Wikipedia talk:Citing sources

message: Perhaps I am missing something, but I don’t really understand why anyone would want to archive a citation “preemptively”. Could someone who supports doing so enlighten me? Blueboar (talk) 16:51, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Is there something at WP:DEADREF and WP:ARCHIVEEARLY you don't understand? —Locke Cole • t • c 19:45, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes… I understand using archives for dead links… but when we expect a webpage to change its content (say because it is out-of-date or incorrect) why would we want to cite an archived version?  I would think we would want to cite the most up-to date version (and if necessary change OUR article content to match the up-to-date, corrected website). Blueboar (talk) 23:01, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: There's one case I know of where it's worth doing: Galactic Central hosts bibliographic details such as this which are autogenerated from a database that is updated once a quarter.  When the quarterly update happens, all the URLs change, so if you were citing that page to show that Keith Laumer's The Planet Wreckers appeared in the February 1967 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, the page will no longer contain that information.  When I cite this website I usually preemptively archive it so that I don't have to go hunting for the right archive page a year later. Mike Christie (talk - contribs -  library) 23:11, 18 March 2024 (UTC)

text: Blueboar, I see on a very regular basis articles with dead references that were never archived. Would it be nice if those references had been archived shortly after they were originally added to the article? Yes. Do I think it must occur? Not really. So I guess I'm not really in either of the camps discussing the issue in the main thread, but I guess from a maintenance standpoint I am pro-archive. Primefac (talk) 16:49, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: That is a good argument for triggering off-site archival of pages that you use as references. It is not an argument for using the archived copy to replace the source on Wikipedia. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:51, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Who's talking about "replacing"? The idea, I gather, is to have both live URL and archive URL listed before it's too late. Which sounds reasonable enough. Frankly, I can understand if people say "I'm too lazy for that", but I don't have the slightest idea why anyone would want to prevent others from doing it. Gawaon (talk) 18:04, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: @David Eppstein, @Gawaon Yeah, is this the reason for the attitude thus far? At no point has anyone suggested we replace functional URLs with their archive's. This is why  has both a  and , and only when  (or if  is not set) does the  get used if it is present. If  is still live, simply using  will keep  from being shown. This is all explained in the docs at . The only argument at Talk:Donald Trump appears to center around "bloat" of the page, which again, is not a reason to avoid good maintenance of one of our more popular articles. —Locke Cole • t • c 22:32, 19 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: Why would we WANT to “preemptively” archive?

message: There appears to have been some misunderstandings above about what archiving a citation means (see WP:DEADREF for the current language and WP:ARCHIVEEARLY for the process, see WP:LINKROT for some reasons why archiving is a good idea). Just to reiterate, it does not mean replacing existing  with a link to Archive.org/Wayback Machine. It means filling the  and  parameters and setting  for links that are not presently dead (see  for more details on the parameters and how they interact). While my reading was that creating such archive URLs was strongly encouraged, there appears to be a consensus that the current language does not even say that. However, what I would propose is not explicitly requiring archive links, but perhaps language here that effectively disallows individual pages from banning the practice altogether. I can't really see where having them causes any harm to our editors or our readers, and the benefits of having them far outweigh the arguments against including them. 
All that being said, please indicate whether you Support including language that would forbid individual pages from creating a WP:LOCALCON to disallow archive links, or whether you would Oppose such language. —Locke Cole • t • c 04:33, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: To help prevent dead links, persistent identifiers are available for some sources. Some journal articles have a digital object identifier (DOI); some online newspapers and blogs, and also Wikipedia, have permalinks that are stable. When permanent links aren't available, consider making an archived copy of the cited document when writing the article; on-demand web archiving services such as the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/save) or archive.today (https://archive.today) are fairly easy to use (see pre-emptive archiving). 
—Locke Cole • t • c 04:33, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: A modest proposal

message: *Support as proposer for reasons stated above. I am open to alternate wording or different placement within WP:DEADREF. —Locke Cole • t • c 04:33, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: !Votes

message: * The wording is strange and I think it should be improved before we discuss this proposal much longer. WP:CONLEVEL, as I understand it, already says that a local consensus, say on a talk page, cannot override guidelines such as this one. The problem with the mentioned section, however, seems to be that it mentions "making an archived copy of the cited document" but doesn't say anything about adding a link to the reference using the |archive-url= mechanism or so. Surely it was the intent that one should do that too – after all, what would be the point of an archived copy if nobody knows where to find it? So I think a simpler fix, and more in line with the usual wording of guidelines, would be to add something like "and adding it to the relevant reference, for example using an |archive-url= parameter" after "consider making an archived copy of the cited document when writing the article". Once that's there, CONLEVEL should handle the rest and no new sentence is needed. Gawaon (talk) 19:02, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comments 

message: What happens when  is autofilled from the ISBN field, yet the date field has a different year from the date of publication shown in printed book? As far as I can determine, there has only ever been one edition of  (this is autofilled). But the printed book says "copyright 2015 ..." and also gives a printing date of 2015. There is reason to believe the book was actually written in 2011, as the foreword is dated August 2011.
What date should appear in the date field? Is this the date that a short reference template such as harvnb would pick up as the identifier of the cited work? If you were filling in cite book manually, rather than using the autofill, would you ever get to use a date different from that in the printed book? ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 20:41, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: This book can be seen online at  . ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 22:32, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Use the date given on the copyright page of the version you are taking the information from. The copyright may have been registered more than once as the book was reprinted. The entry here on WorldCat shows both dates for English editions, but they have the same ISBN numbers. StarryGrandma (talk) 22:47, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Is the information on WorldCat ever wrong? I have made a pretty intensive search and can only find a translation into Swedish as an alternative edition. I have met incorrect ISBN numbers before, so it is not inconceivable that there may be other errors. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 22:53, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: The link to WorldCat given above offers you, among other options, an e-book which says it is 2011 but when you open the document you see the 2015 publishing date. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 23:54, 22 March 2024 (UTC)

text: A new printing is not a new edition. Books can go through many printings. It only becomes a new edition if revised. Interestingly enough the WorldCat entry for the book labelled 2015 gives the date as c2015 rather than the usual ©2011. I would say use 2011. StarryGrandma (talk) 00:20, 23 March 2024 (UTC)

text: How do other people cite it? Ifly6 (talk) 23:12, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: In Vasa (ship) it uses the 2011 datebut the origin of that is actually an edit by the author of the book a little while before it was actually published. I am guessing that the Swedish language version is a factor in this, even though it was a translation of the English original. As you can see the Swedish edition has a different ISBN, but WorldCat says that was published in 2018if so how did the ISBN get in Wikipedia in 2014? ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 23:44, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't know if I will get an answer, but I have fired off a question to the publisher about the publication date of this book. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 23:54, 22 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Publisher has confirmed two different editions: 2011 and 2015. The latter has some extra material. Confusingly, they both appear to use the same ISBN. This would be why the autofill gives the wrong date. There is absolutely no mention of the 2015 published book being a second edition within the book. ThoughtIdRetired (talk) 12:45, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, that's surely not how ISBNs are meant to be used. Somebody should whack the publisher with a big trout! Gawaon (talk) 13:47, 23 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Year of publication differs from that generated in citebook 

message: What is the preferred way to cite specific sections of a book that does not have page numbers? I'm looking to overhaul Vince Gill using the book For the Music: The Vince Gill Story (Jo Sgammato, Random House, 2008), but the copy I found does not have page numbers. What would be the best way to tie citations to specific passages from the book using the  system? Chapter numbers? Quotes? Both? Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 20:56, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I would generally use chapter numbers in such cases, as the closest available locator. Gawaon (talk) 21:15, 25 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Source citing question 

message: 28 if I counted right
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=European_emission_standards&diff=1215675542&oldid=1215553786 Chidgk1 (talk) 14:27, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: @Chidgk1, the "Hall of Shame" is at Wikipedia:Citation overkill#Examples.  Please add this link, even though it doesn't set a new record. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:37, 26 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: That list is for corrected examples but on this one I changed to one cite but the overcites were readded. So maybe this is a record for still existing excess cites Chidgk1 (talk) 05:00, 27 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is this a record for excess cites? 

message: I am working on a request from another user at WP:AWBREQ to add author links to citation templates. The  I did on the AWB run ended up with, I believe, 159  templates for the given author. My regex of course identifies each of those templates for adding in the author link, and I dutifully included the author link in all of them as per the request. But before I do this on the hundreds of pages where this is germane, I was wondering whether we are bound to the MOS guide to only link the first instance in an article, or whether that does not apply to references as well.
TLDR: Should I add author-link to every citation of a given author, or only the first reference on the page? VanIsaac, GHTV contWpWS 01:34, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Typically users spot check citations as required, we don't read every one, so if it was previously linked it wouldn't be obvious. In long lists of cites, it's difficult to impossible to know if another cite already linked it. In practice every cite stands on its own like an independent unit. BTW this is great work you are doing. I had an idea how to do this in another discussion. Basically build a database of existing cases of author-link and the , then find other instances of that title that are missing an author-link and add it there. With some sanity error checks. Could be fully automated. -- GreenC 02:01, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

text: Wanted to get an MOS perspective as well. VanIsaac, GHTV contWpWS 03:10, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: The example you show seems excessive; out of 205 citations, a single author is linked 159 times. Putting this extreme example aside, the general idea is good. MOS:REPEATLINK doesn't apply to citations. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 04:03, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

text: I think it really depends: not all cited authors are directly relevant to the article, I would only link ones that are. Maybe that sounds odd, but I really feel visual exhaustion from overlinking can even apply to citations. Sure, they can be stand-alone and should be functional as such, but that doesn't erase the fact that they're usually being viewed in the context of an article. Remsense诉 04:31, 30 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Author-link in cite templates 

message: Hi, I have a general question. Why is it required by the MOS to always put a citation immediately after the final character, instead of leaving a space in some cases? For the body of an article, I understand leaving no space. But for some areas, like an infobox, my humble opinion is that a space looks far better. Please see the infobox on this page. By the time you click the link, hopefully nobody has edited it, but currently some of the lines have spaces before citations and some don't. I may be in the minority, but I think when there is no space it looks dreadful, cluttered, and sometimes difficult to read if the word ends with a certain character, such as lowercase "i". If there's plenty of room for a space without messing up text or formatting, is there any flexibility for using spaces? Sorry, but this is just my pet peeve. I hate seeing those citations slammed up against the words when there is apparently no practical reason for it, other than adhering to a rigid policy. Wafflewombat (talk) 16:48, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: There's a note in WP:Manual of Style#Punctuation and footnotes that suggests using a hair space for this purpose. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:29, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for the tip! Very helpful to know. Wafflewombat (talk) 22:38, 20 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  In-line citations and spaces 

message: The redirect Wikipedia:BOOKLINKS has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at  until a consensus is reached.  Daask (talk) 21:24, 5 June 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  "[[:Wikipedia:BOOKLINKS]]" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]] 

message: One is a USGS quadrangle. The others are city maps.
It would be nice if some index gave me specific dates for events, but so far I haven't been able to find anything.— Vchimpanzee •  talk • contributions •  22:18, 5 June 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: What are you looking for in the last comment? I don't understand. Donald Albury 22:35, 5 June 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: If anyone thinks the maps aren't good enough or their dates are too far apart, I'm just stating this is all I have until more information is found.— Vchimpanzee •  talk • contributions •  22:55, 5 June 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Didn't we have a huge discussion a year or two ago on whether it was permissible to infer timing of events from the non-appearance or later appearance of features on maps, with the general sense of the discussion being no, it violates WP:SYN? —David Eppstein (talk) 23:57, 5 June 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Using maps as sources specifically proposal 3 was to add specific language to allow this, but it was closed as no consensus. The close left it down to editorial consensus. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 00:10, 6 June 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  How do I cite maps?