Help talk:Citation Style 1

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Change Most Used Parameters for Report Template

Currently, the most commonly used parameters on Template:Cite report use |docket=. However, as multiple talk page discussions (1, 2, 3, 4) show, the use of the term "docket" is confusing at best. Could we change them to use |id= instead of |docket=?

For example:

To cite a report with a credited author

{{cite report |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |work= |location= |publisher= |id= |access-date=}}

instead of:

To cite a report with a credited author

{{cite report |last= |first= |date= |title= |url= |work= |location= |publisher= |docket= |access-date=}}

and so on.

I imagine these "most commonly used parameters" are more likely to be used by those inexperienced with said parameters, so it would seem to make sense to use a term that is more commonly understood by a larger number of people and much better defined in the documentation. –Noha307 (talk) 21:29, 11 May 2026 (UTC)

Crazy idea, but what if we simply adequately documented the parameters; and if no one can figure out what their proper use is, then remove them? Walkersam (talk) 22:36, 22 May 2026 (UTC)

Citing a chapter with no author, in a book with both author and editor

What is one to do when we want to cite a chapter of a book or an entry in a reference work, and the work has both credited author(s) and editor(s), but the chapter/entry in question has no credited author or editor?

What we want is:

Jones, Daniel (2011). Roach, Peter; Setter, Jane; Esling, John (eds.). "abacus". Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (18th ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-15255-6.

or perhaps

"abacus". Jones, Daniel (2011). Roach, Peter; Setter, Jane; Esling, John (eds.). Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (18th ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-15255-6.

{{citation
|last=Jones
|first=Daniel
|editor1-last=Roach
|editor1-first=Peter
|editor2-last=Setter
|editor2-first=Jane
|editor3-last=Esling
|editor3-first=John
|title=abacus
|year=2011
|work=Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary
|edition=18th
|publisher=Cambridge University Press
|isbn=978-0-521-15255-6
|mode=cs1
}}

gives the first, but it emits the CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN error; whereas

{{cite encyclopedia
|last=Jones
|first=Daniel
|editor1-last=Roach
|editor1-first=Peter
|editor2-last=Setter
|editor2-first=Jane
|editor3-last=Esling
|editor3-first=John
|entry=abacus
|year=2011
|encyclopedia=Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary
|edition=18th
|publisher=Cambridge University Press
|isbn=978-0-521-15255-6
}}

gives

Jones, Daniel (2011). "abacus". In Roach, Peter; Setter, Jane; Esling, John (eds.). Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (18th ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-15255-6.

which is not what we want, as it looks like Jones wrote just this entry in a book featuring a bunch of entries by other authors compiled by Roach et al., when in fact all four of them were responsible for all of the book.

{{cite journal
|last=Jones
|first=Daniel
|editor1-last=Roach
|editor1-first=Peter
|editor2-last=Setter
|editor2-first=Jane
|editor3-last=Esling
|editor3-first=John
|title=abacus
|year=2011
|work=Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary
|edition=18th
|publisher=Cambridge University Press
|isbn=978-0-521-15255-6
}}

gives the first, but is obviously non-semantic and gives the wrong class (journal) and metadata (info:ofi fmt:kev:mtx:journal).

We could just write

"abacus". {{cite book|...}}

for the second, but this will not come with the benefit of built-in error handling or well-formed metadata. Nardog (talk) 16:32, 19 May 2026 (UTC)

I don't understand your problem. If no author is given, don't give one:
Jones, Daniel; Roach, Peter; Setter, Jane; Esling, John, eds. (2011). "abacus". Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (18th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 1. ISBN 978-0-521-15255-6.
-- Michael Bednarek (talk) 13:37, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

There is an issue with describing a work that has both an author and editors. (In this case the original author was responsible for the original work and the editors updated it in later editions.) Kanguole 13:57, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

Exactly. Nardog (talk) 00:19, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

Do we know that Jones wrote the entry on "abacus" as we see it in 2011? If yes, cite him as author; if not, don't. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 00:40, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

I don't know how that's relevant. Figuring that out for every entry is not at all realistic, or meaningful. Jones is not credited as an editor; he is the sole author. If not to provide accurate bibliographic information so readers can locate the work, what is the point of a citation? Nardog (talk) 00:51, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

If he is the sole author, then he wrote every chapter. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:34, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

I still don't understand the problem. If Jones was/is the author, why did Nardog reject his own 2nd proposal? -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 10:47, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

Because it looks like only Jones was responsible for the entry, and the editors were not as involved in writing it, when in fact (or according to the colophon etc.) both Jones and the three editors were responsible for the whole book, including the entry. They need to appear together, or it gives the wrong impression about the division of labor. Nardog (talk) 22:23, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

But if Template:Tq is the aim, the 2nd proposal works fine. If you're not happy about a template's rendering, you don't have to use it – it's not obligatory. Or you could use the catch-all {{Wikicite}} for a free-format citation. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 02:36, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Ebook Documentation

I'm a bit flummoxed that their seems to be no extant documentation on citing ebooks. They've been around longer than Wikipedia has, surely this is a common enough query that we should have a little guidance? Although there is a redirect from Template:Cite_ebook to Template:Cite_book, that page contains nothing useful on the subject. The only thing of value I was able to find (via Google, not WP's search) was this discussion thread deep in the archive.

If the status quo has not changed since then it's certainly not ideal, but still, the best-practices should be properly documented. I put together this quick draft which summarizes @Jonesey95's suggestions; input appreciated if anyone has better ideas.

Citing ebooks Ebooks can be difficult to cite, as they do not always have stable page numbers to reference like a printed book would. PDF scans of a printed book will usually have the original page numbers visible, and can be cited identically to the print copy. Some ebooks in common formats like epub can also have page numbers embedded, though your ebook reader may not display these by default. You can tell if the numbers your software displays are "page numbers" because the page total should be equal to the page count of the print edition. More commonly, ebook readers will instead display a "location" number, which is generated dynamically and not consistent from user to user. This is because factors like screen size and display settings of your ereader software or device will cause the text to be split into "screens" differently. These numbers are not useful for citations. In cases where a true page number from embedded metadata or a print edition is not available, you have two options: Chapter citations If the book has chapters, you can include the chapter where the relevant content is found with the `\|chapter=` parameter. Note this should use the chapter title, not a number (unless the chapters are indicated only with numbers, in which case that is the title: eg. "3."). While not as precise as a page number, this will still aid readers in locating your citations. <example of chapter cite> Quotes Another option, and probably the best way, is to actually quote the relevant content with the `\|quote=` parameter. Note that this should be a short quotation, and need not neccessarily include all the relevant content you relied on. The text of the quotation will aid readers in locating the relevant section of the ebook. <example of quote cite> Ideally, these two methods can be used together to craft a citation that is clear and easy to locate in either print or digital editions of the work. <example>

One nagging question for me is presented by [the Epub spec], which indicates static page boundaries MAY correspond to a print edition, or may be exclusive to the ebook. I'm not sure how much this is used in practice, but it means potentially a page number from an ebook edition could be useful for a citation, but only if you also have the ebook edition. Thus it seems to me it's important to indicate somehow that an ebook release is being referenced, but I'm not clear on how. |edition= seems an obvious choice, but I think that would be considered a mis-use (one might have an ebook version of a 2nd Edition).

There's also not an obvious place to insert these best practices in the Template:cite_book page. particularly considering all the transclusions; this won't be of much use if it's buried several headings deep. Frankly I think the organization of this page is a mess overall; I would call the table of parameters the "meat" of the article, yet that's buried under a disclosure triangle and irrelevant headings at Usage>Vertical formats>Full. Template:citation at least has sections for different types of media already so it could make more sense there. Or, maybe a dedicated template+doc page for ebooks would be justified, but scanning the parameters of cite_book I'm seeing a pretty small number that are irrelevant to ebooks so I doubt that makes sense. Walkersam (talk) 22:17, 22 May 2026 (UTC)

Walkersam: See WP:EBOOK from the guideline WP:Citing sources. If you want to expand on the guideline that is more expansive, the traditional way is with an essay. If the essay is well written, rules-based, common sense and useful, linking to it from the guideline can often work without too much resistance. -- GreenC 04:32, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Way to silence CS1 maint: unrecognized language?

As an introduction, I'm a new editor here, but I recently began perusing through CS1 maintenance categories.

I found Category:CS1 maint: unrecognized language, and noticed that there's not a proper way to silence the error for legitimate languages that aren't recognized as ISO-639-1 or -2. I did a quick search on this page and its archives after being sent here from the teahouse, and I couldn't find anything really mentioning this, so no idea if consensus has been reached that this is a bad idea.

Obviously this is a pretty low priority thing, being maintenance messages that are automatically hidden, but I feel like it'd be better to have a way to remove pages from this category, that way editors can focus on fixing citations with actual improper languages used.

For example this is how it could work (taken from Bade language and apologies for the juvenile formatting - writing this in a pinch),

	Input	Output
Current	{{Cite book \|...\|language=Bade<!--bde does not work as of 2025-05-04-->, en, ha \|...}}	(in Bade, English, and Hausa) (maint error)
New	{{Cite book \|...\|language=((Bade)), en, ha \|...}}	(in Bade, English, and Hausa)

The module would 'recognize' (better described as ignore) languages formatted with double parenthesis surrounding them. Obviously, this comes with some drawbacks, but I think that if an editor were to know about this, they probably would also know how to format this parameter? Hopefully.. This seems to already exist for the Category:CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list page as well.

Apologies if this isn't the right page to discuss this topic on, or how changes like this start. TheGrapeEscape (talk) 22:50, 24 May 2026 (UTC)

This is either Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration, or something more fundamental. i.e. the MediaWiki software itself. I suspect the second one: since there is no Bade Wikipedia, there's little need to set up that language code/name pair. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:43, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

Yeah, I agree that it'd be too much unnecessary work to add support for language codes, since that involves documenting them all. At first, I thought the choice to not include ISO-639-3 was for parity with the rest of MediaWiki, but it's definitely because there are way too many languages under it to manage.

Instead, I was suggesting that we allow the error to be silenced by wrapping it in double parenthesis, meant to be used for languages that don't have enough international speakers. It's possible to misuse something like that, but when going through articles in this category, I noticed a lot of comments similar to the one documented in the table. So, editors are aware of the language not having a code recognized, most of the time. Also, I bet someone could probably run a script through a dump of every page to find uses of them being used improperly? There are currently about 500 pages in the category, but I feel like there have to be way more sources using local languages and dialects like this, where editors were unsure if they could put the language in the template, or just didn't know to add it.

I'll have to look through the config more, but I actually ended up noticing another thing somewhat related to this: Whatever code in the module that does the categorizing doesn't recognize sr-el as a valid language, despite it being in the configuration (and probably docs), mapped to display as "Serbian (Latin script)" - as opposed to Cyrillic, on line 1311. There are probably other errors like this, but I just thought I'd mention it since I caught this particular one. Not sure what would need to be changed to fix this particular one, but I'll probably dig through the scripts later today to see if I can find where the categories are added. TheGrapeEscape (talk) 17:55, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

Re: Cite web

{{Cite web}} doesn't let you cite two url's, unlike {{cite book}} which does. Can you add this, please? For example, I'm trying to link to a Sotheby's auction item. This info has two links, the item itself and the general auction. The template doesn't let me do that. On the other hand, with a book, I can link to both the chapter and the book itself. Viriditas (talk) 20:43, 25 May 2026 (UTC)

You could use ‹See TfM›|at= -> "General auction". Item details. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 01:54, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks. Will do. Viriditas (talk) 03:11, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Just understand the URL in the ‹See TfM›|at= is not attached to ‹See TfM›|archive-url= so when it dies, a bot won't fix it. Other processes and reports may skip it. The general auction seems gratuitous .. is it verifying information not available in the item link? Place your key URL in the ‹See TfM›|url= field, it will be more secure from the ravages of entropy. To make it robust, use two cite web templates.-- GreenC 04:21, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Cite sign should accept a location parameter with numbers, or explain why it does't

{{Cite sign}} does not accept a location parameter with numbers. I found this example in User:Arbeh/draft/Harry Bowers.

Original: Template:Cite sign
((...)) doesn't help: Template:Cite sign
Spell 10 as "Ten" fixes it: Template:Cite sign

The real story is that ‹See TfM›|location= expects a city, not a street address or "In the hall of the mountain king" or whatever, but it should be explained. —Anomalocaris (talk) 03:54, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Were these billboards up for a short period in 1979? As in they not there now. Sources for verification have to exist so other editors can check them, if the billboard weren't a permanent installation whether ‹See TfM›|location= is correct or not is rather a secondary issue. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:13, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

The ‹See TfM›|location= parameter is for the location of the publisher. So, where is the headquarters for Eyes and Ears Foundation? Presumably it's in SF, CA; so use ‹See TfM›|location=San Francisco, California. This is explained at Template:Cite sign#csdoc_location. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:15, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Accept-as-written markup for archive url?

On the Wayback Machine's Wikipedia page, there is a source (#8) citing one of the oldest archives, and it dates to 1995, which triggers a cs1 error even though the url works and is legitimate. As far as I know there is no way to use accept-this-as-written markup for the archive-url parameter. Is there a way this could be added or some other way to fix the error? Thanks. BlaqWiedow (talk) 04:59, 30 May 2026 (UTC)

False positive detection of deprecated archiving service

The url https://web.archive.org/web/20170929152253/https://www.npmjs.com/package/archive.is is detected as being deprecated, I'm guessing because of the 'archive.is' part, it's entirely unrelated. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 16:10, 30 May 2026 (UTC)

already been fixed in the sandbox:

{{cite web/new |title=Unofficial Node.js API for archive.is |website=npmjs |url=https://www.npmjs.com/package/archive.is |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170929152253/https://www.npmjs.com/package/archive.is |archive-date=2017-09-29}}

Template:Cite web/new

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:35, 30 May 2026 (UTC)

Category:CS1 errors: generic name

Special:Search/insource:"first=Daily" insource:/first *= *daily/i might be something to be added. 1234qwer 1234qwer 4 02:38, 7 June 2026 (UTC)

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