Template talk:Citation needed/Archive 2

message: I notice the old category got deleted, leaving pages with this tag on currently unsorted. One solution I've been toying with is since the old category was deleted largely because it was growing too large, perhaps it might be an idea to create sub-categories according to subject area, so people with kowledge and expertise in that area can look into referencing the articles. The way this could be achieved is by adding the following code to the template:

What this would do is create an optional cat= parameter that people could use, so  would add the relevant page to :Category:Physics articles needing references. The #if function means that currently existing tags, and any tags added without the cat= paramater, remain unsorted while the #ifexists paramater means that only categories that already exist would be populated, so the categories would have to be created beforehand (I added the paramter in to guard against categories being created because of typos). Ideally the relevant categories would be created and monitored by appropriate WikiProjects, and the list of possible values ("physics", "football" etc) and the categories they relate to could be kept and updated here. The same sort of code could also be added to other similar templates, of course, if it's seen as being useful. Anyway, I thought I'd put it up here first so I can see whether there's a consensus that it would be useful, and see if there's any potential problems I haven't thought of (I've tested the code and it works fine but you never know). --Daduzi talk 21:03, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Argh, so I missed the category link at the bottom of the template, not sure how I managed that. Still, the above could still be inserted as an optional, supplementary means of categorisation. Does anyone have any strong feelings (or feelings of any description) either way? --Daduzi talk 12:55, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the best way to create topic-specific lists would be through the PNA mechanism, which uses a bot to keep updated per-topic lists of articles with various problems.  See e.g. Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Genetics. I will add this to my todo list for the bot. -- Beland 18:35, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  A possible means of categorisation 

message: This template has a misfeature that, if it is next before an end-of-line, makes it swallow all immediately following whitespace, thus making the next paragraph amalgamate with the previous paragraph. Anthony Appleyard 22:14, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: From what I have seen, this happens only when the next paragraph starts with a link.  I have been getting around it by replacing the newlines in those situations with BR tags.  I put the BR just after the template call and then begin a newline normally, but with only one newline character. Will (Talk - contribs) 04:41, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This has happened to me in two articles today. An admin with good knowledge of Wikicode should check this template's code out and try to fix the problem. – Lantoka (talk) 00:40, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: This template needs editing

message: I think it can and should be shortend to [need cite]. - RoyBoy 800 03:13, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Nah, too informal. It would have to be [needs citation] at least. Which is 1 letter shorter. --tjstrf 04:40, 28 September 2006 (UTC)

text: why shorten it? I say make it blink, in an 18pt font. This is our last line of defence against the ever-looming "Wikipedia is unreliable" verdict, so make sure readers see it and understand it. dab (ᛏ) 17:27, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

text: Wow, I had no idea that this template which has stood for at least several months is being edited. BTW,   also works. Here's what it looks like:  or . AstroHurricane001 23:50, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Shorten

message: This template uses the "sup" tag, which makes its effects on the page extremely ugly.  Perhaps it should simply be set to "small" or something. --Tony Sidaway 22:57, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I prefer the sup tag in that it makes the notice rather difficult to miss. If the tag is "ugly" then that is a good thing as unsourced passages are rather "ugly" in a textural sense.   23:02, 19 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Absolute agree! Other than I don't think it is ugly at all but signifies "this is an annotation of some kind; if you are not interested in annotation right now, ignore and move on".  I can read entire articles without ever once noticing one of these superscripts if I put myself in the frame of mind to ignore them (like when I'm genuinely reading Clouded leopard because I saw it on the news and want to know more about the animal; when I'm not being an encylcopedia user but an editor I pay quite a lot of attention to the superscripts. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 00:01, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

text: All inline cleanup/dispute templates, as well as other annotation templates such a footnotes and ref citations use .  This is a rehashed topic (see above), and I'm marking it "Resolved" here because this is emphatically not the venue for this discussion.  If someone wants to do away with this use of superscripting, that is a far-ranging Wikipedia-wide issue with numerous ramifications that must be brought up the Village Pump, and cannot possibly be resolved on the talk page of some random template that happens to be following the already-established convention. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 00:01, 20 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Ugly

message: this edit introduced a space between the </sup> and <includeonly> tags. Since the space is not inside any div or span set within this template, it doesn't appear to be necessary, and it has undesireable consequences on at least one page. I'm asking that the space between the </sup> and <includeonly> tags be removed. Gimmetrow 03:39, 28 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Done. Kirill Lokshin 06:33, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: See #Incorrect behavior.  This change broke something.  If the change was made to other similar templates, will need reversion there, too. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 09:48, 18 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Extraneous space at end 

message: I have an update to the tooltip for including the date, with an implementation at User:Sigma_7/Sandbox1.  Any comments or objections to this update?
:Comment: At the same time as we update the tooltip, could we also fix the wrapping problem? I have an implementation at User:Kevinkor2/Fact. If you need to test these changes, look at User:Kevinkor2/FactTest. --Kevinkor2 23:13, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Regarding the wrapping - does it make any difference if the span is opened and closed as part of the link cover text, or whether the span includes the base link as well? Gimmetrow 23:22, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Thank you for noticing that, Gimmetrow. When the span includes the base link, the span's tooltip is overwritten by the base link tooltip. In my case, all the links were getting "Wikipedia:Citing sources" as their tooltip. --Kevinkor2 23:42, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tooltip 

message: In line breaks, the tag currently gets split into two lines either between the open bracket and the citation or between the needed and the closing bracket. The brackets could be moved into the no-wrap span or the formatting could be changed to citation needed. Opinions? ~ trialsanderrors 01:39, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed (with regard to moving, not removing, the brackets), but should be done to every template in this "class" (similarly-formatted inline templates). We need to keep them as consistent as possible. At some point, we should probably simply replace all of them with a meta-template, so that they can all be maintained at once. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 05:21, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Line break issue

message: Could someone add a class attribute to the span tag? Something like class="fact" or class="citation needed", so that it can be customized or highlighted.— miketm - Queen WikiProject - 14:54, 27 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed, but should be done to every template in this "class" (similarly-formatted inline templates). We need to keep them as consistent as possible. That is, for any Template:Foo of this sort, it should have a class="template-foo" in it, in the same position (note I say "template-foo", not "foo"; any given "foo" might already be in use as a class.  Better yet: class="template-foo inline-template"; the 2nd class would allow all of them to be styled the same, while the first would allow them to be styled independently.  Or perhaps the "inline-template" class should be applied at a higher level.  But anyway, you get the idea. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 05:27, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Like class="template-fact inline-template", class="template-specify inline-template" and so on. I think that would work best.— miketm - Queen WikiProject - 20:05, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Works for me.  It strikes me that we should probably set up a WikiProject to identify and maintain all of these like-formatted templates (or, rather almost like-formatted - they keep diverging, and in fact replace as much of them as possible with single meta-template. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 08:13, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Add class attribute 

message: The discussion of whether :Category:Articles with unsourced statements, used primarily by , ought to exist at all has been restarted as:
Wikipedia:Deletion_review/Log/2007_February_20#Category:Articles_with_unsourced_statements.
Dragons flight 16:45, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  The existence of a category 

message: Breaks when used in table by overlapping with text in an adjacent cell, at least in my browser (Firefox).  See Comparison of operating systems#Technical_information .
Thanks,
ArmedBlowfish (talk|mail) 21:44, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Minor formatting error