphoidbomb (talk) 15:37, 3 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

There is a BRFA for |deadurl= / |dead-url= → |url-status= which see. Will it be approved? Don't know.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:52, 3 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A barnstar for you!

	The Technical Barnstar
	It is a thankless job but I am glad someone like you is willing to do it. I wish you good luck. --- Coffeeandcrumbs 21:43, 3 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Another barnstar for you!

		The Citation Barnstar
		Many thanks for the work you've done updating and maintaining the citation modules and templates. My apologies for helping turn today into a drama-fest, and I'm especially sorry for suggesting that you should be blocked. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 22:09, 3 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Source editors

Hello Trappist'. Since your user page doesn't exist, I was unable to ping you on the Joseph LaBarge talk page. I am wondering why you removed two of the three editor's names from one of the sources used in the article. At archive.org three editors names are given. I realize that Martin's name is the only one listed on the title page, but unless there was a good reason for removing the other names or if it doesn't involve a policy/guideline issue, I would prefer to have all three names listed. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 22:17, 3 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

A user page is not required for pings to work. I have been pinged a lot today.

This one?

{{cite book |editor-first=G. W. |editor-last=Martin |title=Collections of the Kansas state historical society, Vol IX |authorlink= |publisher=State Printing Office, Topeka, Kansas |orig-year=1875 |year=1906 |url=https://archive.org/details/collectionsofkan09kans/page/n3 |ref=Martin}}

Martin, G. W., ed. (1906) [1875]. Collections of the Kansas state historical society, Vol IX. State Printing Office, Topeka, Kansas.

When I followed the link to archive.org it drops me at the title page of the facsimile where the title is:

Transactions of the Kansas State Historical Society, 1905–1906 Vol. IX Edited by Geo. W. Martin and published in 1906 (the date that you include in the citation)

The metadata from archive.org that lists the various other editors and the years that they held office were either before or after GW Martin's tenure as editor. Dates are not editor names so that lead me to the recognition that not all of those editors should be listed. Though I didn't change it, I would suggest that the archive.org metadata are wrong about the book title as well (transactions, not collections). Answer your questions?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 22:55, 3 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your prompt reply. Since there is only one name listed on the title page i.e.Martin, and given the doubt you've expressed, I can live with the source/citation as it's now listed, per your recent edit. Thanks for looking out. -- Gwillhickers (talk) 23:19, 3 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Recent changes

Trappist, I wonder whether disallowing "publisher=BBC News" is based on a misunderstanding.

Cite news is not only used for newspaper titles that need italics. BBC News is not a title (or "work") and should not be in italics. BBC News is a publisher, a division of the BBC. Similarly, it isn't always appropriate to use "website=" with cite web. Sometimes the publisher of that website is more appropriate, and publisher does not take italics (unless the publisher is also a title). For example, I might use cite web with "publisher=" for short reports, where I don't want the title of the report to be in italics:

• "Female genital mutilation". Geneva: World Health Organization. 31 January 2018.

In such cases, "website=www.who.int" is not appropriate, and in fact would look unnecessary and silly. The flexibility of these templates is a good thing, and I wish that flexibility could increase. Restricting them so that publisher= is not allowed would, I think, mean a certain number of people would stop using them. SarahSV ^(talk) 22:11, 3 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that there is a misunderstanding – on my part. Yes, there are news sources that are not newspapers, BBC News being one among many. When you talk about BBC News as a corporate entity (the business side of news journalism), the name is not italicized. When the corporate entity, BBC News, publishes an article, it does so in BBC News, the publication or work of BBC News the business entity. Because in this case, BBC News is a publication or work, it is italicized just as The New York Times is a publication of The New York Times Company.

So too, World Heath Organization website (who.int) is a publication of the corporate entity also called World Heath Organization. When citing the WHO website, the publication that you are citing is World Heath Organization. Because the publication and the publisher are the same, one may be dropped: publisher. There is no prohibition against |publisher=, it is allowed in all cs1|2 templates except the preprint templates ({{

cite arxiv

}} and the like).

Always, in cs1|2, you are citing a publication (because

WP:V

requires publication), never citing a corporate entity. Any utterances from a corporate entity must have been published in some sort of publication or work.

Beyond these semantic reasons there are also technical reasons why the periodical templates require a periodical parameter. If you wish I can explain that.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 22:43, 3 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I, and many others would disagree. Not all websites have names, and reusing the name of the publisher as a surrogate just isn't right either. When a website has a name, it should be given in italics, but where it doesn't exist, we shouldn't be forcing editors to make up one or duplicate the publisher. Imzadi 1979 → 23:02, 3 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Trappist, BBC News should never be italicized. It's not a title like The New York Times. Similarly, the World Health Organization is never italicized; it is a publisher. Those are style errors. I'm pinging Tony1 who may be willing explain further. Tony, the citation templates have been changed to disallow (?) "publisher=", so that entities such as BBC News are treated as titles (works) and are italicized. This is a misunderstanding, but Trappist (who has made the changes) is not accepting that. Can you assist? (Also see AN.) SarahSV ^(talk) 00:46, 4 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The BBC publishes a website called BBC News. It's one of many websites published by the BBC, including BBC Sport. It is a title; it's not a title of a paper publication like The New York Times, but the title of a website. (The WHO example is different, I agree.) Peter coxhead (talk) 01:31, 4 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

That's not the name of a website. BBC Nine O'Clock News is a title. BBC News is the publisher. It's a division of the BBC. They don't italicize it: "BBC News has learned". [2] Anyway, the point is that we need publisher=. Trappist says it's allowed, but earlier all the articles I'd added it to were showing error messages. SarahSV ^(talk) 02:11, 4 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

SarahSV, I agree with you that BBC News is an organisation, which publishes news. It is not a creative work, and should not be italicised. I have often thought that we need a pair of new parameters |program= and |programme=, so that the example you give would be coded using |publisher=BBC News and |programme=BBC Nine O'Clock News, with the programme title appearing in italics. Would be interested in your thoughts on this proposal. --NSH001 (talk) 09:48, 4 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

• Agree with SarahSV: the name of an organisation is not italicised, and the "publisher" field is for non-italicised names of publishing outlets. Occasionally there's a grey area; but not here. Tony (talk) 02:52, 4 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]
• Trappist, I respect that you have a view on how these citation templates should be used, but it is not up to you to unilaterally enforce your view on the whole of Wikipedia. The simple fact is that you do not have consensus that the periodical parameters should be mandatory, only that its contents should be italicized if used. The AN thread shows that well over 90% of the people disagree with your stance regarding the periodicals parameters. I think it's well overdue now for you to acknowledge your mistake and revert your change making these parameters mandatory.Tvx1 05:14, 4 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Minor question about Monkbot task 16

Why does the bot remove the empty |df=? – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:01, 5 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Not just |df= which is very commonly empty so appears to be deleted specially (it's not), but any empty parameter that is found in a template that task 16 fixes. For instance, this diff. Why? that is your grace's part, because I like to take every legitimate opportunity to get rid of empty parameter clutter.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 21:59, 5 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Some people object fervently to removal of empty parameters. I do not know why they do so, but I try to avoid churning up their wrath. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:58, 5 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yours is a different experience from mine. Were you deleting all empty parameters on a page?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 00:38, 6 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

No, I tend to remove only non-functional blank parameters, like |coauthors= and |month=, due to having seen editors complain about blank parameter removal (e.g. "They encourage other editors to fill in the blank information" or similar claims). I don't have an opinion either way, and I wish you clear sailing with your parameter removal. Thanks for taking care of the dead-url conversion with your bot. – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:05, 6 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It is not at all clear if that bot will ever run since the primary proposal at WP:AN includes reverting the deprecation.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 02:44, 6 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Clarity is not something that WP:AN is known for, which is why I almost always keep my distance. I agree with Primefac's assessment, however, that a mass revert seems unlikely. I think the requirement that |website= be present will be overturned, at least for a while, but the logic behind deprecation of |dead-url= in favor of |url-status= is strong, even though the error messages were annoying to many. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:14, 6 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]