Why doesn't Wikipedia require everyone to use exactly the same style for formatting citations on every single article, regardless of the subject?
Different academic disciplines use different styles because they have different needs and interests. Variations include differences in the choice of information to include, the order in which the information is presented, the punctuation, and the name of the section headings under which the information is presented. There is no
house style on Wikipedia, and the community does not want to have the
holy war that will happen if we tell people that they must use the style preferred by scientists in articles about history or the style preferred by artists when writing about science.
Editors should choose a style that they believe is appropriate for the individual article in question and should
never edit-war over the style of citations.
What styles are commonly used?
There are
many published style manuals. For British English the
Oxford Style Manual is the authoritative source. For American English the Chicago Manual of Style is commonly used by historians and in the fine arts. Other US style guides include
APA style which is used by sociologists and psychologists, and The MLA Style Manual which is used in humanities. The
Council of Science Editors and
Vancouver styles are popular with scientists. Editors on Wikipedia may use any style they like, including styles they have made up themselves. It is unusual for Wikipedia articles to strictly adhere to a formally published academic style.
Isn't everyone required to use clickable footnotes like this[1] to cite sources in an article?
Why doesn't Wikipedia require everyone to use citation templates in every single article?
Citation templates have advantages and disadvantages. They provide machine-readable meta data and can be used by editors who don't know how to properly order and format a citation. However, they are intimidating and confusing to most new users, and, if more than a few dozen are used, they make the pages noticeably slower to load. Editors should use their best judgment to decide which format best suits each specific article.
Isn't there a rule that every single sentence requires an inline citation?
No.
Wikipedia:Verifiability requires citations based on the content rather than the grammar. Sometimes, one sentence will require multiple inline citations. In other instances, a whole paragraph will not require any inline citations.
Yes, signs, including gravestones, that are displayed in public are considered publications. If the article is using citation templates, then use {{
cite sign}}. You may also cite works of art, videos, music album liner notes, sheet music, interviews, recorded speeches, podcasts, television episodes, maps, public mailing lists, ship registers, and a wide variety of other things that are
published and accessible to the public.
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this list. For talk archives from the previous Manual of Style (footnotes) page see
Help talk:Footnotes.
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This page falls under the
contentious topics procedure and is given additional attention, as it closely associated to the English Wikipedia
Manual of Style, and the
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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)reply
No, everything in Wikipedia must be verifiable from reliable sources. If reliable sources do not yet exist, then the information must wait for inclusion until it is covered in reliable sources. It is not our job to preserve information that has not been published in a reliable source.
Donald Albury19:57, 6 June 2024 (UTC)reply
Maps don't get updated very often. The town where I have lived for the last 25 years has grown significantly during that period - and had been doing so at intervals for around 200 years. The street where I live was built in stages from about 1935 to about 1965, but some portions are missing from maps published about ten years after they were actually built. Maps can't be used to cite when something was built, or even that it existed at the publication date. --
Redrose64 🌹 (
talk)
21:05, 6 June 2024 (UTC)reply
References given as footnotes, such as this one, don't need to include quotes at all. A quotation in the main text should always be translated, but that's not the case here anyway.
Gawaon (
talk)
20:23, 14 June 2024 (UTC)reply
True, we don’t require that citations include quotations - however, if a citation does quote a non-English source (as is the case here) we need to translate it … per
WP:RSUEQ. Even a machine translation is preferable to no translation. The alternative is to remove the non-English text from the citation.
Blueboar (
talk)
20:40, 14 June 2024 (UTC)reply
Noting here – after reading the guideline – that
WP:RSUEQ uses the language should. That is, non-English quotations in footnotes do not require translation, but they are encouraged and recommended.There are quite a few Classical Chinese quotations scattered about the project, where the quote primarily serves as a search string to locate the text in the source. Translating all of these would take a whole lot of work, and they're already summarised in English in the prose citing them. Removing them would nearly break verifiability.
Folly Mox (
talk)
13:12, 20 June 2024 (UTC)reply
I agree with Folly Mox; if there's a reason to provide a non-English quotation, it should never be removed, and WP:RSUEQ doesn't recommend this. --
Michael Bednarek (
talk)
13:21, 20 June 2024 (UTC)reply
My understanding is that there are two things that need translation into English for a non-English source: the title and any quotations (in text or in the citation). --User:Ceyockey (talk to me)
01:02, 15 June 2024 (UTC)reply
the title needs to be translated and presented in the trans-title parameter -- this is an essential thing, I believe. User:Ceyockey (talk to me)
02:45, 20 June 2024 (UTC)reply
(sorry if trans-title is the wrong field - not checking the template at the moment so memory might not serve.) User:Ceyockey (talk to me)
02:45, 20 June 2024 (UTC)reply
Yes, there's a trans-title parameter, but its usage is optional. I've seen dozens or hundreds of references to French, Spanish, German etc. works, and the title is never translated – indeed to me it would feel a bit silly if it were. Now, if the original is in a different script (Cyrillic, Chinese etc.), a translation might be more useful – but I don't have found any rule suggesting that it must be translated. The only rule that seems to exist is
WP:RSUEQ, which refers to translating quotations, not titles.
Gawaon (
talk)
06:24, 20 June 2024 (UTC)reply
Yes, the only information required to be in English is body prose (including direct quotes). Citation information – title, quote, author, anything – does not require translation, although translation is recommended and often quite helpful for readers and editors both.
Folly Mox (
talk)
13:17, 20 June 2024 (UTC)reply
I’d encourage translation but not require it (status quo). Similar to
WP:OFFLINE sources it's allowed, but if there’s doubt and inability to verify, that’s a good reason to request clarification, but solely on its own we shouldn’t be removing sources merely because we don't access it or understand its language. ~ 🦝
Shushugah (he/him •
talk)
20:26, 20 June 2024 (UTC)reply
Just keep in mind that not all citations are created using a template. We still allow editors to type them out the old fashioned way.
Blueboar (
talk)
20:58, 20 June 2024 (UTC)reply
This
edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.
Under the sub-heading Citation generation tools there is a statement: "Citer is an all-purpose tool that generates complete scientific citations." This is true, but restrictive. Citer is useful for many types of citations that are not necessarily scientific. General web pages and news articles are two examples. Please remove the word "scientific" from the description.
A notable example of a date of limited relevance is the date when an author accessed a document.
Including the date of access inexplicably breaks with tradition. Would a reference to an ink-and-paper document show when the authors of the citing document accessed that document, say at a public library? No.
Unlike other elements in a reference, an access date is not a property of the referenced content.
An access date doesn't show whether the referenced content has changed between the time the citing document was written and the time the reader might view the referenced document. The way to learn that is to compare the date of the citing document to the update date of the referenced document.
Using an access date in place of an update date is something of a con. If a referenced document's date were missing in the ink-and-paper world, the reference would say "n. d." or "no date."
You seem to be arguing that access date is not a useful datapoint, but then propose that another parameter be added to it rather than replace it. Could you explain the reasoning there?
Nikkimaria (
talk)
05:21, 17 June 2024 (UTC)reply
Hello
Page Notes, "date of last update" would just go into the |date= parameter. (Like using the date of whatever later edition of a book you're reading.) The |access-date= parameter is useful on a page that changes,(6) and when a link goes dead. Access dates are used in
APA,
Chicago, and
Harvard Style citations.
Rjjiii (
talk)
05:25, 17 June 2024 (UTC)reply
These style guides differ regarding last update. APA has this to say: "If a date of last update is available (such as for a webpage), use it in the reference." ... "Include a retrieval date only if the work is unarchived and designed to change over time. Most references do not include retrieval dates." --
https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/elements-list-entry#retrieval
We don't require them either. Including them is nevertheless a good idea, especially if the page is more or less likely to change or go away.
Gawaon (
talk)
18:13, 17 June 2024 (UTC)reply
Access dates are used by editors who are trying to match the correct versions at archive.org. They therefore have a practical purpose.
Also, they put a limit on "no date" sources. We may not know when the webpage was published, but we know it was on or before the access date.
WhatamIdoing (
talk)
22:40, 20 June 2024 (UTC)reply
I encountered a situation today where I needed to
put an additional detail in parentheses that is covered by a separate source from the sources used for the rest of the sentence. It seems kind of strange to use all three sources for the sentence that was there before both at the end and before the parentheses, but the source I added does not cover what came before the parentheses.—
Vchimpanzee •
talk •
contributions •
19:44, 1 July 2024 (UTC)reply
Would an
explanatory foot note work? It will hide the content you are putting in parentheses until the reader clicks on the link, but it certainly makes the connection between the content and the reference clearer. If you want to keep the extra content always visible, you could also break up the sentence.
Donald Albury20:16, 1 July 2024 (UTC)reply
Won't help if I don't know when I've done this previously. I found that one of the three sources for the entire sentence didn't verify anything, and got a
404 error for another source. So I concluded the third source would verify everything (it requires a subscription) and put it before what was in parentheses, and reworded so the information would match.—
Vchimpanzee •
talk •
contributions •
22:24, 1 July 2024 (UTC)reply
Semi-protected edit request on 2 July 2024
This
edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.
Note: Not sure if my first attempt went through (please excuse if this is redundant).
Regarding "Slavery in colonial Spanish America" article:
4. Seijas, Tatiana.Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians. New York: Cambridge University Press 2014.[page needed]
Not done. {{edit semi-protected}} is placed on a talk page to request an edit of the corresponding article or project. The citation mentioned in the request is not present on
Wikipedia:Citing sources, rather, it is in
Slavery in colonial Spanish America. That article does not appear to be protected. I'd do it myself but I don't have that book. Since Mearnest1 has done the research to find the page number, it's Mearnest1 who should make the edit.
Jc3s5h (
talk)
19:31, 2 July 2024 (UTC)reply
Repeating publisher and location information for different articles from same website?
This is a relatively niche question. Let's say an article, such as
AHS Krab, cites ten or more separate articles from the same news website. The citations cannot be combined using a single reference name, because each one links to a different URL. Must the publisher and location information be repeated for every single citation, or is it sufficient to include it in the first reference to that website?
Huntthetroll (
talk)
23:45, 4 July 2024 (UTC)reply
In many articles references are removed or replaced with better ones. If that replace reference happened to be the one that contained the complete set of source details then they are lost for all the subsequent references from the same source. Of course, they are still in the article's history, so they could be recovered but at extra cost of editor effort - which often doesn't happen. Or sometimes the order of cites is changed, making a middle cite fuller then both preceding and following cites from the same source - weird looking!
On the flip side, the cost of putting full the details in every reference from that source is just a copy/paste operation, so it is quite minimal effort. In fact, I often build up one in full by hand, then copy it many times and then alter the specific details - much quicker than typing it all by hand. Stepho talk00:41, 5 July 2024 (UTC)reply
I agree, making each citation self-contained seems best, as it is probably easiest to follow for the reader and robust in view of future changes.
Gawaon (
talk)
08:05, 5 July 2024 (UTC)reply
Gawaon, I came to the same conclusion as you and
|Stepho did when I was editing
AHS Krab last night. Since I intend to continue adding content and citations to the article, I prioritize reader convenience and robustness in the face of a changing set of references. I will also investigate
Folly Mox's suggestion about using {{
harvc}}.
Huntthetroll (
talk)
17:23, 5 July 2024 (UTC)reply
Huntthetroll, this reply will assume you're referring to the citations to the websites Defence24 and Altair, repeatedly cited with the respective parameters |website= Defence24|publisher= Defence24|location= Warsaw, Poland and |website= Altair|publisher= Altair Agencja Lotnicza|location= Warsaw, Poland. I'd argue that the publisher and location of these websites are unnecessary in every case, including the first references to these sources.It's almost never helpful to include both |website= and |publisher= where the values for those parameters match to a large degree, as they do in these cases. It's also rare to include the |location= of a website, unless it's the website of what used to be a physical news-paper.
Folly Mox (
talk)
13:29, 5 July 2024 (UTC)reply
I initially thought the same, but I eventually changed my mind.
I tried to imagine the perspective of a reader that is completely unfamiliar with the article's topic, or with any of the sources cited. I would not expect the reader to know or assume that, for instance, the Polish-language website defence24.pl and the English-language website defence24.com are published by the same Polish limited-liability company, Defence24
Sp. z o.o. In fact, I was going to leave out the publisher for the similarly named site nowiny24.pl, because I assumed that the same company would be responsible, but decided to double-check the site's "O nas" ("about us") page, just to be sure. Suprisingly, nowiny24.pl is published by a completely different company, which should mean that it can be used to cross-check information from Defence24. I would not have known this, nor would any reader, if I had not looked up the publisher.
In the case of a web citation, I treat |location= as the location of the publisher's headquarters. I find that this provides important information about the publisher's "institutional perspective", for lack of a better phrase, by showing the publisher's proximity to centers of political and economic power.
Sure! Whatever works best for your own editing flow and job satisfaction. I said above I'd argue, which appears to have been incorrect. Happy editing,
Folly Mox (
talk)
16:22, 6 July 2024 (UTC)reply