Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#c-WhatamIdoing-20250424205500-Himaldrmann-20250424195600

A question was raised at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Beauty Revealed/archive1 regarding the use of parenthetical referencing in end notes/explanatory notes. The current wording of WP:PAREN reads {{green|This includes short citations in parentheses placed within the article text itself, such as (Smith 2010, p. 1).}} (emphasis in original), with the only explicit exception reading {{green|This does not affect short citations that use tags, which are not inline parenthetical references; see the section on short citations above for that method.}}

Could there be some clarification as to what exactly within the article text itself entails? Does it mean in the body of the text; the body and the infobox; the body and the media captions; the body, image captions, and explanatory notes, or some other unspecified mix? — Chris Woodrich (talk) 00:44, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

:I was the editor who brought up the above concern at the Beauty Revealed FAC. My interpretation of the above quote was that it was emphasising that parenthetical citations should not be in the article body. I could not find any text that gave an exception to notes within WP:PAREN or the RfC. My belief is that the deprecation and prohibition of parenthetical citations include notes. Z1720 (talk) 01:02, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

:That's correct; I had not mentioned any arguments to avoid potentially influencing the discussion. My argument (copied from the FAC nom) is that "Regarding the treatment of explanatory notes, I note that MOS:FNNR treats them as though they are equivalent to citations ({{green|If there are both citation footnotes and explanatory footnotes, then they may be combined in a single section, or separated using the grouped footnotes function.}}). Template:Efn also treats explanatory footnotes as similar to citations, defining explanatory notes as {{green|footnotes which provide something other than, or more than, a reference to a source that supports the accompanying text}} (emphasis mine)." I note also that the initial RFC made a specific reference to reader-friendliness, which is why I have used in-line for footnotes (one less click for readers who have already had to click once to read the endnote). I removed all endnotes from the FAC under consideration above; examples of what the style being discussed is like can be seen at Gao Qifeng and The True Record. — Chris Woodrich (talk) 01:07, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

::I would tend to agree that the endnotes are not part of the article body and so not covered by PAREN. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:16, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

:::I also agree that the readability of the endnotes as used in this version is much better than forcing inline citations into the notes. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 04:08, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

::Wikipedia:If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it. I realize that's a hard story to sell at FAC, but it's a long-standing policy.

::In this case, the two short citations were well-formatted, with links to the books they refer to. They are identical to the short citations in the immediately following ==References== section. The only difference is that, having already clicked down to read the footnote's text, you don't have to click another time to find out which source is being cited. I think that this is actually a good thing, as the (rare) interested reader need only:

::# Click to get to the footnote, and then

::# Click to get to the full citation for the whole book.

::instead of:

::# Click to get to the footnote, and

::# Click to get to the short citation, and then finally

::# Click to get to the full citation for the whole book.

::@Z1720, this is a bit pedantic, but I notice that in the FAC page, you say that the short citations "should be replace with inline citations". They already are inline citations, because anything that associates a given bit of material with a source is an WP:Inline citation. I think you meant something like "should be reformatted to use little blue clicky numbers". Ref tags (those little blue clicky numbers) are the most popular, but they are not the only permitted form. If you truly can't bear the idea of parentheses in a footnote, then we can replace them with something else. Daggers would fit the time period of the article's subject, if the OP doesn't wish to see little blue clicky numbers in the footnote, or the full citation could be duplicated in the footnote, if the OP doesn't wish to make readers click three times to see it. But I think this is unnecessary. This is not an unreasonable approach to citing this article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 09:12, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

:::{{re|WhatamIdoing}} I do not think parenthetical citations are an improvement in the notes, which is why I did not invoke WP:IAR. I actually think parenthetical citations are detrimental to the reader because of the reasons mentioned in the RfC that deprecated them: most readers do not care about the citations and ignore the footnotes when reading articles, and parenthetical citations clutter the text with extra characters that the reader is forced to read to get to the information. I think it is better to have a footnote be at the end of each note. Z1720 (talk) 14:54, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

::::I think it is insane to require footnotes in your footnotes merely because some of the footnotes have added explanations in them and that turns them magically into text and text cannot have parentheses. If you have footnotes with short citations (clearly an accepted style, still), and some of those footnotes also have explanations in them, that is not a problem. Otherwise your point taken to a logical extreme would require an infinite regress of short citations because the nth-level short citations could not contain parenthetical references and would have to have footnotes pointing to (n+1)-level citations, and so on ad infinitum et ad absurdam. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:54, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

::::If {{tq|most readers [...] ignore the footnotes}}, then it doesn't matter how we format the information we put in them. The argument for deprecating in-text parenthetical references was based on the clutter that they (supposedly) introduce. If most readers are just skipping over the footnotes, then they won't care about those footnotes containing clutter, will they? The rationale for avoiding parenthetical references just doesn't apply. {{pb}} An example: I recently overhauled the article on von Neumann entropy. Prior to that, I'd been working on quantum entanglement, which used a lot of {{tl|rp}} tags to provide page numbers for repeatedly-cited books. I stuck with that style per WP:CITEVAR; I don't dislike it as much as some people, but there was an awful lot of it, so I decided to avoid it for von Neumann entropy. There, I went with {{tl|sfn}}s for everything that is cited more than once. It's also helpful for when the same point is discussed in multiple books, so we can do short footnotes like {{tq|Nielsen & Chuang 2010, p. 106; Rieffel & Polak 2011, p. 218; Bengtsson & Życzkowski 2017, p. 435.}} But not every book discusses the same topic at the same level. Rieffel and Polak's Quantum Computing: A Gentle Introduction is written at a more introductory level than Bengtsson and Życzkowski's Geometry of Quantum States; the former is for undergraduates and the latter for graduate students, basically. If we wanted to explain this, so that our readers can know where to look first for what they want, the natural way to do that would be to give a few words within the footnote itself. Requiring footnotes within footnotes is just demanding blue clicky numbers for their own sake. XOR'easter (talk) 19:58, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

:::::If an explanatory footnote contains material that is challenged or is likely to be challenged, then it must cite one or more reliable sources in-line. If :Template:Efn is used for the footnote, then either ... or :Template:Sfn may be used as a short footnote citation, eliminating any need for parenthetical citations. In practice, I almost always cite sources for content in explanatory footnotes to head off any future challenges. Donald Albury 23:28, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

::::::If you want to make it harder for the reader to find and understand article sourcing by making them have to jump three times, first having to go to one kind of footnote that explains the sources, and from there to a second kind of footnote that gives you a brief reference to the footnote, and from there to a third part of the references containing the detailed reference metadata, then I guess that's a valid style, but I don't see the point of all this separation. Requiring that other people do it your way goes against WP:CITEVAR, is not what the deprecation of parenthetical references in actual article text is about, and cannot be justified by that deprecation. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:38, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

:::::::Explanatory notes are not supposed to be for explaining sources, they are for content that may be of interest to readers, but is more or less peripheral to the topic of the article. If explanatory notes are used as intended, then there are not three jumps to the source. In explanatory notes, as in the main body of the article, there are in-line citations that link to the Reflist, some of which are full citations, and some of which are short references to the full citations. Donald Albury 00:58, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

::::::::"{{tq|In explanatory notes, as in the main body of the article, there are in-line citations that link to the Reflist}}" not on mobile though. Most reader will get a popup from a footnote now. If you click the footnote link in a mobile popup, it'll replace that with another popup. I've done parenthetical/short citations in explanatory notes because it allows a mobile reader to have the explanatory note and citation on the screen at the same time. {{tl|Efn}} makes ref tags so parenthetical citations within that template seem outside the scope of the deprecation RfC. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 02:24, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

::::::::Explanatory notes can be for whatever one wants to explain. If one wants to explain something about the sources, in a footnote, in an article that uses short footnotes, then there is nothing wrong with doing that, and with using a harv-style parenthetical reference in the explanatory footnote to say which source the explanation is about.

::::::::An article in which the footnotes contain lots of text about the subject of the article is often a badly organized article. If the text about the subject is relevant enough to include, it is relevant enough to include in the main article text. For a horrific example see 24-cell ([https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=24-cell&oldid=1262995924 current version]) in which the huge number of explanatory footnotes on off-topic material include the subset {m,r,s,t,ab,ad,ai,al,am,ar,bz,ca,cf,ci,cj,ck,cl,cm,ct,cu,cv,cy,cz,dd} all of which can be reached from each other by following internal chains of footnotes within footnotes within...etc. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:02, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

::::::::This seems like a good reason to just combine all of the footnotes, whether they contain prose or citations, into one unified category of "Notes", so that there won't be pedantic arguments about what possible kind of text is allowable in which type of note. –jacobolus (t) 07:40, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

{{od}}For a good example of how informational footnotes which have supporting references to them should work, see Cefnllys Castle. There are many FA's that work in exactly the same way. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 10:10, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

:I've added clarification to WP:PAREN based on this discussion. -- Beland (talk) 21:12, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

{{discussion top|result=No change. Most participants seem to favor keeping the MOS short by not adding detail on this issue. The line between using a parenthetical phrase that happens to only contain a year and narrative citation is a bit blurry, and some found the former useful in some circumstances and argued against an absolute prohibition. There seems to be consensus that putting years in parentheses when mentioning a source should in most cases be avoided, either because they count narrative citation as a type of prohibited parenthetical citation, or because they just find it bad writing compared to using a prepositional phrase or adjective or similar grammatical construct ("Brown's 1819 book" or "In 1993, Ramzi wrote"). -- Beland (talk) 08:15, 30 April 2025 (UTC)}}

There is currently no rule regarding "[author] ([year])" citing within a sentence. Should there be? 15:53, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

[https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/basic-principles/author-date The APA Style website] calls the "(author, year)" format and the "author (year)" format parenthetical citation and narrative citation, respectively.

We have a policy forbidding parenthetical citation, WP:PAREN. But we have no policy regarding narrative citation. That would be WP:NARR I guess, because WP:NAR is taken.

Real-life examples:

• Pokémon (full list of citations)
• ICD-11 (full list of citations)
• In particular, see ICD-11#Gaming disorder

A fictional example:

An important reason to mention an author as a WP:INTEXT (with or without publication year) is to emphasize that this is what *they* believe to be true, not what *Wikipedia* believes to be true. It is *their* point of view, not Wikipedia's. This improves an article's accuracy and neutrality.

Mentioning the publication year of a source may be valuable. If the murder was committed in 1983, then a source published in 1986 was written in a very different context than a source published 23 years after the event. With regards to forensic science: DNA evidence would not have been available in the 1980s, but it could be in the 2000s.

Another argument in support of explicitly stating publication years is artificial intelligence. In the ensuing decades, AI will be able to create essays, books, and educational videos with a degree of quality much higher than is currently the case. Eventually, it will be able to make full-length documentaries on par with those made by humans. These seemingly reliable sources, almost indistinguishable from non-AI ones, can be produced and published with way lesser human input than what used to be the case. Writing "Author (2006)" and "Author (2060)" would make it clear which source is from < 2022, i.e. purely human, and which one is from >= 2022, i.e. possibly made with part-human/part-computer input.

If we decide to allow narrative citations, then the policy should also make it clear on what sources they can be used, and on what sources they should not be used. Normally, the format is used for citing academic papers, articles in scientific journals, and books. It is typically not used for social media posts and documentaries. Articles and blog posts are a grey area, but I do believe we need to differentiate between an extremely well-researched piece from The New York Times and some random article from IGN.

What are your thoughts? 💭 - Manifestation (talk) 15:53, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

:For the record: I fully agree with WP:PAREN. This is not a proposal to change WP:PAREN. I think that parenthetical citing is ugly. I don't even like {{tl|rp}}, because I think it's also ugly. But this is different. For a real-life example, see here (and here for full list of cites). - Manifestation (talk) 15:53, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

::I think narrative citation is allowable, and sometimes the best approach. I have some qualms about what we see in ICD-11#Gaming_disorder.

::{{quote|Gaming disorder ({{ICD11|6C51}}) has been newly added to the ICD-11, and placed in the group "Disorders due to addictive behaviours", alongside Gambling disorder ({{ICD11|6C50}}).}} If the maintainers of {{tl|ICD11}} fail to keep it working, it could be hard for a reader to understand what is being cited. Jc3s5h (talk) 16:58, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

:::Using embedded links in text is discouraged (WP:CS:EMBED), I don't think using a template to create them hangers that. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 17:21, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

::::This is not what this RfC is about. - Manifestation (talk) 17:33, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

:::::No it's an aside, as I was replying to the content brought up by Jc3s5h. Even outside of the context of this RFC those links shouldn't be embedded in text. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 17:49, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

:I don't think this is disallowed but I don't think it's good practice either. Instead of "Author (year) wrote" I would suggest "In year, Author wrote" or something similar. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 17:25, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

::I think this is not a matter for Wikipedia:Citing sources at all. In-text attribution is part of article text, and subject to MOS. We can say that someone said something in some year, in whichever of these formats we like, but cite that to a reference that is by someone else in another year, as long as that reference supports the text. The text of the article is a description of someone doing something in some year. The reference is whatever we put in a footnote to support it. It might be a footnote to the same publication that is implicitly referred to by the text or it might not. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:58, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

:::"I think this is not a matter for Wikipedia:Citing sources at all."
Yes it is.

:::"In-text attribution is part of article text, and subject to MOS."
Then why is WP:INTEXT part of Wikipedia:Citing sources?

:::The rest of your comment is incomprehensible. - Manifestation (talk) 19:22, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

::::I think David Eppstein's point is that WP:INTEXT is about when attribution is required, but the stylistic choice of the manor of that attribution is a matter of MOS. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 19:50, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

:::::There's only one style to do it in: "Author (year)". Also, I would like to know if the community wants narrative citation or not. If not, then Wikipedia:Citing sources should forbid it. Cheers, Manifestation (talk) 20:38, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

::::::Manifestation, please prove your assertion "There's only one style to do it in: Author (year)". I also don't think we should not express a preference about whether parentheses may be used in narrative attribution. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:47, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

::::::There are many ways of doing in, and the style of text is a MOS matter. Parenthical referencing is mentioned in Citing Sources because is a type of referencing. How text should be styled has nothing to do with referencing, which is why this is a manual of style issue. As I said I don't think this is a good stylistic choice, but there's nothing here or elsewhere forbidding it. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 21:12, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

:::::::How many styles could there be to write "Author (year)"? The only stylistic choice I could think off is whether to use "and" or "&".

:::::::For example:
"However, Doe & Cloe (2025) suggested a different explanation";
"However, Doe and Cloe (2025) suggested a different explanation".

:::::::- Manifestation (talk) 21:16, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

::::::::The one I mentioned previously. Although "author (year)" may well be the only way to write "author (year)", it's not the only way to do intext attribution. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 22:22, 7 February 2025 (UTC)

:Good references will usually include not just a work (way too vague), but also a page number or range, so a narrative citation will look like "Roberts (1986, pp.{{nbsp}}72–75). These should certainly be forbidden, and indeed I read WP:PAREN as already forbidding them. By extension this also applies to the fairly small number of cases where a work is so small that no page number is needed, or where the citation is indeed meant to cover the whole work. So these should not be used either. Such cases are to be distinguished from cases where a work is described by giving title and year: "Cormac McCarthy became famous after publishing The Road (2006)." That's not a citation at all, and so considerations regarding citation formatting do not apply. Gawaon (talk) 03:28, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

::I agree that reference-like metadata such as pages should not be used in this context. You would not write "In 1986, on pages 72-75, Roberts..." as article text so why would you write it the other way as article text? If your intent is not to tell readers about who made some discovery and when, but rather to point to where one can read a reference about it, it should be a footnote rather than in the article text at all. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:54, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

:::I think we can all agree on this. Page numbers belong in the s. - Manifestation (talk) 17:11, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

• I prefer other styles, but I don't think we should actively prohibit putting the year in parentheses. It feels like scope creep. It should be acceptable to write "Alice Expert (2008) argued something similar to what Bob Business recommended, except that they disagree about...", and I especially don't want to see people claiming that the publication year cannot be associated with a publication, in sentences such as "Her Book of Little Poems (1901) was largely ignored during her lifetime..." It might be better to write "Her Little Book of Poems was published in 1901 but largely ignored during her lifetime...", but we shouldn't make the perfect be the enemy of the good enough.{{pb}} Given that this is not the first time this question has come up on this page, it is probably time to write down a "It's not technically banned" rule somewhere. Also, please reconsider "in a 2006 JFS paper..." in light of the anti-hype advice in WP:MEDSAY, and when you wrote "accurate" in the table above, I suspect you meant "precise". WhatamIdoing (talk) 08:10, 10 February 2025 (UTC)
• :Well, what I meant with less accurate is to emphasize the difference between "Roberts (1986) believed that" and "Some historians believe that". In the former sentence, the author who said it is named. In the latter sentence, nobody is explicitly being named. This makes a phrase easier to read, but at the risk of weaseling ("Some say...", "It is possible that...", etc.). Cheers, Manifestation (talk) 17:18, 10 February 2025 (UTC)
• ::I agree it's good to mention the author in such cases, but why mention the year? Supposedly they upheld that believe also in later years, so it can safely be omitted. If they did change their belief, that should almost certainly be mentioned in the running text. ("In 1986 Roberts publicly expressed a belief that XXX, but five years later she admitted that she had been mistaken.") Gawaon (talk) 12:17, 11 February 2025 (UTC)
• :::The publication year of a source may be important to note. A source always reflects the state society was in, at that point in time. A Wikipedia article about electroconvulsive therapy may, with a neutral point of view, describe that it was once a common form of psychiatric treatment, and could cite various papers from the 1960s and 70s about it. With the advent of modern antidepressants in the 1980s and 90s, use of elektroshock declined, and criticism of it increased. Nowadays, it is used only rarely. - Manifestation (talk) 19:35, 24 February 2025 (UTC)
• ::::That's why we prefer newer sources if a field has changed. And if the year is important enough to mention in the running text, something like "in 1986" will do fine. I'm not saying that putting the year in parentheses is necessarily bad, but it's certainly not the only and probably (if the year is important) not the best way to do it. Compare: "World War I started in 1914" vs. "Then World War I started (1914)". Which one is the better way to put this? Gawaon (talk) 09:10, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
• Agree with the above (I think everyone so far?) that the practice described here being neither deprecated nor encouraged is an adequate requirement level: usually the prose can be reworked to flow more naturally, but in some cases it makes the most sense.{{pb}}A bit skeptical about forbidding or allowing this – or any text styling – based on source type, as suggested in the final paragraph of the RfC statement. Seems overengineered.{{pb}}So I suppose to answer the question as posed: no, I don't think there should be a rule about writing sentences containing strings like {{tqq|Author (year)}} or indeed {{tqq|Title (year)}}. Grafting onto the MOS practices that are strictly optional / permissible but neither recommended nor discouraged— therein lies bloat, and possibly the mistaken assumption that the only things ok to write are the ones specifically mentioned as such. Kindly, Folly Mox (talk) 11:43, 10 February 2025 (UTC)
• The rationale for deprecating parenthetical referencing was that Wikipedia has tags and {{template link|sfn}}, which declutter the prose and allow readers to easily click to read the full citation rather than rely on manually cross-referencing dates with a bibliography. I read the closure of the parenthetical referencing RFC to also apply to the narrative style of referencing. The proposal makes this case quite plainly: {{tq|merely proposing that we do not use inline, non software based, text parentheticals}} and {{tq|As to the other main wrinkle: use of The paper by Eek (2020) showed and Eek (p. 35). I also suggest this be phased out, in the interest of consistency}}.{{pb}}I'm also quite confused by a few parts of the rationale in this RFC: example two, {{xtn|"Jake Roberts believed that John Doe committed the murder. However, Tim Reese presented new evidence pointing to James Roe as the culprit."}} is listed as {{!tq|"possibly unclear that sources are being cited"}}; however, this isn't how such a sentence would appear in the encyclopedia. There would be ref tags linking to the full citation after each sentence: {{xt|"Jake Roberts believed that John Doe committed the murder.{{ref}} However, Tim Reese presented new evidence pointing to James Roe as the culprit.{{ref}}"}}. That, to me, is perfectly clear and how I expect Wikipedia articles to read. I'm also not convinced by the AI concerns in the proposal: this feels like a solution in search of a problem. If in 2060 the world decides to label each citation in written works with "before LLMs" and "after LLMs" then it can be reconsidered then, but I'm really not following the logic here to the conclusion that these concerns merit every Wikipedia citation having a date in the prose. The final part of the proposal, {{tq|"the policy should also make it clear on what sources they can be used"}}, also really seems to overcomplicate things. Citations to IGN reading like academic papers would definitely get annoying, which is why it really shouldn't be allowed in the first place. If we allow articles using narrative referencing, a good-faith editor will likely add newspaper article references in that style to such an article to meet CITEVAR, and will have to be rebuffed and explained to that the article actually has two concurrent citation styles: one for books and one for news articles. That'd be confusing to most editors and would possibly even ignite some very annoying edit wars. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 16:38, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

It's been a while since the last comment on this RfC. I've done a little spamming in the hopes of gaining more input (a little spamming is ok, right?).

Also, I would like to make a concrete proposal about an extra section, titled "Narrative referencing", right underneath the section "Parenthetical referencing". The former would be WP:PAREN, the latter would be WP:NARR.

{{block indent|style=background: white; padding: 1em; border: 1px solid #999;|1=

Parenthetical referencing

{{shortcut|WP:PAREN}}

Within the APA style of referencing, an "(Author, Year)" citation at the end of a sentence is called parenthetical citation, while an "Author (Year)" citation within a sentence is called narrative citation.

{{blockquote|Example of parenthetical citation:
It has been argued that social media has facilitated a growing distrust of science (Doe & Cloe, 2020).}}

{{blockquote|Example of narrative citation:
Doe and Cloe (2020) argued that social media has facilitated a growing distrust of science.}}

Parenthetical referencing has been deprecated on Wikipedia since September 2020 and should not be used.

[....explanation about parenthetical referencing....]

{{shortcut|WP:NARR}}

Narrative referencing is a type of in-text attribution in which an "Author (Year)" citation is used within a sentence. This is different from parenthetical referencing in which an "(Author, Year)" citation is used at the end of a sentence.

Here are two examples of narrative citations:

Doe and Cloe (2020) argued for stricter governmental regulations on social media.^[1] Roberts and Johnson (2022) instead urged states to invest in education and critical thinking skills.^[2]

References

----

1. ^ Doe, John; Cloe, Jane (2020). The Effects of Social Media. pp. 105–115.
2. ^ Roberts, Tim. Johnson, Dave (2022). The Importance of Education. p. 80 + 85.

The consensus of a 2025 RfC was that the use of narrative referencing on Wikipedia should neither be encouraged nor forbidden. It is, however, not allowed to use it in combination with in-text page numbers:

{{block indent|style=background: white; padding: 1em; border: 1px solid #999;|1={{cross}}
Doe and Cloe (2020, pp. 106-108) suggested laws that forced social media companies to be transparant.

}}

}}

What are your thoughts? 💭 - Manifestation (talk) 19:16, 24 February 2025 (UTC)

• I think:
• # That trying to create a written rule for everything is WP:CREEPY and a bad idea. I'm therefore doubtful that we actually need to add this proposed text and example.
• # That {{xt|"Alice (2020) said..."}} can almost always be either omitted or replaced by {{xt|"In 2020, Alice said..."}}. This will usually be preferable if the point is to identify the source as being either the latest and most up-to-date word, or to identify it as historical or potentially outdated. The parenthetical year is primarily useful if, for some rare reason, you need to distinguish in the text between multiple publications by the same author.
• # That in those rare instances when it can't be replaced by "In 2020..." (e.g., Alice originally said this in late 2019, but she repeats it in a source with an early 2020 publication date, so "In 2020, Alice said..." is misleading in a way that's relevant for the article), then {{xt|"Alice (2020) said..."}} is okay. Other formulations would equally be okay, e.g., {{xt|Alice later reported, in an article in The Magazine, that at the time she had said..."}} The sentence/paragraph should still end with a little blue clicky number.
• # That it is our policy that Wikipedia:If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it. This goes double for the details of formatting sources. Do what's right for the article, even if it means that you have to put a year in parentheses. {{pb}}WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:45, 24 February 2025 (UTC)
• I agree that this is excessive WP:CREEP. Ifly6 (talk) 20:53, 24 February 2025 (UTC)
• I agree with the general sentiment that this style of textual attribution is ok and not deprecated as parenthetical referencing (because it is textual attribution rather than a reference). But I also agree that formalizing it in this way is WP:CREEP. We don't generally need rules to say that it's ok to have article text of a certain form. I don't see why this case demands such a rule. In addition, this is totally misplaced. Because it is about article textual content rather than about referencing, this is the sort of thing that (if it belongs anywhere) belongs in the MOS, not on WP:Citing sources. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:19, 24 February 2025 (UTC)
• :Completely agree with all of David Eppstein's points. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 22:25, 24 February 2025 (UTC)
• ::If Wikipedia:Parenthetical referencing hadn't been WP:BLARd, then I would support adding a sentence to that to say, in effect, "BTW, 'Alice (2020) said...' is not a parenthetical reference, so that RFC is irrelevant". I don't think we need this in WP:CITE itself. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:54, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
• The proposed text here seems like overkill, and not entirely accurate. As referencing I'd say this variant of parenthetical referencing is deprecated with the others per Wikipedia:Citing sources#Parenthetical referencing. We still need the {{tag|ref|o}}. But as ordinary text "Name (year)" isn't so far outside the norm that we can say that every instance is intended as referencing rather than being a somewhat overly terse version of "In year, Name" or "Name (in year)" or the like, and as such is up to editorial judgement whether or not mentioning the year is relevant to the topic and how exactly it should be formatted. If anything is needed, I'd add just a sentence or two, maybe along the lines of {{tq|Narrative forms of parenthetical referencing, such as "Brown (2006, p. 2) wrote" or "Smith (2007) argues", are included in this deprecation. However, use caution when identifying deprecated narrative referencing, as similar constructs may be valid in-text attribution or other prose.}} Anomie⚔ 13:47, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
• :"Narrative forms of parenthetical referencing, such as "Brown (2006, p. 2) wrote" or "Smith (2007) argues", are included in this deprecation."
• :Narrative referencing is *not* a form of parenthetical referencing. They were *not* included in the deprecation. - Manifestation (talk) 21:04, 25 February 2025 (UTC)
• :: Whenever I find a reference to "narrative referencing", it's in conjunction with parenthetical referencing when the name of the author is used in the text. The pre-deprecation version of Wikipedia:Parenthetical referencing didn't even distinguish it with a separate name, merely stating {{tq|You may name the author within the article itself, in which case only put the year in parentheses}}. In the deprecation RFC, the "Name (year)" style was also explicitly proposed for deprecation, and the close did not except it from deprecation (nor did very many comments argue for deprecation of "(Name year)" but not "Name (year)"). Anomie⚔ 02:40, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
• :::If there is no rule about it, then how can future Wikipedians know if it's (not) OK to do? How is it possible that only in 2020 did Wikipedians reach consensus on parent. cites, yet no one thought of doing the same on narr. cites? - Manifestation (talk) 11:54, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
• :::: From what I linked, it appears that Wikipedians considered "narrative" cites as a special case of parenthetical citations. Anomie⚔ 13:31, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
• :::::I think it would only apply if there wasn't a reference somewhere to support the content. If a sentence started with "Smith (2020) said that ..." and end a with a reference, then that's just a way of writing text. I'm not a fan of writing text that way, but it doesn't appear to be covered by PAREN. If on the other hand the same sentence was otherwise unsupported and "Smith (2020)" was only defined in the reference section that would be deprecated by the RFC. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 14:01, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
• :::::: Sure, that's what I was saying above with {{tq|However, use caution when identifying deprecated narrative referencing, as similar constructs may be valid in-text attribution or other prose.}} On the other hand, if it is just a way of writing text then editors can rework it to be less awkward and the MOS can address it if people want it to. Anomie⚔ 03:52, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose. The addition is unnecessary, as others have noted. And regardless of whether author (year) references are already deprecated or not, the given examples are bad writing style that should preferably be rewritten. "Roberts and Johnson (2022) instead urged" is just needlessly repetitive since the full reference (including authors' names and year) is actually given in a footnote at the end of the sentence. Repeating them in the main text is just noise that will distract the reader who probably won't know these two authors. So some other wording like "Another study suggested" or "Another study from 2022 suggested" or "Two other educators urged" or whatever is preferable. If, on the other hand, the researchers are sufficiently notable to have their own articles, then their full names should be given and linked (at least on first mention): "Tim Roberts and Dave Johnson suggested in 2022". Gawaon (talk) 08:54, 26 February 2025 (UTC)
• I think narrative forms of parenthetical referencing should be included in the deprecation. The publication year is not necessary in the article prose since most readers do not care about this, it distracts the reader from the information they are trying to read about, and is redundant as the information is in the footnote. Z1720 (talk) 13:52, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
• :So you do not object to mentioning the names in article text.., just placing the date in parentheses? Blueboar (talk) 14:48, 3 March 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose: I would consider "narrative referencing", as defined in the proposal, to fall under "parenthetical referencing" as defined in the consensus for depreciation. In other words, this is already discouraged for good reason and there should not be an exception for it. If desperate to approximate it, an editor can always write "in a 2022 paper, John Smith argued that..." and cite the paper in a footnote as normal. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 13:43, 10 March 2025 (UTC)
• Oppose. This {{em|is}} covered by WP:PARENTHETICAL, and there is a clear consensus {{em|against}} WP articles being peppered with "According to Smith (2023) ..." and "A recent study (Smith 2023) ..." detritus. Including also page numbers and other detailia is {{em|worse}}, but is not the only thing covered; all parenthetical referencing is (and that means referencing by injecting source information parenthetically into the main text, with the original broad definition of parenthesis and parenthetic[al] (defn. 1), not a meaning of 'using round brackets', which are only called parentheses in American English, and only called that because their most frequent uses is bracketed in a parenthesis in the original sense). Reformatting something like that to be, e.g., "A recent study [Smith 2023]", or "A recent study^{Smith 2023}" or whatever, is not some magical back-door to evading WP:PARENTHETICAL. WP is not an academic journal nor written like one.

  The fact that one off-site citation style has made up its own neologistically invented distinction between so-called "parenthetic" and "narrative" citation micro-formatting doesn't mean that anyone else goes along with this narrowing of the definition of a parenthetical citation style, much less that WP has adopted it. The only reason to use such a style (i.e. a reason to invoke WP:IAR and do it anyway) is when the same author, or two by the same surname, are being repeatedly cited in the same WP article with multiple works in different years, such that we need to disambiguate between them. But even this is actually better handled by a) using shortened footnotes to just link to which Smith source we mean, and when really needed b) using clearer writing, e.g. "A later study by Emily Smith in 2023 ...", versus "Aldon G. Smith's 2017 research indicated ...", and so on. It's not that dates are magically forbidden, it's that "Surname (YYYY)" and "(Surname YYYY)" formatting is an unhelpful academicism that makes our readers' eyes glaze over. Either it is not contextually necessary at all (most often the case: our readers rarely need to know the author name and year except in the page-bottom citation data if they happen to be trying to go very something with the original source) so is just habitual but tedious and distracting academia name-dropping; or it {{em|is}} actually contextually needed (perhaps because which author wrote what is important in the immediate context, and what order they came in also matters), in which case it needs to be spelled out clearly in plain English, not hinted at with a "secret code". Finally, it would be utterly inappropriate for WP guideline material to veer suddently into deferring to the preferences and neologisms of some particular offsite style manual, and just encourage "style warfare" by everyone and their dog trying to inject "rules" they like from whatever external style maven they personally like better. Our internal style consensus processes do not work this way.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  20:32, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

  {{discussion bottom}}

List-defined references are a pain for VisualEditor users. It displays "This reference is defined in a template or other generated block, and for now can only be previewed in source mode." instead of the actual content of the reference when using the VisualEditor. Modifying the references requires switching to the source code editor, but not everyone is familiar with its syntax. I don't know why the VisualEditor doesn't handle them better, it doesn't seem unsolvable from a programming perspective and I would be fine with list-defined references if it did, but unless there are plans to fix this, perhaps we should discourage it? I'm curious to know what more experienced contributors think. Alenoach (talk) 20:44, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

:VisualEditor is crap. It's VisualEditor that should be discouraged. Jc3s5h (talk) 21:10, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

::Two notes on this:

::# The VisualEditor (VE) can preview a list-defined reference. Check out police jury in the VE. When I rewrote that, I used list-defined references, but no templates. In the VE, you can preview, modify, and reuse the list-defined references. You cannot add new list-defined references, delete existing ones, comment out existing ones, or replace existing ones. The VE will treat any template used within another template as just text. I don't think there is anything in the pipeline to fix that.

::# [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Sub-referencing Sub-referencing] is meant to be the official solution to citing different pages and it is meant to be built on list-defined references, although it looks like that is causing problems for the team.

::Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 21:24, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

:::Ah indeed, your way of doing it outside the "reflist" template works better with the VisualEditor. I still believe that inline references are more beginner-friendly, but your approach is a clear improvement compared to putting it in the reflist, thanks. Alenoach (talk) 21:42, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

:Entirely agree with Jc3s5h. If the problem is that VisualEditor can't hack it, then the problem is VisualEditor. We should not warp our usage of helpful article-source organizational tactics because of bad tooling foisted on us by Wikimedia. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:37, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

:: I'm disappointed that m:WMDE Technical Wishes/Sub-referencing is going off in a weird direction because VE doesn't do LDR well and they don't want to work on fixing that. Anomie⚔ 11:43, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:::It is so disappointing. I raised the issues that VE would cause for their plans [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Sub-referencing/Archive#Cart_before_the_horse_(list-defined_references) over a year ago] and they were dismissive about it then, seeming to frame it as beyond the scope of their project. But then like, who is it in scope for? Is there a team or even a person working for the WMF that has a long-term vision for how to improve referencing, or is the long-term plan to just hope we figure it out? There are limitations to what can be done with the current system; that's why using {{tl|sfn}} feels like putting a puzzle together and {{tl|rp}} is so basic. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 00:40, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

:I've tried WP:LDR on a couple of articles, and I find it to be inconvenient, especially if you're using section editing. I think we should discourage it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:30, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

::LDR is the preferred method for many editors. It has pros and cons, but it should not be discouraged. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 06:36, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

:::I wonder whether we could find out what percentage of articles actually uses it. There is a cost (in editor's time to learn about yet another different system) to maintaining unpopular arrangements. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:34, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::::Template {{t|Use list-defined references}} has >5300 transclusions. Nobody has to learn about it; as with other citations, other helpful editors will convert citations non-conforming to an article's established style. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 03:08, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::So it's used in less than one in a thousand articles. That's barely any use at all.

:::::Yes, people do have to learn about it – if they want to be able to fix the citation formatting problem that brought them to the page; if they want to be able to remove a citation without getting an ugly red error message on the page; if they want to understand what's going on with the page so they don't have to rely on "other helpful editors", especially the ones whose "helpfulness" manifests in the form of yelling at them for not doing everything perfectly the first time. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:16, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::@Michael Bednarek, that seems too low? At least one list-defined reference is used in at least [https://bambots.brucemyers.com/TemplateParam.php?wiki=enwiki&template=Reflist 179,000] articles, based on the "ref" parameter in {{tl|reflist}} transclusions. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 04:26, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::I suspect that many of those uses occur in articles with mixed citation styles. But that number further clarifies that discouraging LFDs is impractical. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 04:43, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::Well... "discouraging" is usually a long-term and largely inactive/passive process. You just write something in some documentation and leave it for five or ten years, and let community members make individual choices. You could write something as strong as "being discouraged but not banned", but you could also write something like "relatively unpopular" or "less popular than shortened footnotes". WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:11, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::That suggests that about 1 in 40 articles is using that, at least partially. That feels like a more plausible estimate to me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:08, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::Just cruising thru, not reading the arguments: I use {reflist|refs= cos you can better read the text in source mode. Putting the refs in the body text looks like spaghetti code and can make a passage almost unreadable. And a key point: it's rare for someone editing to want to change the ref. Editors usually want to do things to the text. If you need to read the ref that's better done in reader mode. You might want to delete the ref; that is different. Wanting to make changes to ref itself are rare and are are usually like to add the date or something -- important but not usually key; you're not going to change the title or the author etc. Sometimes I have to find the ref tags in all that text, do linefeeds to get the refs out of the way to even read the text, then put them back -- not a huge deal but not excellent. Sometimes I'm like "Jeez this's a dog's breakfast, I'll just not do the edit I was intending to do." Herostratus (talk) 02:24, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::I suggest using "" rather than "{{reflist|refs=", as shown here. The difference is not significant for source editor users, but "" will not make references hidden for the VisualEditor users. Alenoach (talk) 02:37, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::Huh, it's odd that you describe straight-through wikitext as spaghetti code, because I think that the jumping-back-and-forth style of LDR is much more spaghetti-like. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:43, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::@Herostratus, Are you confident about "And a key point: it's rare for someone editing to want to change the ref. Editors usually want to do things to the text"?

:::::::::A while ago, an article appeared on my watchlist. I hadn't looked at it in years. There were something like 50 edits over five years. Not a single word of text was changed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:04, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

::::::::::Well what were all those editors doing, not seeing the connection.

::::::::::Well I would be pretty confident EXCEPT I now realize that adding the archive url etc, is probably pretty common. So I have to back off from that. Herostratus (talk) 02:59, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::::All of those editors were fiddling with non-content stuff, including but not limited to ref formatting.

:::::::::::I increasingly wonder whether we could do a decent study about who writes Wikipedia's contents. High-volume editors do a lot of reverting/blanking, and we do a lot of fiddling with wikitext (some of which is actually useful to the occasional person, e.g., adding archive URLs), but I wonder whether newbies add more content. If a new paragraph is added (and sticks), who added that? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:50, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

::::::::::::Almost 20 years ago, Aaron Swartz made [https://web.archive.org/web/20140803134036/http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia a study] in which he found that Wikipedia's actual content is indeed largely written by the newbies and non-regulars. Whether that's still the case is an open question, but it sounds plausible to me. Gawaon (talk) 07:52, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

::::::::::::That would be interesting and might even be useful. I know that my own editing patterns tend to shift around a lot, with bursts of content creation interspersed with assorted gnomery of many types. A lot depends on chance. I see something that needs to be fixed, and if I am in the right mood I fix it if I can, and it often leads to something else related or of a similar type. Other times I fixate on cleaning up or improving something on a larger scale, and then there are policy discussion.... Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 12:26, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

Per Alenoach above, handles list-defined references in exactly the same manner as {{reflist|refs=, but with the benefit of VisualEditor support. Should we discourage or deprecate {{reflist|refs= in situations where there are no other parameters passed to {{template link|reflist}} and use a bot to replace all such occurrences with ? Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 12:49, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

:Isn't there, at the very least, a difference in font size? Gawaon (talk) 13:05, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

::Originally that was true, but since 2010 the font sizes have been the same. Compare angle, which uses {{reflist|refs=, versus Sheetz–Wawa rivalry, which directly uses . Both their reference lists have font-size: 90%;, albeit the former is styled by the CSS class .reflist in addition to .references. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 13:13, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

:It would be good to have the software engineering perspective, so I opened [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Feedback#List-defined_references a discussion here]. I hope we will get an answer about whether the VisualEditor can be improved, or otherwise the design rationale. Alenoach (talk) 13:37, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

::Oppose breaking our markup because of limitations in VE. If VE is broken the solution is to stop using VE, not to break more things. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:02, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

:::Might be good to wait for a deeper understanding of the problem before taking a decision. Alenoach (talk) 17:10, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

::::Ok, apparently this is the main page where the software developers handle it: [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T52896 T52896]. It's a major issue that has been there for more than 10 years, and the inability to parse references inside templates also seriously impacts translation tools and infoboxes. One software engineer said in 2014 that fixing it would be too hacky and that there is no good and generic solution, and complained about the templates. No one is working on it, so I guess they don't plan to address the issue. Alenoach (talk) 19:57, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

:::This is essentially just substing a somewhat-redundant template. When called in LDR contexts without other parameters, {{template link|reflist}} appears to just call and are already listed in the documentation as equivalent, so I don't see what you think would break. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 18:16, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

::Oppose I love love love using the LDR, if it were a kitten I would carry it in my pocket with me everywhere. If visual editor is the problem, then fix visual editor. Sgerbic (talk) 17:21, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

::: {{re|Sgerbic}} Note the proposal in this subsection is to require doing LDR using {{tag|references}} rather than {{tlx|reflist|refs{{=}}...}}, not to deprecate LDR. Anomie⚔ 18:09, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

::::Sorry, all this coding language is confusing to me as I am only a general editor. I love using reflist|refs, all the articles I write use this style and would hate to see something so tidy and easy to use to be replaced with something so messy and awkward. Sgerbic (talk) 18:41, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

:::::@Sgerbic It shouldn't be any more complicated. You can write your LDRs as you would, but instead of wrapping them in the reflist template, add tags on either end. Cremastra _talk 01:34, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

::::::That is very old school, I want to continue using reflist|refs it is so much neater. I'm not understanding why continuing as I have for the last few years is a problem. If there is a problem with visual editor then that should be fixed. Possibly I am not explaining myself well, this is an article I just rewrote a couple days ago Jotham Johnson. Sgerbic (talk) 03:15, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

:::::::The only difference is that where you currently type:

:::::::{{color|green|{{Reflist|refs=}}

:::::::{{cite web |title=Prof. Jotham Johnson, 61, Dies; Chairman of Classics at N.Y.U. |url=https://

:::::::(etc., all the way down, and then ending with a closing }}), you would instead type:

:::::::{{color|green|}}

:::::::{{cite web |title=Prof. Jotham Johnson, 61, Dies; Chairman of Classics at N.Y.U. |url=https://

:::::::(etc., all the way down, and then ending with a closing ). Or, more realistically, you would do the same thing that you're doing now, and every now and again, a bot would replace the unnecessary template with the original wikitext code.

:::::::Do you understand how small the recommended change is? It's literally just a few characters difference in the whole page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:37, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

:::::::The problem with every script in recognizing reflist template LDRs has existed and been investigated for over a decade. If you could fix it without hacky tape, that would be nice. Aaron Liu (talk) 10:57, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

::I opened [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T392942 a bug report here]. Alenoach (talk) 18:01, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

:Strong support In addition to better visualeditor support, using {{tag|references}} means that most of the citations will still display even if the WP:PEIS limit is exceeded. All the old reasons to use {{tl|reflist}}, such as font sizes or responsive columns, have long since been overcome by the software. Nothing about using {{tag|references|content={{cite foo|...}}}} for list-defined references is harder or less "tidy" than using the template, and in fact I'd argue that bracketing a long list with tags is more "tidy" than encapsulating it into a template parameter. The only thing holding us back is inertia from the days before the raw tag had feature parity with the template. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 18:50, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

:Oppose: visualeditor is broken, not {{para|refs}}. Boghog (talk) 19:37, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

:I worry that deprecating the reflist template, but only for LDR is going to cause confusion. Good faith editors are likely to use reflist, as it's what they will see commonly elsewhere and only after being told of the situation understanding that the common method shouldn't be used in this specific case. LDRs are not common, so many editors could go a long time before coming across this situation. It would seem the better solution would be either to move away from using the reflist template (if it's true that tags now have all the same functionality), or from using LDRs. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:02, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

::There's no reason for anyone to use {{tl|reflist}} in 99% of cases, LDR or not. It should be deprecated across Wikipedia, not just for LDRs. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 20:24, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

:::I think @Ahecht is right. Most of the times, using {{tl|reflist}} instead of is like using a template to make text bold instead of using the ordinary ''' wikitext code. Back in the day, there were several differences (importantly, the template could do columns ~15 years ago, before the wikitext code had that built in), but those differences are few and far between now, and IMO the template should only be used when non-default features are actually wanted.

:::BTW, when we started using the template, we had the same arguments: Using the template is going to cause confusion, because people are used to the wikitext code. It's not actually a big deal. People figure out it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:56, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

::::My point about confusion was in regard to a situation where reflist would be used for the vast majority of articles, but not on the few that use LDRs. A situation that would be quite different from when editors started using the template. This wouldn't be the reverse, but a janky halfway solution. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 08:19, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

:::There is still a reason: if we ever want to add extra coding to references beyond the basic formatting that the references tag provides, having it in a template makes it easy and avoids having to persuade Wikimedia to maybe do it someday if they ever find the interest to listen to us. That is, it is more flexible and more robust.

:::Beyond all that, there is another reason: changing existing reflists to references tags in millions of articles would represent an enormous clog-up of everyone's watchlists for however long it would take to do so. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:44, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

::::Bots are hidden from watchlists by default, I think. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:21, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

:::::Yes, it's quite trivial to hide bot edits, either through preferences at {{Preferences|Watchlist|Changes shown|check={{int:Tog-watchlisthidebots}}}}, or ad-hoc using the filter button on the watchlist itself. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 03:55, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

::::::Hiding bots means never seeing all the damage the bots sometimes do. I regularly check edits by bots and report on bad edits by bots. 99% of the time they are ok but that remaining 1% needs checking. I cannot do that if my watchlist is overwhelmed by thousands of bot edits.

::::::Also, this issue goes far beyond list-defined references: it appears to be a general issue with VE not handling templates nested inside other templates. Working around it in this case will merely take pressure off the VE developers to make VE work without doing anything about the broader problem. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:58, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

::::::: Is that pressure having any effect anyway? Anomie⚔ 11:28, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

:::::::Just mark everything as seen right after the fixbot does things; in the worst case you can always just filter out the fixbot (which will probably be a one-off ish bot used to answer Wikipedia:AWB/R). And the pressure with reflist has been on to ten years; no one has found a non-hacky (without {{tq|making up a list of hack templates that each wiki uses, which is a WONTFIX if ever there was one|q=y}} which I agree with) solution. Aaron Liu (talk) 12:27, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

:Support : the problem seems unlikely to be solved any time soon ([https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T52896 T52896]). Maybe they underestimate how impactful the problem is, or maybe we underestimate the technical obstacles. But the VisualEditor is not a minor feature, so we should do what we can to accommodate its users. I don't see a good reason for using {{reflist|refs= instead of . Alenoach (talk) 20:31, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

:{{started}} a new draft proposal at the idea lab since this will require a fairly large site-wide RFC if implemented. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 22:32, 29 April 2025 (UTC)Moved below per Mike Christie Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 02:51, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

::Dan, I'm not sure what would have been wrong with leaving the RfC here and simply advertising it. Since I'm commenting I'll mention that I use VE by preference; I never use LDR but would prefer to be able to edit those articles with VE if I come across them. I agree with some of David's points above, though; I don't think anything should be implemented that would flood watchlists, and I don't see any benefit in changing usages of reflist that are not implementing LDR. If you're going to reword this RfC, I think it should be narrowly defined. I'd specify that no bot edits should be done except when the edit accompanies an edit that would have been made anyway, to keep this off watchlists; and it should only affect LDR articles. David, the one point of yours I don't agree with is that we should leave reflist usages in place just in case someone finds them useful for parameter addition in the future. I think present value (to VE users, of whom there are many) is better than some possibly non-existent future value. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 01:24, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

::One of the most basic use cases of {{tl|reflist}} is to allow multiple columns in the reference section on sufficiently wide screens and to control how wide these columns shall be. How does the <references/> tag handle this? Sorry if this is a noob question, but I didn't find it by a quick look at the docs. Gawaon (talk) 06:43, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

:::It doesn't handle it, and in those cases the reflist tag should be left in place. Though as far as I know one would never use the columns parameter with refs=, so it would be out of scope of this proposal. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 11:33, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

:::: That's not entirely correct. {{tag|references|s}} and {{tlx|reflist}} both use 30em columns when there are more than 10 refs. This can be disabled with {{tag|references|s|attribs=responsive=0}} and {{tlx|reflist|1}}. OTOH, reflist has more options: {{tlx|reflist|2}} and {{tlx|reflist|30em}} do columns without the "more than 10 refs" condition, and other widths besides 30em can be passed to {{tlx|reflist}} too. Anomie⚔ 11:45, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

:::::This (having multiple columns without using the template) was implemented in 2017. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:11, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

::::::Including widths besides 30em? Aaron Liu (talk) 17:23, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

:::::::Aaron, I don't know the answer to your question (regardless of whether your question is a "When was widths besides 30em added?" or "Was support for widths besides the site-defined default ever added?"), but I wonder whether it matters in practice. I've never seen someone combining narrower column widths with LDR, because {{tl|sfn}} is the main use case for narrower column widths, and those aren't put into LDR. Nobody's talking about an absolute requirement to do this without exception. A bot/AWB script that's capable of detecting whether an article is using LDR could trivially be programmed to leave it alone if other parameters are being used. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:24, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

:What about {{tlx|reflist-talk|2=refs=}}? --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 08:26, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

Since I think this would be a very controversial and thorny RFC if proposed, I've started a proposal below for discussion. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 02:52, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

{{divbox|1=plain|2=Working proposal (please edit)|3=

Early features of {{tlx|reflist}} included a different font size (90%) and automatic column handling. Today, both of these features are built into the Cite extension. As a result, the template, when called alone, is effectively a basic wrapper for {{xtag|references|s}}. Usage of {{tlx|reflist}} where the {{para|colwidth}} parameter is given are outside the scope of this proposal. Editors are still free to use the template where its features are actually desired.

VisualEditor cannot handle list-defined references when those references are defined inside of a template like {{tlx|reflist}}; however, it can handle {{xtag|references|p|content={{xtag|ref|p}}}} properly due to its closer integration with MediaWiki. Almost 200,000 pages have references defined inside of {{tlx|reflist}} and thus those entire articles cannot be contributed to by VE users ({{Template parameter usage|reflist|lc=yes|label=none}}).

Documentation on this is lacking. Help:List-defined references says VE doesn't support the referencing style at all, and treats both methods as equivalent.

The VisualEditor war has been going on for a decade now and it's now used by a not-insignificant number of editors. While I think we'd all love if it worked well and didn't dump horrible {{xtag|ref|params=name=":0"}} tags everywhere, "WMF should fix it, we shouldn't have to touch our templates" has gotten old.

WMF is developing a Wikitext-based reference reuse handling they're calling sub-referencing. This should benefit editors of list-defined references by allowing page numbers to supplement citations to such references. Templates like {{tlx|reflist}} were cited as a major hurdle in the development of this tool.

When the WP:PEIS limit is reached within an article before the references section, the reflist template will just render as Template:Reflist, whereas the {{xtag|references|s}} tag will still function (although some citation templates may not render properly).

The Polish Wikipedia editors routinely check if {{Template link interwiki|lang=pl|Przypisy}} includes a list of references and, using pl:MediaWiki:Gadget-sk.js#L-575, replace it with {{xtag|references|s}}. One sticking point to keeping {{Template link interwiki|lang=pl|Przypisy}} without a list of references on that project was the replacement of a Polish word with an English one; however, this isn't relevant on the English Wikipedia.

The following pages will need to be updated to remove the equivalence between {{tlx|reflist}} and {{xtag|references|s}} and encourage use of the latter by new editors:

• Help:Footnotes
• Wikipedia:Citing sources
• Help:List-defined references
• Template:Reflist/doc
• Template:Sfn/doc
• Template:R/doc
• Template:Harvard citation/doc

Uses of the {{tlx|reflist}} template that do not rely on its

• Some parts of the proposal above are impossible to read in dark mode because they have white text on white background. See mw:Recommendations for night mode compatibility on Wikimedia wikis for suggested fixes. -- Beland (talk) 10:07, 30 April 2025 (UTC)
• What's the point of this proposal? I doubt it has more than a snowball in hell's chance of making it due to the flexibility of {{tl|reflist}} to be used with or without a colwidth parameter making it too useful to give up without a good reason (which doesn't seem to exist), and spurious RfCs are a waste of editors' time. Why not rather focus on the original idea of deprecating the use of {{tl|reflist}} with refs=, which seems to be the only actual problem anyway? Gawaon (talk) 11:50, 30 April 2025 (UTC)
• :I don't see how specifying per-article column widths is that useful. Aaron Liu (talk) 12:32, 30 April 2025 (UTC)
• ::Well, following the recommendations in Template:Reflist, I tend to use the default setting when most references are "long" and there is no extra Bibliography section, while setting the colwidth to 20em for articles that use mostly short author–year references ({{tl|sfn}} and friends) resolved in a Bibliography section. I also use 25em in articles that mix both styles more or less evenly. It's not essential, but it gives articles a nicer look. Gawaon (talk) 13:01, 30 April 2025 (UTC)
• :::Hmm, that does makes sense. Would a template that just applies a pre-set column width of either 20em or 25em on the fix that? Would not be hard to script if it just applies 20em or 25em every time, though it wouldn't support user-specified custom column widths. Aaron Liu (talk) 13:14, 30 April 2025 (UTC)
• ::::Well it's in any case slightly more annoying and less intuitive to replace <references/> with a template than just adding or modifying a parameter to an existing template. Plus the idea of getting rid of {{tl|reflist}} in favour of a tag is a solution looking for a problem, as far as I can tell. Hence I doubt it's going to fly. Gawaon (talk) 13:50, 30 April 2025 (UTC)
• :::::{{Tq|solution looking for a problem}} the real problems with the template are listed above. {{template link|reflist}} was created specifically to extend the parser tag and met very similar opposition fifteen years ago, it's worth considering now whether it's still needed in most cases. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 14:30, 30 April 2025 (UTC)
• :::::I'm not saying that, I'm saying something like this:

{{thincols}}

Aaron Liu (talk) 15:28, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

• ::::::@Aaron Liu, the Visual Editor wouldn't be able to handle that due to a different limitation. Try editing pages with the VE that use {{tl|refbegin}} & {{tl|refend}} for a list of full citations. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 00:34, 2 May 2025 (UTC)
• :::::::There's no under refbegin, though. What I propose is just CSS templatestyles—it doesn't even change the DOM. There's no way it would break VisualEditor unless VE uses computer vision. Aaron Liu (talk) 00:56, 2 May 2025 (UTC)
• ::::::::But to get the CSS to apply, won't you have to wrap the with a div or some other element? Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 01:35, 2 May 2025 (UTC)
• :::::::::No. It's done through a stylesheet that will apply to all invocations of on the entire page. You're thinking inline styles. Aaron Liu (talk) 01:41, 2 May 2025 (UTC)
• ::::::::::[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TemplateStyles TemplateStyles] can affect classes like reflist and reference-text? Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 02:01, 2 May 2025 (UTC)
• :::::::::::Yes. Just put the inline style you mentioned below into a selector for those classes. Demonstrated at User:Aaron Liu/sandbox#References using User:Aaron Liu/Refwidth using Template:TemplateStyles sandbox/Aaron Liu/refwidth-20em.css. Aaron Liu (talk) 11:38, 2 May 2025 (UTC)
• ::::::::::::Wow, this is a really cool development and completely changes the whole proposal. I had no idea TemplateStyles was this powerful. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 17:05, 2 May 2025 (UTC)
• ::::::::::@Aaron Liu, I was mistaken; I just assumed they did not work that way. I tested something similar out in {{tl|refbegin/sandbox}}. The first real issue I see is that they both do something to the effect of style="column-width:{{{any value}}}" which I don't think can be done with separate CSS. The first workaround that comes to mind is to create CSS classes for each width and maybe round the values down (so that 22em becomes 20em) to avoid having too massive a number. That still seems kind of wonky though Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 03:17, 2 May 2025 (UTC)
• ::::::::::@Aaron Liu, okay I did this in a way that feels goofy but seems to work? Check out [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Rjjiii/sandbox7&oldid=1288375254 this sandbox] version of Open-source license in the VisualEditor. You should be able to see, edit, add, remove, and replace all references without any issues. You will not any styling affects unless you save the page. Regardless of changes to {{tl|reflist}}, I may propose some version of this for {{tl|refbegin}}. I think reflist deprecation may get limited traction though, because even without the template, the VE can't add or remove a LDR. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 07:21, 2 May 2025 (UTC)
• :::This proposal specifically exempts uses of the template where editors feel a need for specific column widths. Many, if not the majority, of our articles use the default (blank or 30em) parameters. {{xtag|references}} now supports 30em columns as the default, so there's no difference between it and the template's default setting. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 14:32, 30 April 2025 (UTC)
• As a purely practical measure, I suggest updating Help:List-defined references first. Also, we can probably get numbers on how commonly the visual editor is used here. The total was over 25,000,000 edits a couple of years ago. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:17, 30 April 2025 (UTC)
• I would strongly support this -- I use the visual editor and while I don't run into list-reference articles much, I wouldn't mind pasting in rather than {{reflist}} when I make an article. Every RfC gets "solution in search of a problem" comments, some more than others, but there definitely is a problem here to be solved. Mrfoogles (talk) 23:25, 3 May 2025 (UTC)
• :(If you're in the visual editor, then you don't have to paste in that code. It's in the menu under Insert > References list.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:24, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

WP:CITESTYLE mentions different styles that use title case or sentence case for titles of referenced articles, and says what to do about all-caps original titles, but some editors prefer to just consistently copy the capitalization style of reference titles, though those styles are mixes of sentence case, title case, and capitalize-every-word styles. Should we note that such consistently copying of styles from sources meets WP's definition of a consistent citation style, or should we say that it does not? Or continue to not say? Dicklyon (talk) 22:43, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

:I've never seen it brought up at WP:FLC or WP:FAC, where fairly significant source reviews that focus on quality of sources and consistency take place. Seems to make the most sense to just use what the sources do and title case the all caps titles. After all, why editorialize? Hey man im josh (talk) 22:46, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

::I'm not sure why CITESTYLE references that particular capitalization guidance, but MOS:TITLECAPS outlines a specific style and also an exception for the use of defined (off-wiki) styles with other practices. 23:22, 1 March 2025 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nikkimaria (talk • contribs) 23:22, 1 March 2025 (UTC)

:::I think CITESTYLE basically just says pick a citation style and stick to it (from among published styles, I presume it meant), whether that style uses title-case or sentence-case work titles. If there's a published style that says just copy the capitalizations of the various sources, I'm not aware of it. I'm sure we don't do a good job in general of being consistent with citation styles, but the style of capping every word including short prepositions does tend to stand out as wrong and not consistent with much of anything ever recommended anywhere (e.g. in "Matthew Stafford Voted Comeback Player Of The Year By PFW/PFWA" which was restored [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Detroit_Lions_seasons&diff=prev&oldid=1278294808 here], from a publisher that has been very inconsistent in their own headline styles). Dicklyon (talk) 01:06, 2 March 2025 (UTC)

::::CITEVAR is not restricted to "published styles". WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:35, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

::::I'm still not seeing anything supporting forcing people to change all of the titles of sources instead of simply being consistent in how we format references. It's a net negative from my personal and is a strange overreaching aspect of things that would definitely lead to less content being improved and promoted at featured venues if pushed. Nobody wants to deal with the nonsense of changing all of the capitalization of sources, and it would lead to a lot of ridiculous situations. What it I feel like capitalizing every "The" but downcasing every "and", it would be consistent.

::::Instead, the simple, obvious, straight forward, and consistent approach that doesn't push people away is to just downcase all caps words and be accepting of people sticking to the capitalization of sources otherwise. People already have a hard time getting accustomed to our stylings, and to enforce a stupid style rule like that would do no one any favors.

::::Hold an RfC on whether every source in references should be expected, because it's been weeks now and I'm not seeing it in any text or in this discussion. Until you do, I will not be doing so, and I will reinforce that it's not an expectation based on our current guidelines. If it's done, I'll probably stop source reviewing and promoting altogether, because who's got the time and care to enforce such a silly thing? Especially when it's not an improvement and does nothing to affect the readability of references or the article itself. What a ridiculous waste of time. Hey man im josh (talk) 15:16, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::Yes I feel strongly about this, and it's because I don't want to put further barriers up for editors wanting to promote content or for those getting started with editing. I'm all about editor retention and further strictness on MoS guidelines, that actually doesn't dictate a style except to literally pick your own and stick to it, doesn't benefit anybody. I'm all for consistency in references, it's one of the things I look for most when doing source reviews, but this idea/suggestion is a step too far. I have zero intention of supporting editorializing titles beyond down casing and all caps word because all I see is potential harm, fights, and future burnout, with no benefits. Hey man im josh (talk) 15:22, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::Yeah, I don't think this is something that needs to be addressed. Gawaon (talk) 18:27, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

:It may be worth mentioning that MOS:ALLCAPS also says to downcase all-caps titles. I tend to convert those to title case (more about that is discussed at the end of my comment). Personally, I also tend to apply this to all-caps prefixes in titles like "LATE-BREAKING NEWS: Dicklyon participates in a capitalization discussion!" Otherwise, I tend to follow what the source has done, so I can scan through the list of references to see how many of the titles use one form of capitalization or another for a particular term. (That has limited value, I know, but it's a start.) I tend to find it improper when someone picks their preferred capitalization style for a particular phrase (e.g., "MYFAVORITE Company" or "Elbonian Incident" or "Ectonian Revolution") and applies it uniformly within quotes and citation titles in addition to applying it within the Wikivoice sections (especially if they do that shortly before proposing to rename the article to fit their preferred style and without mentioning that they did it).

:Help:Citation Style 1 says to "Use title case unless the cited source covers a scientific, legal or other technical topic and sentence case is the predominant style in journals on that topic. Use either title case or sentence case consistently throughout the article." It seems to say to apply that {{em|generally}}, not just in the context of considering all-caps titles (for which it is not possible to know what the source prefers). The vast majority of reasonably well drafted articles on Wikipedia seem to use Citation Style 1.

:—⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 21:00, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

::The rule is: Set a style (including a made-up style) for the article, and be consistent within that single article.

::@Hey man im josh, if you can actually get consensus on the talk page that "The" will be upcased and "and" will be downcased in the titles of sources for that article, then WP:CITEVAR is there to support you (i.e., all the editors forming that consensus).

::@Dicklyon, I don't think that anyone has ever attempted to justify "whatever the automated ref filler gives me" or "whatever I can copy and paste" as being "a consistent style", and I don't think that would be a fair interpretation. I also don't think it would be workable in practice: Consider a book design that uses all caps on the spine, all lowercase on the cover, and title case on the title page. Which one is the "correct" one to copy? I suspect that such arguments come out of not prioritizing citation formatting, with the result that if you fix it for them, they'll accept the fixes. The top of this guideline says that {{xt|what matters most is that you provide enough information to identify the source. Others will improve the formatting if needed}}. Anyone who actually cares about consistency can be one of those "Others" and improve the formatting if they deem it necessary. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:13, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

:::Yes, that's what I thought, too. So I was surprised when my attempts to move toward a consistent title-case style were reverted in preference to following mixed styles copied from sources. I'm not trying to force anyone else to fix or conform, just don't like to see my attempts to move toward consistency reverted on such a basis. Dicklyon (talk) 03:19, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::::How very unusual. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:13, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::: {{U|WhatamIdoing}} {{tq|I don't think that anyone has ever attempted to justify "whatever the automated ref filler gives me" or "whatever I can copy and paste" as being "a consistent style".}} This is {{em|exactly}} what Hey_man_im_josh is arguing for. {{tq|This dispute started with someone who also copies the titles of works as they appear in [online] sources, but reverted when someone else applied consistency to the capitalization of titles.}} Exactly, and it's weird that this has turned into a lengthy discussion at all, since his revert was clearly not justifiable.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:22, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

::Just looking at 'prefixes in titles like "LATE-BREAKING NEWS…', I don’t see those as part of the title, and on the rare occasions I come across them during a different edit, I remove them to reduce the noise. Other examples are EXCLUSIVE or (from old-time printed newspapers) STOP PRESS. The publication uses them to describe what is being published, so it does theoretically sit alongside title, issue number, page numbers etc., but not as part of the title and (IMHO) not part of the essential metadata, though an exception would be where an article's text changed between its LATE-BREAKING edition and its later unflagged version. --Northernhenge (talk) 17:11, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

:It seems a little odd to me that Help:Citation Style 1 says to prefer title case (i.e., "Use title case unless ..."). Wikipedia generally prefers sentence case for its own titles, so why should it prefer title case when it cites titles outside of Wikipedia? —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 21:19, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

::The CS1 documentation should not be making any such recommendation. At most, it should say something like "Most articles use title case". WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:08, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:::It also says "Use either title case or sentence case consistently throughout the article", which is what I was asking about. Should we re-state that in WP:CITESTYLE, or change both to say it's OK to use the CS 1 templates but to follow the caps as found in sources? And if some such mixed style is used, shouldn't we tag the article to say so, so that editors like me who normally tend to edit toward consistency will know to leave it alone? Dicklyon (talk) 03:24, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::::Honestly, if it's a one-off situation (people aren't making an actual habit of this, right?), then I think that an Official CITEVAR Discussion™ on the article's talk page should settle the matter pretty quickly, and then we wouldn't have to add yet another written rule. But if you've got 2+ editors and 2+ articles doing the same thing, then I think that it's probably time to think about a clarification. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:16, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::I think so far only User:Hey man im josh has pushed back on such edits, but in more than one place. See his revert at [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Detroit_Lions_seasons&diff=prev&oldid=1278294808 this diff] of my downcasing a few words in the title/headline "Matthew Stafford Voted Comeback Player Of The Year By PFW/PFWA", followed by discussion at his talk page User talk:Hey man im josh#Reference capitalization. It's not at all relevant to the article topic, so I figured it would be better to seek more input here after his talk page. Dicklyon (talk) 19:16, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::That's because making edits to change the capitalization of references, especially for content which has been promoted, is not an improvement or benefit. It's also not something explicitly defined as necessary. It's a stylistic choice that you prefer, whereas I believe in not editorializing titles being downcasing an allcaps word. Hey man im josh (talk) 19:18, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::::I would support changing the Help:CS1 instructions to remove the instruction to prefer title case by default{{snd}} that is contrary to Wikipedia's general preference for sentence-case titles, and CS1 is too widely used to ignore it as just one random variant of citation formatting. Some people are commenting that they think no one edits cited titles except to downcase all-caps. Personally, I will admit to sometimes editing titles, and I have also noticed other people sometimes doing that (and sometimes I have gotten somewhat irked about what someone else has done to cited titles). Mostly, if I'm looking at some sources, I try to have the title of cited sources styled the way the cited source does it{{snd}} unless the cited source is using all-caps for the whole title (or a large segment of it). Copying what the cited source does makes it easier to quickly see whether the cited sources in an article are mostly calling an organization the EDGE Foundation or the Edge Foundation. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 02:05, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::I'm with you on that "EDGE" case; if it's an acronym, keep it that way. But if sources use more or less title-case headlines but cap every word including "of the", or use lowercase "is", do we just copy that? It looks wrong in WP, where we have a consistent specification of what title case looks like. Dicklyon (talk) 04:55, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::After further thought, I think I should retract what I said about the Help:CS1 instruction being contrary to Wikipedia's general preference. Cited titles are the titles of works, so MOS:CAPTITLES would presumably apply to them, and Wikipedia's general preference would be to use title case for referring to them. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 15:21, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

• Editing in MilHist I have often seen editors amend allcaps to render in title case. In articles about works, we apply MOS:TITLECAPS even if the work (eg an album cover) varies from that guidance. The issue here as I read it, is amending a title rendered in all capital letter - ie capitalising of, the and by when they are not the first word of the title. I see no good reason to revert an edit that amends this to a conventional title case rendering of the title. It is certainly not a style consistently used in the article.

:I do see at MOS:TITLECAPS: {{tq|WP:Citing sources § Citation style permits the use of other citation styles within Wikipedia, and some of these expect sentence case for certain titles (usually article and chapter titles). Title case should not be imposed on such titles under such a citation style consistently used in an article.}} Of the styles cited at WP:Citing sources § Citation style, I would think that the Bluebook is possibly the only one that advocates the use of allcaps and smallcaps. However, one could only see that the Bluebook would be consistently used as a style in in a legal article. Otherwise, we are using either title case or sentence case. Cinderella157 (talk) 10:28, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::I think the question is more like: Since the newspaper headline Dewey Defeats Truman was originally printed in all caps ("DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN"), if you had some reason to cite that article, should the citation use ALLCAPS? I'm not sure that it's really about whether to write "Read the News" vs "Read The News". WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:39, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:::Not really. The question is more like should we modify headlines such as "Matthew Stafford Voted Comeback Player Of The Year By PFW/PFWA" to "Matthew Stafford Voted Comeback Player of the Year by PFW/PFWA"? In particular, there's no obvious coherent style for reference titles in the article, and I'm told the style is copy what the cited sources do; is that an OK "consistent style", or is it not? Seeking opinions. Dicklyon (talk) 19:16, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::::It sounds like this needs to be a discussion at Talk:List of Detroit Lions seasons per CITEVAR: {{xt|seek consensus for a change on the talk page}}. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:00, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::This is my general citation style that I intend to follow when I continue to promote and improve content. I imagine if started there, it would eventually lead to scattered discussions that result in conclusions based on what people feel like, as opposed to a defined policy that says we should down case/editorialize titles. This discussion, and each one of those, would be a waste of time. Time that could be better spent working on and promoting content. Hey man im josh (talk) 21:27, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::Anyone creating an article is welcome to establish a consistent style. Other editors are free to form a consensus that the initial style should be changed.

::::::The word wikt:editorialize means to insert opinionated content into what ought to be facts. An example of editorializing would be something like "Donald Trump, who is the greatest US president ever, said..." Deciding which words ought to be capitalized in a citation is not "editorializing". WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:49, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::Yes, he misuses that term, when he means something like "exercise editorial discretion over the style of". What bothers me more is Josh's statement "This is my general citation style that I intend to follow when I continue to promote and improve content", like he gets to set the style, when promoting content. Now, it seems likely that a lot of articles getting to that point (e.g. "good" or "featured" review) often don't yet have a clear and consistent style of reference titles, so some discretion is probably needed. So what are the plausible choices? My question is whether copying mixed styles from sources is included in what we mean by a "consistent style". And whether it would be better to stick to an actually consistent style like all the style guides suggest. Dicklyon (talk) 05:06, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::I won't apologize for my consistent citation style which doesn't harm anything and has been used to improve a lot of articles and content just because you don't like my style. I don't like the waste of time that this is and it being an effort to interpret and spin things how you want them to be. You've been unable to convince me that this is what our actual guidelines force upon us, so I encourage you to go the RfC route of forcing everybody into using sentence or title case, because until then, I have no intention of changing my style or forcing people to change capitalization of references during the source reviews I conduct. What am absolute waste of time such requirements would be. Hey man im josh (talk) 10:56, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

:This really is the key, at MOS:TITLECAPS: {{tq|some of these [permitted citation styles] expect sentence case for certain titles (usually article and chapter titles). Title case should not be imposed on such titles under such a citation style consistently used in an article.}} By the same reasoning, it is not defensible to copy-paste completely random-ass case conventions from misc. sources into an article that is consistently doing something. Most commonly, that "something" is 1) title case for major works (the italicized part) and sentence case for minor works (the in-quotation-marks part), at least if they are sub-works (articles in a journal, chapters in a book). But 2) title case across-the-board is also somewhat common. There is also a degree of tolerance for doing journal articles in sentence case but news and website articles in title case, as least if originally written that way, but I have yet to ever run into anyone objecting when I normalize all cited articles/chapters to the same case convention within one WP article).

WP:CITESTYLE also tells us to use (and impose if necessary) a consistent citation style. So, if random copy-pasting has resulted in a mess, then normalize it to something sensible and consistent (probably one of those two conventions I numbered above; if you try to impose something weird like title case for minor works and sentence case for major works, or inverting which one gets italics, no one is likely to want to go along with that).

The latent question in here is "Does randomly copy-pasting conflicting title styles from sources like websites and journal bibliographies and Google Books metadata and so on, and producing an inconsistent mess, itself constitute a 'citation style' I can defend against anyone changing it?" The answer is "{{em|no}}". Confusing chaos is not a style, it's the lazy avoidance of a style. In past years, various parties have attempted to WP:WIKILAWYER their way into preventing people normalizing other citation chaos, e.g. claiming that how they space apart the parameters in a citation template (no matter how confusingly) constitutes as "citation style" they're entitled to defend, and these arguments have been rejected by the community. (Just the fact it was being approached in a us-vs.-them, me-and-my-fellow-WP:OWNers-versus-the-rest-of-the-editorial-interlopers manner was a bad sign.) The purpose of us having a (any) consistent citation style in an article is to make citation material comprehensible to the reader (at least after they get used to the formatting at a particular article; as we more and more depend on WP:CS1's default output being {{lang|la|de facto}} "the" WP citation style, the easier this gets for readers, across articles not just within one).

A citation style at WP is not about making an editor's work easier or making an editor happy that they're getting the citation format they like best. If that were the case, we would not have citation templates at all (or perhaps we'd have dozens of competing sets of them, one pile for APA style, other group for MHRA style, etc.). Even our held-onto-tooth-and-nail idea that any consistent citation style is permissible is probably doomed. (It was never entirely true anyway; e.g. the ones that mandate nutty things like putting major-work titles in all-caps, or italicizing author names instead of work titles, are shunned here and never gained even a slight foothold.) More and more of our material is consistently referenced with CS1 templates (easily over 90% of articles are at least mostly doing this, aside from some tacked-on inconsistent cites, and many actively edited ones are entirely doing it, while the number of actively edited ones that are bucking this trend to use CS2 or some manually imposed oddball format is negligible and dwindling, meanwhile Harvard-style referencing has been community deprecated (WP:PARENTHETICAL) despite it having been "a consistent citation style".

In summary: clean up citations to be consistent for readers and not give them headaches, or just move on. But don't make citations more messy than when you found them just because you think you can get away with it. Cf. WP:POINT. :-) The answer to the more explicit question of "would [it] be better to stick to an {{em|actually consistent}} style like all the style guides suggest"? is "{{em|yes}}", at least within a a single article. And this isn't new, but has been what WP:CITESTYLE has been saying all along.

PS: "my general citation style that I intend to follow when I continue to promote and improve content" also sets off red flags for me, as it did for someone above, to the extent this might mean "if I have any say in the promotion of an article to good or featured status or front-page appearance, I'm going impose my preferred citation style on it". Ideas in a "my style or else" vein are yet another reason why competing citation styles at this site are ultimately not going to continue to be feasible, even if some old hands have perpetuated them for far too long. Not everyone likes every aspect of CS1, but it's a tsunami, and it's well-documented so easy to build tools for that make citation a much less tedious experience. The fact that it's templated in well-understood code means that if a community consensus wants a change in it (the most common complaint is the use of "." as an element separator; probably better as ";"), then such a change will be easy to implement without having to manually change a billion citations. Oh, yeah, unreasonable maintenance burden is another reason "my precious flower of a unique citation style" is an awful idea.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:26, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

::So hold an RFC to get what you like codified. As it stands, it's "pick a style and stick with it", not "always use title or sentence case". Hey man im josh (talk) 10:51, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

:::Josh, are you really asking for a sitewide rule against your preferred approach? I recommended above that we approach this as a decision that would apply to just the one article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:51, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

::::@WhatamIdoing: If there's an intent to enforce a stylistic

::::norm relating to the capitalization used by sources, and to limit it to title or sentence case, I do think that should require an RfC to properly assess community consensus. At this point in time this isn't outlined by our guidelines. I don't think that's unreasonable to say that something not currently explicitly defined as an expectation/norm/MoS practice be discussed at large. As mentioned, I follow this practice with all the articles I work on (using the capitalization used by the source), as do others that I know. Hey man im josh (talk) 20:17, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::Things that are not currently explicitly defined as an expectation or norm in the MoS, but for which the dispute centers on a single article, are usually handled as ordinary, consensus-driven discussions on the talk page of that article. No written rule = make a sensible choice for the one article.

:::::We don't need a rule that says "No editor, in any article, must ever ____" for editors to get together on the article's talk page and say "The MoS doesn't have any specific rule for or against ____, which means that editors can do whatever they think is best. For this specific article, and without attempting to make a one-size-fits-all rule for all the other articles, we choose..."

:::::But if you want a one-size-fits-all rule that will affect all of your FLs, then let me know. I'm willing to start the RFC if you insist on it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:24, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::@WhatamIdoing: I obviously do not want to waste community time, as we doing now, but I anticipate that it would lead to a number of further discussions on various talk pages and, if it goes the way Dicklyon would prefer, would be pointed to as a precedence in said further discussions or to just make the changes in other places without discussions. I simply want to just go about my work in what I perceive to be as a perfectly reasonable way (consistently using the capitalization provided by the source). Hey man im josh (talk) 11:55, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::I can't see how discussing this at various article talk pages would make any sense, since it's not related to any of the topics of articles. Getting some local consensus about what's OK on a few articles, with no corresponding guidance to point to, wouldn't be very useful, would it? Isn't this more properly discussed in the context of style guidelines? And Josh, do you really do that? You check every ref title's style against the source when promoting to "featured"? That's sounds way too hard. Dicklyon (talk) 15:58, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::No, I don't check every reference for that specifically, but I've caught it at times somewhat accidently while checking other aspects of the consistency of references, including checking whether all relevant information has been included in the reference. As a result, I've suggested consistency, one way or another, in the form of adjusting all the capitalizations or sticking to what the references use. Hey man im josh (talk) 16:01, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::Dick, everything about an individual article can get discussed on its talk page. Want to decide which WP:ENGVAR to use in this article? Start a discussion on its talk page. Want to decide which WP:STYLEVAR to use in this article? Start a discussion on its talk page. Want to decide which WP:DATEVAR to use in this article? Start a discussion on its talk page. Want to decide which WP:CITEVAR to use in this article? Start a discussion on its talk page. The rules are (intentionally) the same for all of these WP:VARS. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:48, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:I find it rather annoying when some editors drive-by consistent references in sentence case and turn them into title case. If it really is the case that CITEVAR covers title and sentence case consistency, this should be made clearer and given a blue all-caps tag. Ifly6 (talk) 22:15, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

::Can you easily find a diff or two of that happening? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:22, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

:::I can't remember too many instances but I did remember it happened on these two articles on Brutus and his father:

:::* https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Marcus_Junius_Brutus&diff=prev&oldid=1268975385

:::* https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Marcus_Junius_Brutus_(tribune_83_BC)&diff=prev&oldid=1268975818

:::Ifly6 (talk) 01:37, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::::The ref titles in those articles were not consistent, either with each other or with the sources they were taken from. You can hardly complain if someone moves an article from an inconsistent mix of styles to a consistent style. Dicklyon (talk) 02:48, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::Both articles have an overwhelming majority with sentence case. If that's your position, it's essentially reifying the thin end of the wedge. Once someone gets a single reference in with title case they can immediately proclaim "inconsistent mix of styles" and demand title case on everything. Fantastic. Ifly6 (talk) 03:54, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::You are correct, which is part of the problem with this approach of demanding/expecting consistent capitalization from sources. It becomes a huge burden on editors and the resources we have available if editors are overly focused on the capitalization used by sources, and ends up hurting Wikipedia as a whole. Hey man im josh (talk) 11:57, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::{{ping|Ifly6}} That's an interesting theory. Have you seen cases where refs started out consistent with their sources and then got made inconsistent by someone moving one to title case, making it inconsistent? I might have done that, inadvertently, but have you seen such? Did anything like that happen on those two articles you linked? Dicklyon (talk) 15:50, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::{{ping|Hey man im josh}} Nobody's demanding/expecting. It's about knowing what direction is considered an improvement. It's so much easier to look at refs and spot style inconsistencies than to check every one against the source. All style guides suggest sticking to a style. I haven't seen one that says just copy whatever your sources do (which is in general not even well defined, as some have pointed out, as the styles on covers and such don't always match). How making refs more consistently styled can hurt Wikipedia is hard for me to imagine. Dicklyon (talk) 15:50, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::{{tq|It's about knowing what direction is considered an improvement.}} – Which is subjective, I consider it to be an improvement to use the capitalization used by the source (except when words are entirely capitalized). I consider your perspective to be one that makes the article worse and wastes a tremendous amount of editor time, which would also discourage content promotion if it were to be pushed more and required. {{tq|How making refs more consistently styled can hurt Wikipedia is hard for me to imagine.}} – Source to reference integrity. I believe in not modifying the title used by the source. The idea of pushing one's personal preference irks me. Hey man im josh (talk) 15:57, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::Yes, it's subjective, but we can perhaps come to a consensus about it and represent that consensus in guidelines (or in precedents if it's too small a thing to bother to put into guidelines). By the way, I've looked at more featured lists and found quite of bit of editorial discretion in ref titles, including adding words, removing words, cobbling together bits of text from web pages to make a pretend title, and adding a question mark at the end of a title. Some of this needs to be done, since not every web source has a "title", and I'm not saying you condone all this "editorializing", but it does suggest that ref titles are not being checked against source style for consistency. Dicklyon (talk) 16:30, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::Josh, you say {{xt|It becomes a huge burden on editors and the resources we have available if editors are overly focused on the capitalization used by sources, and ends up hurting Wikipedia as a whole}}, but you are asking that they focus entirely on the capitalization used by the individual sources. What Dick proposed was to completely ignore "the capitalization used by sources", and you objected to that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:39, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::@WhatamIdoing: I'm not asking that they focus entirely on the capitalization from sources, I'm stating that there's nothing wrong with following that and that their approach, stating that there is and that "it's an improvement" is strictly an opinion, one which I obviously disagree with. It's important to remember that the automatic citation tools we use take the capitalization used by sources. This then adds time to changing and tweaking all of these for a stylistic choice, one that doesn't improve the content written or make it more accurate. I don't agree with modifying source titles or wasting editor time on trivial matters, which is why I object to it. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:43, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::If I ignore the capitalization used by the sources and set it to one of the standard methods, then I can make the citations consistent quickly and easily merely by looking at the wikitext and remember the rules taught in English class to 10 year olds. Alternatively, with the script mentioned below, I can click a button, glance over the resulting diff, and be done very quickly.

:::::::::If I have to follow the capitalization choices made by each individual source, then I am, indeed, focusing entirely on the capitalization from the sources. How else could I determine whether the capitalization is actually correct in such a model, except to find and open every single one of the sources, and compare, word by word, whether each title matches each different source's chosen style? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:52, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::::{{tq|...and remember the rules taught in English class to 10 year olds.}} – You overestimate the consistency of education and the idea of people actually retaining and properly understanding what should and shouldn't be capitalized in titles. This becomes clear when you examine a lot of move discussions regarding what should and shouldn't be capitalized, unless you want everything to be sentence case all the time. Even then, it leaves it open to interpretation. One example being what Wikipedia may not view as a proper name but other sources do. So then what, you jump around checking what is and isn't classified, specifically on wiki, as a proper name? What is the source consistently capitalizes said phrase because it treats it as a proper noun or name? We still choose sentence case in that situation? {{tq|Alternatively, with the script mentioned below, I can click a button, glance over the resulting diff, and be done very quickly.}} – So repeatedly use a script on an article if it's being updated with references for a stylistic choice that some disagree with? That doesn't sound like the best idea.

::::::::::{{tq|If I have to follow the capitalization choices made by each individual source, then I am, indeed, focusing entirely on the capitalization from the sources. How else could I determine whether the capitalization is actually correct in such a model, except to find and open every single one of the sources, and compare, word by word, whether each title matches each different source's chosen style?}} – Why would you be trying to do that anyways? In idea, you don't have to focus on that if you rely on the capitalization used by the reference to begin with. The problem comes into play when people decide they want to change the capitalization from what the source and the default citation tools and gadgets available do. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:58, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::::Why would I be checking whether the citations are consistently formatted? Because complying with the MoS is a requirement for featured content. If you want featured content, you have to:

:::::::::::* determine what the 'established style' is, and

:::::::::::* determine whether the article conforms to that established style.

:::::::::::If your 'established form' is "use exactly the capitalization used in the original source's title, even if it is RanDoM", then determining whether the article conforms to that established style requires checking the title of every source against how it was typed in the Wikipedia article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:32, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::::::{{tq|Why would I be checking whether the citations are consistently formatted? Because complying with the MoS is a requirement for featured content.}} – Right, and as stated below by PresN, using the capitalization of the sources is acceptable and is perfectly in line with what's acceptable at WP:FLC. The MoS does not state this citation style is unacceptable, it's just a handful of editors doing so. Hey man im josh (talk) 18:39, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::::::In which case, you ought to be able to have a quick chat on the talk page for the single disputed list, establish that there is a consensus to do it your way, and be done with this.

:::::::::::::Are you resisting this discussion because you think that an ordinary discussion about this will result in a consensus rejecting your preferred style for that one (1) list? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:43, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::::::::{{tq|In which case, you ought to be able to have a quick chat on the talk page for the single disputed list, establish that there is a consensus to do it your way, and be done with this.}} – There would need to be a consensus against that way, or a consensus to change to a different way, instead of simply seeking consensus for the existing style.

::::::::::::::{{tq|Are you resisting this discussion because you think that an ordinary discussion about this will result in a consensus rejecting your preferred style for that one (1) list?}} – Sure, let's pretend that's it, instead of the other explanations I've given. Specifically that I've worked on thousands of articles adding citations and a discussion in each place would be ridiculous. It's either acceptable or it's not. If it's not, I suggest requesting that all the built in citation tools Wikipedia uses be modified to fit the preferred format. Hey man im josh (talk) 18:49, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::::::::Even if it's acceptable in general, each article needs to establish which style will be used. We could say source-copying is an acceptable capitalization style in general, but for this specific article, the consensus is to use (e.g.) sentence case instead.

:::::::::::::::Rejecting the source-copying variation would not create a single "preferred format", just like your rejection of all caps doesn't create a single preferred format. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:21, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::: {{U|Ifly6}} {{tq||Once someone gets a single reference in with title case they can immediately proclaim "inconsistent mix of styles" and demand title case on everything.}} {{U|Dicklyon}} challenged you to provide evidence of this ever happening and you did not respond. I renew the challenge. This simply does not happen, not with any of the WP:VARS. Someone would be reverted immediately if they tried this kind of WP:GAMING. The case you pointed out of a article moving from a dominant-but-not-consistent style to a different entirely consistent one could be justifiably reverted, as long as the near-consistent one were also made entirely consistent. Such edge-case happenings are so rare and so uncontroversially fixable that we need not address them here per WP:CREEP and WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY and WP:LAWYER.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:22, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::He asked for {{tq|Have you seen cases where refs started out consistent with their sources and then got made inconsistent by someone moving [I think "adding" is meant here] one to title case, making it inconsistent?}} On Marcus Junius Brutus: [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Marcus_Junius_Brutus&oldid=1165086430 consistently sentence case]; [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Marcus_Junius_Brutus&diff=prev&oldid=1167004428 Clarke added in title case]; the edit to impose title case on a predominantly sentence case source list is then linked above. At the time I declined to revert since I was under the impression that (1) title case was preferred under the MOS (which is why I emphasised making the retention point, {{small|{{tq|this should be made clearer and given a blue all-caps tag}}}}, clearer earlier) and (2) wasn't willing to get into yet another long and drawn-out fight with that editor.

:::::::If you are demanding proof of the specific possibility that I alleged, of someone adding a source in one case specifically to claim inconsistency, I have no diffs to provide: I've not looked for them because I have thought that title case is preferred anyway. My comment was in reference to his response that I had no basis for complaint: the response falls into the fact pattern asserted, where an article consistently in sentence case had a title case reference added and then someone, here Dicklyon, justifies the title case edit on the basis that it is made consistent. If you think that the previously linked edits can be justifiably reverted and that the possibility of such gaming can be successfully disregarded as gaming, I am willing to accept that. Ifly6 (talk) 05:01, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::That Clarke book ref added by a relatively inexperienced editor who got the sfn wrong, too, doesn't indicate any preference about caps, as far as I can tell, beyond the usual tendency to cap book titles. He probably didn't notice that there was a consistent lowercase style there, nor intend to make it inconsistent or change it. Why didn't you just fix it if you noticed? You could have helped educate him. Or did you see some reason to think he cared about that? There's nothing in his talk archive about that. Further, it's not an example of what I asked for, which involved "cases where refs started out consistent with their sources". Those are not that. Dicklyon (talk) 05:35, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::And I'm very unclear on what you think I've done. When I changed ""Matthew Stafford Voted Comeback Player Of The Year By PFW/PFWA" to ""Matthew Stafford Voted Comeback Player of the Year by PFW/PFWA" I made no claim about making the article citations consistent, style wise, nor did I think I was making them less consistent; I could see there was still a mix of sentence case and title case. I was just fixing what looked like an obvious error in title case, having never heard of the idea that copying such a weird style from a source would be a thing. It turns out that I learned from Josh that it is a thing, with him at least. I'm trying to find out if others think this makes sense. So stop accusing me of who knows what, please. Dicklyon (talk) 05:50, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::I answered your rhetorical questions already. See (1) and the explanation in the second paragraph as to why I didn't object earlier. Moreover, this is Wikipedia, not a court where a matter not objected to in the first instance is precluded on appeal. As to the second matter, I am not referring to the OP. You said [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Citing_sources#c-Dicklyon-20250319024800-Ifly6-20250319013700 in a reply directly to me] that I {{!tq|can hardly complain if someone moves an article from an inconsistent mix of styles to a consistent style}}. What about {{tq|justifies the title case edit [that I linked above] on the basis that it [the article] is made consistent}} is an inaccurate description? Ifly6 (talk) 18:31, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

{{ping|TheDoctorWho}} I notice at Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/Featured log (look for "title case") that you have on quite a few occasions noted ref title style inconsistency and suggested a tool to fix them. Have you had pushback on that, from Josh or anyone? Dicklyon (talk) 16:30, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:Interesting, I just wanted to note that it's not a requirement at FLC @TheDoctorWho, nor is it explicitly codified in any aspect of the MoS. I believe it's an interpretation of MOS:CONFORM that it also applies to references, but I do not view it as such. Hey man im josh (talk) 16:38, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::This issue was ultimately first brought up to me at my first FAC where it was requested that I change them. Pinging {{ping|Gog the Mild}} since they're the one that first brought it up there.

::I started suggesting at FLC per my interpretation of MOS:CONFORM as well as MOS:CT and MOS:TITLECONFORM. Specifically the piece that says {{tq|WP:Citing sources#Citation style permits the use of other citation styles within Wikipedia, and some of these expect sentence case for certain titles (usually article and chapter titles). Title case should not be imposed on such titles under such a citation style consistently used in an article.}} I've always read this as meaning that if a consistent citation style (including title/sentence case) is not used in an article, then one should be.

::An example later in that MOS says {{tq|something like "JOHNSON WINS RUNOFF ELECTION: incumbent leads by at least 18% as polls close" should be rendered on Wikipedia as "Johnson Wins Runoff Election: Incumbent Leads by at Least 18% as Polls Close" or "Johnson wins runoff election: Incumbent leads by at least 18% as polls close", depending on title-case or sentence-case for periodical sources in the citation style used in the article}}, again suggesting (to me at least) that there should be some kind of uniformity.

:::The MoS has since been a little fluid around this. My current understanding is that book titles need to be in title case, article and chapter titles can be either title or sentence case, but should be consistent within an article. Gog the Mild (talk) 19:07, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::While it's not a named requirement at FLC, the FLCR do say {{tq|Style. It complies with the Manual of Style and its supplementary pages}}, and if my interpretation of the the named MOS is correct, then it would fall under that requirement. I typically point nominators towards this user script, or run it myself if they're having trouble with it or aren't familiar with user scripts. TheDoctorWho (talk) 17:06, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::I did some digging to see if this had come up in any of the nominations I've been a part of, and it had in two. One of which I explained my approach, which the reviewer accepted, and the other I pinged PresN for, which they replied to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_list_candidates/List_of_Detroit_Lions_first-round_draft_picks/archive1#c-PresN-20231212013400-Hey_man_im_josh-20231211192300 here]. Noting that this was back in December of 2023, but they're obviously much more experienced at WP:FLC than I am, and they've been a delegate there far far longer than I have, but they noted that we do not enforce this in source reviews.

:::I can respect your interpretation @TheDoctorWho, and I do understand where you're coming from, but personally I'm a believer in keeping what the source used as a matter of source-to-reference integrity (I'm not sure of a better way to phrase it, even though this may not be a perfect way to do so). Personally I think your quoted text actually states that there isn't a set style or requirement to use a specific style, so long as you're being consistent in your approach. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:15, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::::I respect your position as well and I do agree that it suggests a consistent style and not preference for a particular style. That said, I wouldn't suggest a nominator to change their references from sentence case to title case if sentence was consistently used. More often than not however, it seems that there is a mix of more than one style because the titles have been copy/pasted. The only reason I typically suggest title case when a consistent style isn't used, is because that's what the script converts to. TheDoctorWho (talk) 17:36, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::@TheDoctorWho: Do you have any thoughts on "Use what the source uses for capitalization, except downcase all caps words" as a reference style choice? As mentioned, that is the preference for myself and a number of others, and I have my feelings as to why this is more appropriate. It does lead to a mix of capitalizations in references sometimes for context. I mention this because using the capitalization from the source, as opposed to picking sentence or title case, is ultimately what this discussion is about. We don't necessarily need to force people to change the style they're using, particularly at FLC, if they're consistent in how they're doing so. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:44, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::While I suppose that it's still consistent in a way, I'm not the biggest fan of it. That format can't be verified quickly without actually checking the individual sources.

::::::Back to the "JOHNSON WINS RUNOFF ELECTION" example, this would also raise the issue of do you downcase to sentence or title case? Both are used so an editor is actively picking one of the two based on their preference, and I could see it turning into a wider case if the downcasing isn't done consistently (down to title case in one ref and sentence case in another).

::::::All this said however, if I ever mentioned that the cases weren't consistent at an FLC and an editor pointed out that it was the reference style choice used, I would likely go ahead and pass the source review, as it still meets a form of consistency. TheDoctorWho (talk) 18:26, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

I firmly believe that "use the stylization of the source, except for fixing allcaps" is a perfectly consistent style. To be more blunt, I find the way a handful of editors have, over the last 1-2 years, tried to insist that forcing all sources to be title or sentence case is the only consistent way to be completely baffling, given the prior ~20 years of not doing that at the FA/FL or any other level. Not to mention that we have never tried to force all of wikipedia to adopt MLA vs harvard vs chicago formatting, so why suddenly would we force wiki-wide title formatting. If you want to force a structure on all ref titles in your articles that's fine, but that's never been a thing and I'm not interested in having 3 people try to retroactively make it a thing. --PresN 18:19, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:@PresN, the point isn't to establish wiki-wide title formatting. The point is to figure out whether side-by-side refs using different capitalization schemes is "consistent", even though it doesn't look consistent when you see "The Size of the Moon" next to "The size of the moon" and "The Size Of The Moon". WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:37, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::"All articles must use either title or sentence formatting for all ref titles, regardless of how the source formatted the title" is trying to establish wiki-wide title formatting. Frankly, pretending that it isn't because you're giving two options is insulting. --PresN 18:46, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

All source titles on Wikipedia have quote marks. Doesn't that mean we should copy how a source presents the title? For example, if the source said "The Size Of The Moon" and we decided to downcap it, wouldn't that be displayed in the Wikipedia article as "The [s]ize [o]f [t]he [m]oon". I don't really care either way though. Just thought I would note that. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 18:49, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:No. Wikipedia guidelines suggest to ordinarily make minor styling adjustments without highlighting them with square brackets. See MOS:CONFORM. A change of wording would use square brackets, but just adjusting for typographical consistency would not. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 03:32, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

{{tqb|1=

The sources we cite have their own style guides. This affects things like the capitalization they use when publishing the sources. For example, different newspapers and academic journals may use:

• Title case: {{xt|Brown, Rebecca (2006). "Size of the Moon", Scientific American.}}
• Sentence case: {{xt|Brown, Rebecca (2006). "Size of the moon", Scientific American.}}
• Leading caps: {{xt|Brown, Rebecca (2006). "Size Of The Moon", Scientific American.}}
• All caps: {{xt|Brown, Rebecca (2006). "SIZE OF THE MOON", SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN.}}

Our style guidelines require the citations in Wikipedia articles to be consistently formatted (e.g., at the Wikipedia:Featured articles level). Editors are allowed to choose different styles for different articles per WP:CITEVAR. These style differences include differences about how to capitalize the titles of cited sources in ==References==.

Using exclusively title case or exclusively sentence case for all citations in a Wikipedia article has always been considered a consistent style. Today's question is: Should we consider copying the diverse styles used by sources to be a "consistent" style? For example, if the article cites a newspaper article that uses leading caps, an academic journal article that uses sentence case, and a book that uses title case, is it "consistent" for the Wikipedia article to have all of these styles in the references section?}}

~170 words, not counting the examples. This is okay but not great in terms of WP:RFCBRIEF. But does it make sense? I have no idea. SMcCandlish, do you think this will be clear to people who aren't MoS denizens? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:26, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:I would oppose an RfC started with this text, as it's clearly trying to lead to a specific conclusion instead of simply presenting options. I also don't understand how wasting people's time with this and making our rules, which are often a barrier of entry for folks, is going to improve the site in any way instead of further pushing people away, but hey, that's never stopped crusades before. Hey man im josh (talk) 18:32, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::How would you write the question? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:35, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::I wouldn't because it's trying to put editors into a box and forcing them to adopt specific wiki-wide formatting styles. The question, simply put, is whether using the capitalization used by sources is an acceptable citation style. An exception/asterisk to this is all caps words, which should be downcased to all lower case or sentence case, whatever is consistent with the other portion of the ref. If the question is going to be asked, it cannot be asked in a leading fashion. Hey man im josh (talk) 18:36, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::::How do you get from me writing {{xt|Editors are allowed to choose different styles for different articles}} to {{!xt|forcing them to adopt specific wiki-wide formatting styles}}? One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others). WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:39, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::How do you think "all articles must use sentence style for all ref titles" is a wiki-wide style, but "all articles must use either sentence style for all refs or title style for all refs" is not? Giving two options does not make it less of a forced style. --PresN 18:51, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::Has anyone proposed that all articles must use either sentence or title case? I didn't. If you look at the bulleted list in the green box above, you'll see me specifying four options and banning none. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:02, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::Lol. {{tq|"Using exclusively title case or exclusively sentence case for all citations in a Wikipedia article has always been considered a consistent style. Today's question is: Should we consider copying the diverse styles used by sources to be a "consistent" style?"}} is absolutely begging the question. Because it's just as valid to say "Using the diverse styles used by sources as well as exclusively title case or exclusively sentence case for all citations in a Wikipedia article have always been considered as consistent styles." You're taking something that has been common practice for 20 years and acting like it's a "new thing" that needs to be questioned, while in turn treating something that's only been pushed for a couple years by a few editors, as valid as it is, as if it's the established, obvious baseline. I'm not opposed to an RfC, but what you're proposing is plainly worded to push a specific outcome. --PresN 19:08, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::So... I disagree that it's been common practice to mix sentence/title/leading/all caps in the same article for 20 years, except in the sense that articles are a work in progress and citation formatting is not usually prioritized. I'm glad I double-checked that statement, because it's wrong: [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Citing_sources&oldid=11480507 Twenty years ago, this guideline] required title case; sentence case and leading caps were banned. I agree that consistent citations aren't prioritized until FA, but at FA, they are required.

::::::::For example, the first FA listed on your User: page was promoted in 2022 by @Gog the Mild after [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Colossal_Cave_Adventure&diff=prev&oldid=1071651808 fixing the capitalization in a title]. Why bother, if a consistent capitalization pattern is not required in citations? Why accept that edit, if it made it "inconsistent" with a whatever-the-original-did style? Here's you [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Colossal_Cave_Adventure&diff=prev&oldid=1069376303 changing the case] for a title in a ref; if that's not necessary, or if it is actively violating the copy-the-original style, why did you do it? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:42, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::...My first FA was in 2010, 15 years ago. It has had mixed ref title cases, reflecting the actual source titles, since promotion. My latest, 25 FAs later, was in 2024. It has had mixed ref title cases, reflecting the actual source titles, since promotion. I accepted Gog screwing around with the ref titles in CCA because I'm not going to throw a fit and trash my own FAC just to have a fight with people who insist their own personal style is the only accepted way for articles to be, especially when those editors are the ones who handle promotions. Your link to my own edit is for me fixing an ALLCAPS issue, which is a specific exception to "use the source's formatting" that is quoted up and down this discussion, so if that's supposed to be a "gotcha" that invalidated my critique of your proposed RfC language, I'm not sure what you're driving at. --PresN 19:57, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::::That wasn't a use of ALLCAPS; that was a use of an acronym in a title that used title case. Some style guides downcase them if they're more than four or five letters long and form a pronounceable word (e.g., AIDS becomes Aids, but NIH remains NIH). Others don't (e.g., SCOTUS). WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:08, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::::Fortran is not an acronym. --PresN 20:17, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::::::FORmula TRANslator is an acronym.[http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/F/Fortrash.html] WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:32, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::::::The name of the language is Fortran. It is not, and never has been, named "Formula Translator", even if that's what the name was derived from. The language maintainers themselves have not written it in all caps since 1990. This is all besides the point. If your argument is "it's okay that my proposed RfC wording to decide whether or not editors should be allowed to base ref title casing on the source title casing, something that has been done on millions of articles for decades, implies that the answer should be no because one time PresN removed caps from something that is possibly up for debate if it counts as ALLCAPS", then... I don't know how to respond. You can make whatever RfC you want. I just don't agree with your proposed wording. --PresN 21:36, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::::::::By the way, I asked my brother, who owns pretty much every Fortran manual ever printed (hundreds of them), and he reports: "The original Fortran manuals for the IBM 704 used lower-case [Fortran], but very shortly thereafter IBM start using FORTRAN upper case consistently onwards." And that edit was about a source by my friend and neighbor Don Woods, ex roommate of another brother of mine. Small world. Dicklyon (talk) 05:29, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::::Your latest, Outer Wilds, has an "editorialized" title in the [https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/outer-wilds-review-extraterrestrial-investigation/1900-6417163/ very first ref]. Not a case thing, but not really a literal representation of a source title. How do you decide how much editorial discretion is OK? Dicklyon (talk) 03:54, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

:Agreed this is too lengthy. We don't need to spell out examples of all these styles, which would actually inspire addition of more variations (e.g. the "sentence case" example is actually showing a mixture of sentence case for minor work title and title case for major work title, so someone would edit it to say than and then insert an all-title-case example, and probably others. I recall from my own undergrad work an obscure style favored in one discipline in which minor works take sentence case and major works take all-caps. It would be entirely sufficient to say {{tq|The sources we cite have their own style guides, which affect things like the capitalization they use in bibliographies. Different publishers use title case, sentence case (or a mixture of these), and less commonly leading capitals on all words, or even all caps. Our style guidelines require citations in Wikipedia articles to be consistently formatted. Editors are allowed to choose different styles for different articles, but not mix them in the same article.}}

However, we have another problem here, in that {{!xt|Today's question is: Should we consider copying the diverse styles used by sources to be a "consistent" style?}} is misleading and pointless. This question has already been asked and response has basically been "no", since it's exactly the opposite of both the intent and the clear wording of WP:CITESTYLE. The {{em|actual}} question to ask here is whether the guideline actually needs to spell this out in any more detail than it already does (the WP:CREEP problem).

{{em|If}} we needed to say anything at all further on this in the guideline, it should probably be to simply agree with editorial reality: {{tq|The most common styles used in Wikipedia are: sentence case for article/chapter titles and title case for major-work titles; title case across the board; and sentence case across the board.}} Remember that the purpose of guidelines is to reflect the best practices the community settles on, not try to force a change in them.

PS: It is already implicit in our handling of all style matters that no one has to read and comply with our style guidelines to contribute here. The important thing is providing encyclopedic content and providing reliable-source citations (at all) to back up the claims in that content. The style guidelines, including both MoS and this one, primarily exist for cleanup work by gnomes and bots. We really only have problems when one editor wants to try to force all other editors to comply with a style the one editor likes best, and make confused "correctness" prescriptivist/proscriptivist arguments (frequently rooted in the WP:Specialized-style fallacy, in this sort of case something along the lines "the [discipline name here] material I read uses style X, so that is the only permissible style for this subject"). A related problem is WP:OWN / WP:VESTED behavior in the form of the mistaken belief that an editor who has spent more time working on an article has more say in style and other matters that pertain to that piece. The fact that the original draft above tried to work in a tie to the WP:FA process (which is really just a wikiproject) is disturbing. WP:CITESTYLE has nothing to do with FA, GA, etc., and applies to all content. So do our policies and guidelines on citation of reliable sources (and what counts), WP not existing as an advocacy platform (including with regard to any stylistic holy-war nonsense), page editability versus "ownership", and levels of consensus (in which generalized community consensus overrides preferences of little gaggles of editors seeking to over-control a subject or a specific article).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:03, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

::Agreed. If we need to say anything it should simply be a statement to retain styles and that there are the three broad capitalisation styles given above. Ifly6 (talk) 18:07, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

:::"Scientific American" actually is sentence case. "American" is never written in lowercase. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:32, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

::I can never get through your walls of text (please work on being more concise), but thankfully, you put the key point to refute near the top. {{Tq|However, we have another problem here, in that Today's question is: Should we consider copying the diverse styles used by sources to be a "consistent" style? is misleading and pointless. This question has already been asked and response has basically been "no", since it's exactly the opposite of both the intent and the clear wording of WP:CITESTYLE.}} — Patently incorrect. That's your preferred interpretation, but the cite style wording makes it clear this is an acceptable style. As previously mentioned, if you want to enforce this odd interpretation, please go ahead with the RfC to get consensus that the consistent style of using what's used by the source (to retain integrity of source titling to reference titling) is inappropriate. Please also ensure to request that the citation tools Wikipedia uses be updated to no longer use the capitalization that sources use. Thank you for your time and happy editing! Hey man im josh (talk) 01:54, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

:In line with Josh's assertion that the question is not misleading or pointless, perhaps this would address that question directly:

:{{tqb|1=Wikipedia:Citing sources#Citation style allows editors to choose any citation style, so long as it is applied consistently. Different sources have different styles, e.g., in capitalization. For example, one source cited in an article might use Title case ({{xt|"Size of the Moon"}}, another might use Sentence case ({{xt|"Size of the moon"}}), and a third source might use leading caps ({{xt|"Size Of The Moon"}}). Some editors want to use all of these styles together, saying that their "consistent style" is to copy/paste the titles as they are formatted by each source. Other editors believe that having some citations in the Wikipedia article use title case and others use sentence case in the same Wikipedia article is not a consistent style, so one style needs to be chosen and the other citations edited to match.{{pb}}Do you think that copying the capitalization styles from each source, resulting in a mix of capitalization styles in the Wikipedia article, is a "consistent style" within the meaning of this guideline?}}

:My question here is mostly: If a consensus is formed (regardless of whether the answer is 'yes' or 'no'), would anyone here have any doubts about how to apply that decision to the disputed article(s)? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:48, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

::Has anyone pointed out yet that sentence case would actually be "Size of the Moon"? Wikipedia treats "the Moon" as a proper name, per MOS:CELESTIALBODIES. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 03:04, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

:::I took this title from an example in the guideline, but I have thought about changing it, because my own preference is to treat celestial bodies as proper nouns. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:28, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

:I've been trying to ignore this discussion. I mean, it is not about what appears in the body of the article, but only about what appears in the Appendices. When adding citations to articles (and I add a lot), I copy the titles of works as they appear in the sources (except, I do reduce all caps to title case). Frankly, I don't recall ever caring (or even noticing) whether or not there is any difference (other than all caps) in how titles of works are styled in citations. I don't care if some one else wants to apply some sort of (I've decided not to quote Emerson here) consistency to the styling of such titles, but I have better uses for my time. - Donald Albury 13:09, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

::This dispute started with someone who also copies the titles of works as they appear in [online] sources, but reverted when someone else applied consistency to the capitalization of titles.

::We could add another example to the list:

::* Library capitalization: {{xt|Homework : the evidence}}

::Both the superfluous space before the colon and downcasing everything except the first word and the most obvious of proper nouns is characteristic of this style. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:59, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

:::My favourite library capitalization is [https://www.google.com/search?q={{urlencode:worldcat.org "war and peace"}}{{#if:|&tbs=li:1|}} War and peace] at Worldcat. Surely, that cannot be used in Wikipedia articles. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 23:57, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

::::You would not use it in the Wikipedia article's text itself, but that would be permissible capitalization choice for a citation in the ==References== section. I doubt you would actually see it in practice, though, because Tolstoy's book is more likely to be cited in a literature/humanities article (i.e., in articles where the chosen style is likely to be Title Case). Sentence case is more common in the sciences/social sciences (e.g., "Molecular structure of nucleic acids: a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid") and is unlikely to appear in an article about classic Russian literature. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:17, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::My point is that War and peace for Tolstoy's book is never acceptable in any Wikipedia article, anywhere, regardless how some libraries might style it. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 01:52, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::Well... This guideline used to require title case, which would agree with your view. It now permits anything that can be called "consistent". And in the dispute that prompted this discussion, an editor is claiming that if the auto-filling ref tools happened to get their information from WorldCat (which uses library style, so War and peace), then that should be accepted and they should be able to prevent other editors from changing it to War and Peace.

::::::So I guess my question for you is: If you look at the green bit above, if that turns out to be the RFC question, would you find it easy to figure out what's being asked and share your opinion? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:10, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::No. As several others have pointed out, there's no demonstrated need to make WP:CITEVAR more detailed/prescriptive. Further, the example title in the green bit is poorly chosen, and sylings 2 and 3 are obviously incompatible with any of Wikipdia's house styles, as is War and peace. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 04:57, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::"Styling 2" is the required capitalization for real-world APA style, which is popular with science journals. APA style is explicitly named in this guideline as an acceptable citation style. Also, the WP:CS1 citation templates (e.g., {{tl|cite web}}) were primarily based on APA style. I therefore conclude that it is not "obviously incompatible". WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:23, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::::Sorry, I mistyped. I meant nos. 3 and 4, and I meant WP:CITESTYLE. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 07:13, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::Another way to ask this: One of the Wikipedia:Featured lists currently mixes all three of those capitalization styles in its sources. An editor attempted to "correct" them to your preferred style (title case), and he got reverted for his pains. Do you think title case should be re-added, or do you think that the "War and peace" + "War And Peace" styles should be kept in (some) of those citations? WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:25, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::::I would never edit an article only to change the citation style. OTOH, when I make other substantial edits, I regularly downcase where necessary. And yes, if in such an edit I should encounter War and peace or War And Peace, I would correct those. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 07:13, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::::Now imagine that the editor who originally added War and peace to the article says "No, you can't 'correct' that capitalization. I'm using the CITESTYLE of 'whatever capitalization the automated tool gives me', so War and peace is correct". Do you think that's a fair use of CITESTYLE? WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:44, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::::@WhatamIdoing: Are you referring to the edit I reverted that started this nonsense? As mentioned, I always intend to utilize the capitalization of sources, with an exception for all caps words. If there's a mistake in the references then making the reference that doesn't follow this style consistent with the others makes sense. Hey man im josh (talk) 15:34, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::::Yes: You intend to use the capitalization used by the sources, which means that if you're citing WorldCat's entries for the book War and Peace, you're going to end up with War and peace. This is not "a mistake" by WorldCat; this is their chosen style. So:

:::::::::::* You choose to defer to WorldCat.

:::::::::::* WorldCat chooses to use a capitalization style that grates on most Wikipedia editors.

:::::::::::* We end up with a dispute.

:::::::::::That dispute can only be resolved by deciding either:

:::::::::::(a) to keep the grating style because it's what the source chose, or

:::::::::::(b) to not blindly follow whatever style the source chose, because some sources have chosen styles that are, to use the technical term, "stupid".

:::::::::::You have been arguing for (a). I believe that Michael would argue for (b). WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:32, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

:: {{U|Donald Albury}} {{tq|I don't recall ... any difference ... in how titles of works are styled in citations. I don't care if some one else wants to apply some sort of ... consistency to the styling of such titles}} That's the sensible attitude to take if you don't have an interest in making them consistent for our readers. We have one party here who seems to refuse to accept this. {{tq|I've decided not to quote Emerson here}}: Except you're doing so by implication, pointedly. As with about 99% of people on WP who make reference to that Emerson material, you did not understand it at all; it has nothing to do with writing style but with socio-political inflexibility of mind over time. See WP:EMERSON for a summary. And consider that implying every other editor is a dunderhead for applying the consistency {{em|that a guideline calls for}} (while trying to pretend you're not doing that) is an unhelpful fight-picking move in the first place.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:22, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

:::I'm just saying that all this todo about the capitalization style of the titles of works in references seems minor to me. As I said, other than all caps, it is something I don't notice. Donald Albury 00:05, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

::::Why would one bother to join a discussion among people who care, just to say "This discussion is about something I don't care about"? Dicklyon (talk) 03:15, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

Josh keeps wanting this to be about "forcing": "forcing people to change all of the titles of sources", "enforce a stupid style", "forcing everybody into using sentence or title case", "forcing people to change capitalization of references during the source reviews I conduct", "put editors into a box and forcing them to adopt specific wiki-wide formatting styles" etc. I find this offensive. This has never been what guidelines and manual of style are about. Nobody is suggesting to force editors to do anything, and hardly anybody has suggested that we hold up article promotions over minor style exceptions. Lots of articles get promoted with style exceptions, and nobody gets bent out of shape about that. Nobody gets fired or chastised over it. It just means that there are still opportunities to move toward better alignment with style guidelines. What brought me here was that I tried to make improvements toward what I thought guidelines suggested, and I got reverted, on the basis of an interpretation that had never occurred to me. So I'm just wanting to know what others think. It's sounding like Josh is not alone, so maybe an RFC will be helpful to see if theres a general consensus on whether we should clarify the guidance, one way or the other, or leave it alone and not worry about it. Dicklyon (talk) 02:46, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

:I don't really see why you needed a separate section to say you were offended and to go after me, but it's disingenuous to act like the goal isn't to force a style change. As for the promotion of articles with "exceptions", you're still acting like it's an invalid style. It's not an exception if it's an acceptable style, which is how it's often treated.

:Again, you're obsessed with the idea that you're right and your changes are "obviously" an improvement, when I believe it was not. The guidance is already clear, you can pick a style and stick with it. There's no need to implement unnecessary changes to reference capitalization.

:You've already heard what some others think, so I don't really see the point in this separate section to ask for opinions. It's silly to pretend the goal here isn't to force others to conform with your personal preference.

:As previously mentioned, feel free to continue on your crusade and obsession, but it's a waste of time for everybody involved. I'm disgusted how much time I've had to spend on this bull shit, I just want to keep improving things without ridiculous knit picking which is mind bogglingly frustrating. Let people do things the way they're doing it if it's consistent. It's not rocket science, that's the guidelines. Hey man im josh (talk) 03:19, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

::Thanks, yes, I will continue to do my best to move things toward conformance with guidelines, as that's my easy way to keep improving things. Of course, I do other things, too. Dicklyon (talk) 03:31, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

:::This is actually about modifying guidelines. It conforms with existing ones. Hey man im josh (talk) 03:45, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

::You can think of the "forcing" subsection as an arbitrary break in a too-long section if you like, but I thought of it as an important aside, as you exhibit that weird "forcing" interpretation of MOS guidance or people who care about such things. Whether we decide your preferred style is an exception, or not an exception, is beside the point of this observation. Dicklyon (talk) 03:34, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

:::No it just restates your opinion, I fail to see what the new section is meant to accomplish, but you do it quite often in discussions. I do not think of the break as arbitrary for that reason.

:::As for the phrasing of forcing, that's what's happening. You're attempting to force your perspective regarding something that's not broken. You're literally trying to force me, and others, into changing how we do our references because you prefer them one way.

:::Do you intend to request that the reference tools built into Wikipedia as gadgets change their practice of using the capitalization that the sources use? Hey man im josh (talk) 03:52, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

:(ec) No argument against an RfC, of course, that's the standard way of determining large-scale consensus for contentious issues. I would gently suggest, though, that the idea that some people don't treat the MOS, including their own interpretations of it, as if it was rigid law, especially at GAN/FAC, is counter to reality, to the point that I question how much you've interacted with the FAC process. As a result, setting a specific interpretation of guidelines in stone is "forcing" it, because other people will "enforce" it. In fact, my own opposition in this conversation is because I've had people at FAC declare "ref titles must all have the same casing" to be law and try to enforce it on the article I nominated. --PresN 03:25, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

::You're right that I haven't interacted with that process much. And I acknowledge that the promotion criteria include conformance with MOS guidelines, and that sometimes some editors will insist on that. So it's good to understand what the guidelines actually say and mean. Dicklyon (talk) 03:29, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

:::GA doesn't require consistent citation formatting. This is explicitly stated in the Wikipedia:Good article criteria, and has been for years. I still occasionally find GA reviewers making up their own rules that contradict this, but it's only FA that is expected to enforce this, and one of the FAC folks told me years ago that they won't fail a candidate over it; if necessary, one of the FA coords will fix the citations (as one of them did, in the example I gave above). WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:43, 20 March 2025 (UTC)

:There is no "forcing". No one has to know and comply with any style guideline to edit here. Rather, if they write non-compliant material, other editors will clean it up later. The only spot for trouble is when a non-compliant editor wants to fight against compliance because they mistakenly believe they have a "right" to force the content to be particular ways (that's the only place any "forcing" comes into it). That obstructionist behavior pattern is actually disruptive and needs to stop. This is not StylisticHolyWarPedia.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  18:06, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

::It’s not really about one editor vs many… The issue of “force” comes in when one group of editors prefer style X, and a different group prefer style Y… if the MOS indicates a preference for either X or Y, then one of the groups will cut short discussion and “enforce” their preference to comply with the MOS. But if the MOS continues to allow multiple styles, then everyone actually has to take the time to explain why they think their preferred style is better, and convince the others to compromise. Blueboar (talk) 18:20, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

:::I don't really understand why Wikipedia doesn't have more of a specific preferred style for citations (e.g., CS1 without the title-case preference). It seems like we have a lot of guidelines for everything else about article except that. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 20:01, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

::::Well, for whatever reason, different citations style are explicitly allowed by the MOS, and no-one is trying to change that. Just trying to decide what's meant by a consistent style. Is copying a bunch of different styles from sources a consistent style, or is it not? I'm not sure what beef Blurboar has here. Dicklyon (talk) 23:44, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::Oh, I have no problem with consistency within any single article. I just don’t think we need consistency between articles, or for the MOS to specify which style is preferred. That choice can be determined through discussion, compromise and consensus at the article level. If the editors at article A prefer citation style X, but the editors at article B prefer citation style Y… that’s fine. Blueboar (talk) 00:27, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::So still wondering why you jumped in here to say that. That's not what Josh's "forcing" comments were about, and not what my question is about. Nobody is pushing for a consistent citation style across articles (though BarrelProof did express that he doesn't understand why not, after your comment). Dicklyon (talk) 00:48, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::Yes, I don't understand why there is no guidance about trying to have a consistent citation style across different articles, when there is guidance about practically all other aspects of writing style. It was commented that "no-one is trying to change that", but at this moment, I would support changing that. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 02:48, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::: {{U|BarrelProof}} Basically it's because of an intense pissing match between camps of editors in WP's early days, almost all of whom are gone now. It's also why WP:CITE is the only style guideline we have without a "Manual of Style" prefix. The fight was between MoS regulars and a faction of editors very, very intent on using particular citation styles (before we even had citation templates). This guideline should actually be renamed to be part of MoS finally, since the split is weird and serves no purpose, and is confusing. (Even in this thread there are many references to CITE as part of MOS, coming from some very long-term editors.) I doubt there is a community appetite for having a single, consistent citation style site-wide yet. Give it another 5 years or so and that will likely have changed, because the number of articles with hand-maintained citations in odd styles is rapidly dwindling. As WhatamIdoing put it: {{tq|The answer... is that nobody wants to deal with the expected drama.}} That's essentially correct, but the amount of drama that would be generated recedes with every passing year. Some obvious evidence of this is the merger of CS2 into CS1, and later the WP:PARENTHETICAL deprecation of parenthetical/Harvard referencing. A decade earlier, and super-mega shitstorms of drama would have been stirred up by either proposal.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:22, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::You're literally trying to change that when I spelled out how this style is acceptable lol. Hey man im josh (talk) 01:45, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

::::The answer to {{xt|why Wikipedia doesn't have more of a specific preferred style for citations}} is that nobody wants to deal with the expected drama. Just imagine what would happen if we said, "By the way, English literature folks: We know MLA style is common in your field, but we've decided to make your articles use APA style. Also: History folks: No more CMOS. Biologists: No more Vancouver. Lawyers: No more Bluebook...". Among people with strong opinions on citation style, choosing a single style is only desired if it's my preferred style.

::::That said, I believe that, eventually, the answer is going to be WP:CS1 (i.e., the style used by the {{tl|cite web}} family of templates), because that's what gets used by people who don't have strong opinions (i.e., most of us). We're just perhaps another decade or so away from that point. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:32, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::Maybe not that long! The situation is actually artificial, an "it's good to have a strong opinion on citation style" sentiment manufactured by the early editors of WP:CITE. All professionals in those fields you mentioned are entirely used to the fact that when they write for a particular journal, book publisher, newspaper/magazine, court, conference, or whatever, that they will be required to follow that particular entity's style manual (or have their material editorially conformed to it before publication). It's 100% normal and expected. The myth that a physicist or whatever is going to have their brain melt or storm off in a rage if they can't use some particular citation style is ridiculous and patently insulting. What happened here is that for no particularly good reason, a faction decided in Ye Olde Tymes that WP should not have a consistent citation style despite nearly every other major publisher having one, but instead cater to all external citation styles. The idea was that this would attract specialist editors. But there is no evidence to support this proposition, and a great deal of evidence against it. WP's practice of permitting any attestable citation style is actually quite aberrant.

And the actual reality of practice isn't this fairytale. There are a number of confusing, weird off-site citation styles that are not permitted here (due not to a rule but simply the editorial community eliminating them – in particular any that conflict with MOS:TITLES on italics and quotation marks, or with MOS:ALLCAPS). Nor is there a close correspondence between any of those named citation styles, and articles on Wikipedia that fall into categories that are within the disciplines those citation styles arose in. Some editor habituated to APA style, for example, is apt to use it if they go work on an article about basketball or the textile industry. Editors not habituated to it are not apt to use it when working on a psychology article. The vast majority of our editors simply use CS1 templates (and in their default mode) more so all the time. Plus those external styles mostly adhere to particular countries (especially the US for a lot of them), and are not used discipline-wide across all journals and such in the subject. Some of them (Vancouver especially) are "reader-hateful" and lossy of basic information. All of this leads inexorably to WP eventually having a consistent single citation style.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:22, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

::: {{U|Blueboar}} {{tq|If the MOS continues to allow multiple styles, then everyone actually has to take the time to explain {{em|why}} they think their preferred style is better, and convince the others to compromise.}} Sure, but randomized chaos, the absence of a style, is not a style. Josh has tried until blue in the face to convince everyone that it is, and has met with no traction, so the "convince" attempt has already failed. {{tq|Oh, I have no problem with consistency within any single article. I just don’t think we need consistency {{em|between}} articles, or for the MOS to specify {{em|which}} style is preferred.}} No one's proposing that. (Some, including me, would actually prefer that outcome eventually, and I've argued that it's inevitable over the long term, but there's no proposal in that regard before us here.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:22, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

::C'mon now, let's be realistic about the goal of these kinds of discussions. The goal is to force specific styles and to tell someone their preferred method should not be used, thus, justifying the changes that one wants to make. Insert David Beckham "Be honest" meme Hey man im josh (talk) 01:44, 23 March 2025 (UTC)

:Wow, this is one hell of a lot of mostly circular back-and-forth to respond to. I'll have to be selective, mostly with interleaved responses. The tl;dr version: No one is required to write new material with a consistent citation style, but a consistent citation style is required in an article, ergo normalizing chaotic style to a consistent one cannot be thwarted by someone who writes them chaotically, and the chaotic approach (a random mixture of every style encountered) obviously does not qualify as "a consistent citation style" or we may as well delete the guideline as completely meaningless. Cf. WP:LAWYER and WP:GAMING. Any time someone tries desperately to misinterpret any WP:P&G material to mean the opposite of what it really means, they are making a mistake.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:25, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

{{U|Hey man im josh}} {{tq|please work on being more concise}}: I would not need to write long here if not for your habit of Gish galloping with a firehose of hand-waving claims and arguments, and recycling of already-refuted ideas. Most of them end up really boiling down the same thing, but you are playing WP:ICANTHEARYOU games and re-re-re-stating the same arguments over and over, which necessitates re-addressing them in new wording that counters your different phrasing. Notice how much longer my responses to you here are than to anyone else. That's why.

• But I'll bullet-point my responses to you henceforth for ease of reading. I don't believe anyone who has trouble parsing some paragraphs could practicably work on an encyclopedia, so I have little choice but to take your "it's too long for me" stuff as a dodge.
• {{tq|So hold an RFC to get what you like codified.}} Wow, thanks for utterly missing the point of all that I wrote and failing to respond to a word of it. Your constant dismissal of what you do not want to hear is a terrible habit. This discussion is not about anyone wanting to codify anything at all – other than {{em|you}} wanting to codify that the absence of a consistent citation style is somehow a consistent citation style. That's obviously not going to fly, and is extreme WP:WIKILAWYER crud.
• {{tq|As it stands, it's "pick a style and stick with it", not "always use title or sentence case".}} No one said the latter; both of those are common sorts of picking a style, and so is using title case for major works and sentence case for sub-works because it's common in academia. You are trying to convince everyone that precisely mimicking inconsistent styles pulled from disparate source material is "picking a style and sticking with it" and no one is buying this, because the sole and only point of our article having {{em|a}} style (not several at once) is to present consistent output to the reader. What you want is utterly inimical to entire purpose of the guideline. It's like concluding that way to have "peace with your neighbors" is to kill them all, because death is "peaceful". Cf. fallacy of equivocation. Everyone here understands what "consistent" means in this context, except one person who doesn't or pretends not to, to try to codify a poor practice.
• {{tq|I simply want to just go about my work in what I perceive to be as a perfectly reasonable way (consistently using the capitalization provided by the source)}}: No one and nothing is stopping you from doing that. What's not okay is edit-warring against someone later normalizing to a consistent citation style instead of your "total chaos of copy-paste convenience". I.e. one editor being lazy does not magically require the rest of the world to be lazy. And fallacy of equivocation again. "Consistent[ly]" in this guideline refers to formatting of citations in output for our readers, and has nothing to do with how "consistently" some random editor uses their mouse or keyboard to do something. Let's not be silly. WP has no means of ascertaining how "consistently" anyone does any such thing, nor any reason in a million years to care.
• {{tq|demanding/expecting consistent capitalization from sources}}: No one has ever demanded that; you're just making up nonsense now. The entire basis of this thread is that consistent capitalization across the sources {{em|does not exist}}. I don't know where this "FUD" tactic is coming from, but it's not going to work.
• Your over-emotive WP:BATTLEGROUND approach has become very unhelpful and is why this thread is a sprawling mess of rehash and strained editorial collegiality. As {{U|Dicklyon}} put it: {{tq|Josh keeps wanting this to be about "forcing": "forcing people to change all of the titles of sources", "enforce a stupid style", "forcing everybody into using sentence or title case", "forcing people to change capitalization of references during the source reviews I conduct", "put editors into a box and forcing them to adopt specific wiki-wide formatting styles" etc. I find this offensive.}} So do I, which is why I've become firmer in what I'm saying here.
• The closest thing to anyone trying to "force" anything is you, demanding that all other editors be required to "obey" your preference for random citation chaos, which is really, really clearly the exact opposite of what this guideline intends (in any wording it has ever had).
• {{tq|it's disingenuous to act like the goal isn't to force a style change}}: That's pure and obvious projection. Not a person in this discussion has proposed a change to this guideline that would require a particular style (even if some think it will head there some day), and we've all been repeating to you that any citation style is permitted as long as its consistent in the article. Aiming for maximum {{em|in}}consistency produced via random copypasta from conflicting citation styles is {{em|by definition}} not consistent and not a style, but the absence of one. Everyone here knows that, surely including you.
• {{tq|You're literally trying to force me, and others, into changing how we do our references because you prefer them one way.}} And that's just a blatant lie. There is no means by which you could be "forced" to enter citations in a particular format. There is no style principle on the entire system that can be enforced in such a manner. Rather, you simply do not get to WP:STONEWALL and against other editors from normalizing your confusing mess into a consistent citation style after the fact, even if you will continue to input inconsistent cites until the day you die, out of spite. I think what's really going on here is you think that you get to control how citations are formatted (even to the pseudo-principle of enforcing a lack of an actual format) in articles on which you are a primary author or over which you are exercising a GA/FA promotion decision. This ideas is flat-out wrong, per WP:EDITING, WP:OWNERSHIP, and WP:CONLEVEL policies.
• {{tq|The goal is to force specific styles and ...}} When multiple editors have told you quite directly that your constant accusations that anyone who doesn't agree with you is "trying to force" something is offensive, battlegroundy, smear-tactic nonsense, then, you need to stop.

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:22, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

:I don't know why you took 10 bullet points to say the same thing over and over. You think that having ref titles follow the title casing of the source is wrong, "chaotic", and should be corrected. You hold a narrow view of what "forcing" means, in that I guess no editor can over be forced to do anything. Josh (and I) feel that following source title casing is accurate and internally consistent. We feel that setting guidelines to your preferred wording against opposition, when those guidelines are enforced at venues like FAC, is "forcing".

:These viewpoints are completely incompatible, and have not changed with weeks of discussion. The clear next step, as repeatedly mentioned, is to start an RfC with neutral wording and get a wider audience to agree with your interpretation. I'm not sure why instead you're just posting the same things over and over at length with different wording. --PresN 13:08, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

Here's another possibility for an RFC question.

{{tqb|1=

This guideline says citations in an article should have "a consistent style". Do the following three citations constitute "a consistent style", particularly with respect to the capitalization of the source's title, or should they be changed? (Note: These are copied from the article where a dispute arose, but they have been simplified, e.g., by removing archive URLs.)

1. {{cite web |title=Matthew Stafford Voted Comeback Player Of The Year By PFW/PFWA |url=https://www.prideofdetroit.com/2012/1/16/2712497/matthew-stafford-pfw-pfwa-awards |website=Pride of Detroit}}
2. {{cite web |title=League's 1st championship game, draft highlight NFL in 1930s |url=https://apnews.com/article/mi-state-wire-michigan-pittsburgh-nfl-green-bay-packers-633a42cf7c3d4e9a806244a2fa171b4a |website=Associated Press}}
3. {{cite web |title=1976 Detroit Lions Rosters, Stats, Schedule, Team Draftees |url=https://www.pro-football-reference.com/teams/det/1976.htm |website=Pro Football Reference}}

}}

What I like about this is that it's concrete. What do you think? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:41, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

:It looks to me like a pre-loaded question to try to solicit a "no" response, especially as there is no description of how these can be considered a reasonable choice{{snd}} just inviting readers to say the list looks nuts. It's further compounded by the second one being a 404 dead link so no one can check the source. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 23:49, 25 March 2025 (UTC)

::Thanks; I've changed the link to a working one.

::You are correct that I have not provided an argument in favor of the "yes" POV (or the "no" POV, for that matter). Do you think that explaining why people should !vote "yes" would be consistent with WP:RFCNEUTRAL? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:30, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

:::I suggest something like this:

:::{{tqb|1=WP:CITESTYLE says "Wikipedia does not have a single house style, though citations within any given article should follow a consistent style". Some editors have argued that directly copying the capitalization styling used by the cited sources should be acceptable practice for citations (unless a source uses all-caps for its title). This can lead to articles in which some citations use title case and others use sentence case, and some use other capitalization patterns. Should that be considered acceptable? If so, does that amount to a "consistent style", or should the wording of the guidance be changed?}} —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 02:32, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

::::I don't understand the "or" in the last sentence. I'd clearly say it's not a consistent style, but why should the wording of the guidance be changed because of that? To me that seems a non sequitur. Gawaon (talk) 16:07, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::If we think that copying the source's capitalization styling should be allowed, and we think the wording of the current guidance might appear to not allow it, then the wording of the current guidance should be changed. Again I get the impression that you just want a declaration that it should not be allowed. We don't need an RFC if we want to make sure that no other conclusion can result from it. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 17:13, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::Who's "you"? I didn't participate in this discussion before, except by stating "I don't think this is something that needs to be addressed". Gawaon (talk) 17:19, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::Sorry about that. I somehow thought you were the same person who started this section. I guess I didn't look at the signature. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 17:58, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::Also, in case it's relevant, I certainly think that "copying the source's capitalization styling should be allowed" – I do it myself especially when time is scarce – and I also think that anyone who unifies the capitalization of the cited sources to make it more consistent should be applauded. I haven't done the latter much, being a fairly lazy fallow, but I certainly welcome any efforts in that direction and find it hard to see why anyone would object to them. Gawaon (talk) 17:23, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::Looking at the above discussion, they've objected/reverted the attempt to unify the capitalization of the cited sources to be more consistent because that violates their style of "consistently" using whatever capitalization they found in each source.

:::::::I think the outcomes will either be:

:::::::* We can all be lazy, but we can't revert someone who unifies the capitalization of the cited sources to make it more consistent, or

:::::::* We need to have a new tag, similar to {{tl|use dmy}}, to tell other editors that the seemingly mismatched capitalization is intentional.

:::::::WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:21, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::To be clear, again, I was reverted when I wasn't even trying to unify citation styles. I was just "fixing" one that was clearly wrong in "every" citation style I've ever seen, as it had every word capitalized, including short prepositions; so I made it into "title case" by downcasing those short prepositions. It just jumped out as wrong, even though it was copied from the source. In most areas, we don't let weird source styling jerk us around on Wikipedia, and it didn't occur to me that someone would argue that this is a "consistent style". It's still not clear to me that anyone other than Josh thinks it is. Dicklyon (talk) 15:53, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

::::BarrelProof, your question puts forward an argument for one side but not for the other side. I also think that having examples is going to help people understand what we're talking about.

::::What do you think about a sentence like "If this style is adopted for an article, then each citation would only be considered correctly formatted if they matched the original source, and other editors would not be allowed to 'correct' the capitalization to match the other citations in that same article".

::::At the very end, you write {{xt|Should that be considered acceptable? If so, does that amount to a "consistent style", or should the wording of the guidance be changed?}} This is needlessly wordy. It's enough to ask whether it's "acceptable" or "a consistent style". We don't need to ask whether to change the guideline (because we will, if a consensus is found. The only question is whether it will say "Capitalization should match other citations in the same article, even if that's not what's autofilled by citation tools" or "Copying the varied capitalization styles from the different sources has been deemed a consistent style; tag with [new template] to warn AWB and other users not to 'fix' the mismatched capitalization"). WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:30, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::What part of my suggested phrasing amounts to "an argument for one side"? —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 07:25, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::The part that says "Some editors have argued that directly copying the capitalization styling used by the cited sources should be acceptable practice", especially since it doesn't present the fact that more editors have argued for the opposite. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:21, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::I think that is just a description of a suggestion, not an argument in favour of the suggestion. I thought maybe you were referring to the sentence that says "This can lead to articles in which some citations use title case and others use sentence case, and some use other capitalization patterns," which to me looks like a description of something undesirable, and therefore like an argument against the suggestion. I see nothing in that description about the quantity of people who take one view or the other, and I think adding something about that would not be appropriate. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 18:38, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::If you want to characterize the style, then leave out the "Some editors have argued that". If you want to characterize the dispute, then "Some editors have argued that..." should probably be paired with "Other editors have opposed...". WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:23, 28 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::In ordinary language, "some" implies a lack of unanimity, and includes no characterization of any particular percentage. If we have already decided that it's less than 5 percent or more than 95 percent, we don't need an RFC. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 18:04, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

{od}

In the context of an RFC, if you say "some think this" and you omit all mention of known opposition, then some editors are likely to complain that the RFC is non-neutral. I'm not saying that it's so non-neutral as to somehow invalidate the RFC, but it is the kind of thing that produces needless and avoidable complaints.

One way to avoid those complaints is to mention both sides (e.g., "Other editors disagree"). Another is to avoid mentioning any people, e.g.:

{{tqb|WP:CITESTYLE says "Wikipedia does not have a single house style, though citations within any given article should follow a consistent style".

Copying the capitalization styling used by the cited sources (unless a source uses all-caps for its title) would result in some citations in a single article using title case, others using sentence case, and some others using other capitalization patterns, such as in these examples:

1. {{cite web |title=Matthew Stafford Voted Comeback Player Of The Year By PFW/PFWA |url=https://www.prideofdetroit.com/2012/1/16/2712497/matthew-stafford-pfw-pfwa-awards |website=Pride of Detroit}}
2. {{cite web |title=League's 1st championship game, draft highlight NFL in 1930s |url=https://apnews.com/article/mi-state-wire-michigan-pittsburgh-nfl-green-bay-packers-633a42cf7c3d4e9a806244a2fa171b4a |website=Associated Press}}
3. {{cite web |title=1976 Detroit Lions Rosters, Stats, Schedule, Team Draftees |url=https://www.pro-football-reference.com/teams/det/1976.htm |website=Pro Football Reference}}

Should that be considered "a consistent style" for the purpose of complying with this guideline?}}

Which approach would you prefer? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:00, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

:Of course if you want to add that other editors disagree with copying the sources' styling, that's fine. I think it's kind of obvious, but fine, and certainly better than going back to a "straw man" that has multiple problems that are more apparent. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 12:49, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

:Keep it simple, this is overcomplicating it. "Is consistently using the capitalization used by sources considered a consistent and acceptable reference style?" Hey man im josh (talk) 12:58, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

::Even simpler, "Is consistently using the capitalization used by sources considered an acceptable reference style? (except for all-caps titles)?" —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 13:06, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

:::Yep. No need to even give examples in my opinion. That says it all right there, it's not leaning or leading to any type of conclusion with the question. RfCs are best when kept as simple as possible. Hey man im josh (talk) 13:12, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

::::Okay. Please join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#RFC on consistent styles and capitalization of titles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:29, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

How do I cite a chapter in a book that is described as "in progress"? See [https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/46866] for the publisher's explanation. They seem to be putting peer reviewed articles in this book as they become ready, with those articles being available on line. The intent appears to be to publish a printed work when they have a full set of articles.

My immediate question is: what cite template should I use? If I was being lazy, cite journal seems to work, but that is hardly correct. I do not see an ISBN for the book (because it hasn't been published yet?) and I don't think I could give the reference a chapter number yet. Perhaps cite web would work, but we need something that makes clear the doi as that is the easiest way to find the reference.

The article/chapter in question is [https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197607770.013.3]

Thanks, ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 09:39, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

:I have gone with cite web per [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ancient_maritime_history&diff=prev&oldid=1279250281], but if there is anything better, please let me know. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 11:41, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

::But cite web needed me to stick in |date=2024 so that I could use {{template|sfn}}. This feels like a bit of a bodged solution. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 11:51, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

:::The first link you provided gives both an ISBN and a publication date, I would cite this as a chapter with cite book. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 12:58, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

::::I've gone with your suggestion. Kind of embarrassing that I could not spot the ISBN. Thanks for your help with this. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 21:43, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

:::Template:SfnRef lets you use Sfn without a date. Donald Albury 17:56, 20 April 2025 (UTC)

{{discussion top|result=The result was merge, which I implemented. Responding to concerns about exceptions and the need for historical context, I carried some examples into the merged text. Responding to concerns about instruction creep and length, I trimmed the merged content down to a minimum. The wording may need to be tweaked with further discussion, but there is consensus this note should not have a standalone page. -- Beland (talk) 20:54, 29 April 2025 (UTC)}}

I proposed that the page WP:Shallow references be merged into WP:Citing sources, as the former is only a few sentences long, too short for a standalone page, and is unlikely to be expanded upon for a foreseeable future. EditorGirlAL07 (talk) 04:27, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

:Support, probably somewhere under the section Wikipedia:Citing sources#Links and ID numbers. The WP:DEEPLINK page only gets a single pageview on average, and I've never seen it before. It's not going to be seen there, Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 04:51, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

:Support. Ifly6 (talk) 05:01, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

:Support It's an obvious bit of guidance but at a very obscure page. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 11:06, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

:Support, but I will note that the relevant content in some sources is displayed on dynamic pages (I'm thinking of some of the US census pages), and only the home page URL is available for a citation. Donald Albury 14:17, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

:Comment, partly for Donald Albury: The context of the previous is discussion is "{{tq|that the DGM ToS does not apply to us}}" after a discussion at Talk:Discipline_Global_Mobile#Linking_to_DGM_Live! about what to do when a site prohibits links "{{tq|other than to the Home Page}}". I imagine nobody has an issue in cases where it's only possible to link to a higher level page. There are a handful of specific-source templates that cite databases and include a one-line instruction on how to use the database, as in {{tl|Cite DAT}} for example. Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 17:40, 15 March 2025 (UTC)

:Support, but I don't agree that one should never link to a higher level page. If the editor knows from experience that the higher level page is reasonably stable and the direct link is unstable, it would be better to link to the higher level page. Jc3s5h (talk) 03:10, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

:Oppose as unnecessary, and also as sometimes advocating for editors to do the wrong thing. In particular, links to PubMed might be construed by some editors as "shallow", but they're very common in medical articles (probably hundreds of thousands of links), very desirable, and sometimes more desirable than a paywalled or tracking-heavy site.

:I agree that, as a general rule, you don't want to link to www.ExampleNewspaper.com; instead, you want to link to www.ExampleNewspaper.com/the-exact-story.html. But once you move out of simple things like that, the best thing, and the most normal thing, depends a lot on the circumstances. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:43, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

::Also: That was a one-time discussion (not, e.g., an RFC) about a problem with a single website. We probably don't need it at all, much less here. The whole thing is WP:CREEPY. People don't normally link to the base domain only when linking to a source, because they Wikipedia:Use common sense. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:12, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:Oppose As per User:WhatamIdoing. 2001:8003:9078:2401:18ED:CE79:33C6:634D (talk) 13:02, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

:I have expanded the page a bit, to provide more context and more direct instruction. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:23, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

::@WhatamIdoing Yeah, but that does not mean that this merger can be prevented, as the shallow references page will likely be a WP:BONSAI because, let's be real, there is not really much information to pour into that page. Not to mention the topic of the shallow reference page is very closely related to the source citing guideline. EditorGirlAL07 (talk) 07:16, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

:::After reading your explanation, I remained unmoved by your words. 2001:8003:9078:2401:18ED:CE79:33C6:634D (talk) 07:26, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

::::There's nothing wrong with a very short essay. We have a core policy that's even shorter, after all.

::::As far as I'm concerned, Wikipedia:Shallow references could be blanked and redirected to the WP:CITEWEB section, which says "URL of the specific web page where the referenced content can be found" (emphasis in the original). But if we're going to have this page at all, it should be clear about what it means and what its history is. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:05, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

{{discussion bottom}}

I know the answer is probably yes, but do you cite a source if the source is already provided in the hyperlink, with said hyperlink being the primary subject of the paragraph? For example:

Operant Conditioning is the conditioning of lorem ipsum...

The sentence above would normally be in the leading section of the article, but in this example it is on a different article that transcluded it onto its own section. Would I then have to copy-paste the source from that hyperlink onto the article that transcluded it? That would also mean every article that transcluded it would also have to provide the source alongside the information. Or can I leave it unsourced on the article that transcluded the information from the hyperlink? The source is there, after all. Its simply in a different place. Senomo Drines (talk) 04:12, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:Wikilinks aren't a substitute for citations; if a citation is needed, it's needed in the article in which the claim appears, not just the one linked. Nikkimaria (talk) 04:16, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:@Senomo Drines, is this one of those Labeled section transclusion things? An exact link to the article(s) in question may be useful. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:19, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:See the last line of WP:USERGENERATED {{tq|"In particular, a wikilink is not a reliable source."}} -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 11:24, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::That line should also be added to this page, users should know that they still need to cite a source even if the wikilink already provides them. I'll add in a paragraph about it so that future users don't get confused as well. Senomo Drines (talk) 12:15, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:::There's a further reading page hatnote that gives more information, but that is a personal essay and not a guideline. I added it in this page because there seems to be unanimous agreement in this talk page that wikilinks are not sources. Senomo Drines (talk) 12:18, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

The "Citing sources" guideline was just edited to add this passage:

{{quote|Wikilinks are not a reliable source, even if they already provide the information on a given topic. If a section from the wikilink page is copied or transcluded, sources must still be cited in the sampled section even if the wikilink page already has it cited. However, this isn't usually a problem, as the same source from the wikilink page is allowed to be cited over to the sampled section.}}

I reverted. My objection is that I consider it the responsibility of the editor copying information that requires a source to verify that the source actually supports the content that is being added. Often, the editor doing the copying does not have access to the source. This limitation should be reflected in whatever is added to the guideline. Jc3s5h (talk) 12:25, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:It pretty much always supports the content because it is always in line with the information from the wikilinked page. But maybe I don't quite understand, if you can give an example demonstrating that the section from the wikilinked page copied over can be done, but the source that went along with that section can't support that for some reason, it would give me a better picture of the problem.

:Putting that aside, I don't see why the whole thing needed to be undone, wikilinks still aren't reliable sources and shouldn't be used as a substitute for citing them. You can just omit the part that says "However, this isn't usually a problem, as the same source from the wikilink page is allowed to be cited over to the sampled section." Senomo Drines (talk) 12:40, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::Consider endnote 20 in [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ISO_8601&oldid=1280455267 this version of "ISO 8601"]. The Wikipedia article claims that "ISO 8601:2004 established the epoch or reference date as 20 May 1875 (the date the Metre Convention was signed)." But the cited source, some sort of programming library documentation by someone named Andrew Main, doesn't claim that at all. The cited source claims 20 May 1875 is the epoch of some day count that Andrew Main invented. Anyone copying this sentence to another article would be responsible to look at the cited source and see if it really supports the sentence in the Wikipedia article. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:44, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:::Oh, but then the problem stems in the wikilinked article itself, not the sampling of it. Assuming the source is reliable, there should be no problem in simply copy-pasting it. Nevertheless, I can add a line warning users to check the source in the wikilink. Senomo Drines (talk) 14:05, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::::The problem starts in the wikilinked article, but an editor is responsible for what the editor adds to an article, no matter where it comes from. Once the problematical passage is copied to a different article, it is the problem of the editor who copied it.

::::The guideline has been modified by Senomo Drines to include the statement "On the other hand, users should beware of copying a section with an unreliable source. The wikilink section in question should be sufficiently credible before transclusion." This is inadequate. It could be understood to mean the editor should merely look at the title of the source, for example, The New York Times, to see if it is a credible source. But what the editor should really do is not just decide if the source is credible, but actually read the source to see if the Wikipedia article really reflects what the source said. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:33, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::::I'm not sure you should sample Wikipedia articles, they are after all not reliable sources. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 15:33, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::I think you misunderstood, I meant sampling as in taking a sample of text from another article, not using another wikipedia article as a source. Senomo Drines (talk) 16:12, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::They're actually functionally the same here, as in both cases you've deigned to rely on the text of another article, which can be edited by users at any time.

::::::A thought experiment I use is: if I printed an article out and took it to a library with internet access strictly mediated by an overworked librarian who cannot do any searching for me more involved than one query per claim, would I be able in principle to verify all an article's claims by referring only to what's inked on the page? Remsense ‥ 论 16:26, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::In essence, every article needs to be verifiable on its own, without having to click over to some other article for verification. So… if you have transcluded text from another article, any citations supporting that text must be trancluded with it. Blueboar (talk) 16:40, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::::Blueboar, I think there's general agreement on that. What I assert is that just copying the citation to the destination article isn't enough. By doing the copy, the editor is asserting that the editor has read the source, is satisfied it's a reliable source, and also is satisfied that the copied claim that appears in both the from and the destination article accurately reflect what the source says. Jc3s5h (talk) 16:45, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::::::That's the same thing, you're adding content to a Wikipedia article based on the content of another Wikipedia article. But there nothing to say the article your copying from is right, you should check before you do so. Only discussing copying here not transclusion, as transclusion is always a bit of a mess. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 17:03, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::::Agreed. Double checking is always best practice. Blueboar (talk) 17:37, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

::@Senomo Drines, about {{xt|It pretty much always supports the content because it is always in line with the information from the wikilinked page}}: When we say that a source Wikipedia:Directly supports a statement, we do not mean that the little blue clicky numbers are touching the statement. (That's an Wikipedia:Inline citation.) What we mean is:

::* the Wikipedia article says "Foo is a colorless green unicorn", and

::* the source says "Foo is a colorless green unicorn".

::There is no formatting change that can make a 1953 scientific paper about DNA "support" a statement about this year's Oscar winners. Formatting changes can make an irrelevant or unreliable source be cited "inline", but the source can't "support" the statement. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:59, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

: This article is a perfect example of what I was talking about. Each and every section in this page uses a wikilinked page as the source. Senomo Drines (talk) 14:37, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

::There are bad articles, that one has been tagged as needing more references for 15 years. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 15:12, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

:::And yet it is wikilinked on the first heading for the psychology sidebar template, but I digress. Senomo Drines (talk) 15:20, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

::::Again Wikipedia is far from perfect, in fact it is always a work in progress. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 16:35, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

::This is a great example of the distinction between “verifiable” and “verified” (ie cited). As far as I can tell, everything in that article is verifiable. The problem is that it isn’t verifi'ed (the article lacks citations to demonstrate'' its verifiability). I see that it has (finally) been tagged as unsourced. Hopefully, someone who knows the topic will add sources and fix the problem. Blueboar (talk) 16:00, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

:::As mentioned before, you can simply extract the sources from the wikilinked sections, although a user in this talk page who's particular about the details might ask for further checking before doing so. Senomo Drines (talk) 18:02, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

::"Main article" does not mean "Here's where the sources are". {{tl|Main article}} is used to say "This is just a quick little WP:SUMMARY, and if you want to know more about this, then we have whole article about this subject." WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:17, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

:See also Wikipedia talk:Verifiability#citing wikipedia, where a logged-out editor asks a similar question. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:25, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

{{edit semi-protected|Wikipedia:Citing sources|answered=yes}}

Page: Autism Rights Movement

Section: History.

Where it says "The term,"neurodiversity", was first mentioned by Judy Singer, the correct page number is p. 32 for her book, Neurodiversity: The Birth of an Idea, published in 2017. 118.208.220.154 (talk) 10:31, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

:{{Not done}}: this is the talk page for discussing improvements to the page :Wikipedia:Citing sources. Please make your request at the talk page for the article concerned. Also, I couldn't find the term "neurodiversity" in page 32. Alpha Beta Delta Lambda (talk) 12:08, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

:I'm guessing you mean the line {{tq|The term "neurodiversity" was first published in Judy Singer's 1998 Honours thesis}}. The reference is meant to confirm that term was first used in Singers thesis, a claim found on page 9 in the introduction by the author (at least in the version I can find). -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 12:57, 22 March 2025 (UTC)

The article {{ship||Vasa|ship|3}} has several references that take the form:"Sails" in {{harvnb|Hocker|Pipping|2023|pp=287-288}}

The cited source is a book edited by Fred Hocker, with Hocker and Olof Pipping described as "lead authors". There are nine additional "contributing authors", and it is clear which chapters each of them has helped write. At present, the full citation is shown as:
* {{cite book |last1=Hocker |first1=Fred |last2=Pipping |first2=Olof |editor1-last=Hocker |editor1-first=Fred |title=Vasa II: Rigging and Sailing a Swedish warship of 1628 |date=2023 |publisher=Nordic Academic Press |location=Lund |isbn=978-91-88909-11-4}}
The same situation applies to references using other chapters, for instance "Spars".

As I understand referencing in Wikipedia, if you are dealing with a book with different authors on different chapters, you should say who those authors are. That would give a short form citation like this{{sfn|Bartos|Bengtsson|Svensson|Hocker|2023|p=309, 321}} (ignore the page numbers, these are just pulled from different articles that use the same source) and a full citation as follows
* {{cite book |last1=Bartos |first1=Louis |last2=Bengtsson |first2=Sven |last3=Svensson |first3=Sam |last4=Hocker |first4=Fred |editor1-last=Hocker |editor1-first=Fred |title=Vasa. II Part 1: Rigging and sailing a Swedish warship of 1628 The material remains and archaeological context |date=2023 |publisher=Vasamuseet ; Nordic Academic Press |location=Stockholm : Lund |chapter=Sails|isbn=9789188909114}}

(a) Would it be correct to change to the form of the second example given, showing all the authors of the chapter, as per the example?

(b) Would such a change be subject to criticism for changing the citation style, or can I just go ahead and make the changes?

(c) If the answer to (b) is "yes", should the different chapters be grouped together in the list of full citations (alphabetically under Hocker, the editor)? This is already done in the article with{{harvnb|Anderson|1994|p=233}}{{harvnb|Narbrough|1946|pp=91, 104, 211}} These are indented to show grouping in the article, but that does not seem to work here on this talk page.
{{cite book |last1=Anderson |first1=Roger C. |title=The rigging of ships in the days of the spritsail topmast: 1600–1720 |date=1994 |orig-date=1927 |publisher=Dover Publications |location=New York |isbn=978-0486279602 |edition=reprint}}

{{cite book|last=Narbrough|first=John |author1-link=John Narborough |editor1-last=Anderson |editor1-first=Roger C |title=Journals and Narratives of the Third Dutch War |publisher=The Navy Records Society |year = 1946|orig-year=1672|location=London |url=https://www.navyrecords.org.uk/journals-and-narratives-of-the-third-dutch-war/ |access-date=16 March 2025}} ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 20:46, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

:On reflection, the example in (c) is not a particularly good one, but I hope you understand what I intend with the work edited by Hocker. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 20:57, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

:If chapters in a book have individual authors, then I think it much better to use the second style that cites the chapter. If there is more than one chapter cited from the same book, I think you should have a separate citation for each chapter, as you want to cite each authors' work individually. So, my opinion is to use the second style above for each chapter. I don't think this a matter of "style", but rather a matter of correctly and clearly citing the sources. Donald Albury 21:24, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

:If you want to cite different chapters in a book, you can use {{tl|cite book}} for the work and {{tl|harvc}} for the chapters. These can then be listed together in the citation section. For an example see the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible#CITEREFAlterKermode1987 Alter & Kermode (1987)] cite in the Bible article, which has chapters listed underneath it using 'harvc'.
If you believe someone might object to your changes to the citation style the best idea is to start a new section on the talk page, that way anyone interested enough to watch the page is alerted. If noone objects in an appropriate amount of time (a longer time the less trafficked the article), then you should be good. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 22:25, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

::Using cite book for individual chapters seems to me to give superior results (for the reader) to harvc. The sort of arrangement I am looking at is [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footrope#Bibliography] (article still being worked on, hence unused references showing as harv errors). To the reader, they see the full reference without having to do a third click needed in the harvc system. The problem for both is if the editor has written a chapter. The fix with using just cite book is to point to the entire work if the chapter author is the editor{{snd}}you have the page number to allow a reference checker to find the ref. With the same issue in harvc, according to the example in the template page, you do not get the full reference come up with a mouse-over, which I feel is a bug that is problematical for an encyclopaedia user who has no knowledge of how this all works (and why should they?). Am I missing something with having this opinion? ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 08:52, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

:::Harvc is not to everyones taste, the benefit is that you don't have to list the entire book details for each chapter (which just creates clutter). The mouse over isn't great, but the vast majority of readers are on mobile so mouse over is becoming less of a thing. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 09:32, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

::::Just quickly compared the two on a mobile. Seems to be one fewer steps to see the full reference with just cite book and no harvc. I can't see how a short citation is of any use to the reader unless they are deeply involved in understanding the article (i.e. which bits are based on which author). Probably need to mull over my opinions before acting on them. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 10:13, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

:::::As harvc should always be listed under the full cite book so there shouldn't be any need for any additional steps, unless the reader is determined to press all the blue links to see what they do.
It will be interesting to see how nested referencing will do this. Frwiki does something similar but using refgroups to bunch references together. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 10:25, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

:The primary purpose of reference is an easy and exact identification of the source, format details are just a secondary concern. My biggest issue with the example above is, that no page information or at least a chapter is given. You shouldn't be forced to read or browse a whole book to verify a few lines or a paragraph in Wikipedia. So definitely page numbers or to the very least a chapter name should be added, if the concerned chapter has a specific author, that is the author that needs to be named more than all the others.--Kmhkmh (talk) 09:17, 31 March 2025 (UTC)

:I agree with the others that {{t|harvc}} and at least {{t|cite book}} with {{parameter|chapter}} is probably what is best here. I also prefer {{t|harvc}} to repetitive {{t|cite book}} invocations because of the repeated book information. I pretty much always use it when there are multiple chapters out of the same thing. See eg Lycurgus' references. Ifly6 (talk) 15:12, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

::I have been doing more experimentation on this with a replica article in a sandbox. At present I disagree that harvc gives better results. Especially on a mobile, I find there to be an extra step needed to find the full reference. Yes, I appreciate that you get taken to the short reference for the chapter, with the full reference for the whole book just a little up the page. Scrolling up counts as an extra step, and where you have a number of chapters with different authors for each, you could be scrolling up a long list. In a mobile view, I don't get the point about clutter, because you are not seeing enough of the bibliography to realise that a full citation is being repeated many times.

::When I first came to Wikipedia, it was to find useful sources to read on particular subjects. So, unfamiliar with the range of options as to how references can be provided, I think I would have found harvc references to have added an extra layer of complexity to trying to find these sources. I am sure I would have worked it out pretty soon, but perhaps a touch of frustration would have prevented me from doing so on day 1.

::Then, taking the editor view, if there is yet another referencing template to learn, it is a barrier to getting on with the job of reading sources and putting some content in articles. That barrier is not so much for me, but for the next editor who comes along and has to work out what is going on with a less common template. And then how does this all work for those using Visual Editor? I can't imagine it does. I think the smaller the toolkit we use for editing, so much the better.

::And, right through all of this, there seems to be no perfect solution to a chapter written by the lead editor (quite common, especially if we want to cite a useful summary from a preface or introduction). What I am using is a fudge so that mouse-over still works. I think you'd have to look twice to see that it is a fudge, but this seems a better option than the reader thinking there is something wrong that will not show the reference they want to see. Again, we cannot expect the reader to have an experienced editor's knowledge of dealing with what appears to be a bug.

::Happy to listen to any further arguments or different points of view, but that is where I am at the moment. ThoughtIdRetired _TIR 19:51, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

:::I think it's just personal preference, I dislike having the sort through lots of duplicate details. It's just wastes time. But there's nothing dictating none method other any other. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 21:49, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

{{Reflist-talk}}

Really? Maybe long, long, ago, but isn't now the consensus that citation templates use is best practice? Semi-random ping to @SandyGeorgia - are modern FAs allowed to have no citation templates? _{Piotrus at Hanyang| reply here} 05:53, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

:I prefer citation templates, and I don't know if the requirements at FA are different, but text based references are still somewhat commonly used. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 08:31, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

: The lack of a uniform citation style is the most glaring style problem in Wikipedia. What we permitted years ago to encourage the expansion of the encyclopedia under the banner of "everyone can edit" now makes us look embarrassingly amateur. We should decide on a preferred style and make plans, with the help of intelligent bots, for adopting it universally in the long term. Zero^talk 10:27, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

:I have used citation templates exclusively for years, so yeah, so I will support anything that moves WP to more use of templates. A plan to gradually adopt templates as the standard for citatons is more likely to reach consensus. Donald Albury 14:29, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

: I would also support a default for switching to CS1 citation templates with default short citation formas in {{t|sfn}} – imo {{t|rp}} is just bad – with explicit proviso that custom anchors are permitted. Custom anchors are needed to deal with sources that don't have years (eg {{tq|Suetonius, Augustus}}) as is common in classical studies. They can similarly can be used if an article benefits from shortened anchors (eg {{tq|CAH² 9}}) or general short cites by title.

:One of the huge benefits of the {{t|sfn}} "ecosystem" is the ability to produce full listings of missing anchors and sources. You simply can't do this with the text-based anchors. A text version of the citation {{tq|Smith 2000, § 3.14}} with no corresponding bibliographic entry for {{!tq|Smith 2000}} is nonsense and we really need ways to track this automatically. Then we can actually go and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Classical_Greece_and_Rome/Archive_45#List_of_your_articles_that_are_in_Category:Harv_and_Sfn_no-target_errors,_2025 solve those problems]. {{small|Though, for some certain self-contained corpuses of citations this can be unnecessary. Eg {{tq|Plutarch, Marius}} is evident by convention. A tag here is useful mostly for people who don't know that convention and I usually try to provide it for such sources cited more than once or if translated.}}Ifly6 (talk) 15:17, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

:We should consider the new parameter, details, being developed for the <ref> tag, currently under development. See [https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Draft:Moderator_(town_official) my example] on the Beta-Cluster. Also see m:Talk:WMDE Technical Wishes/Sub-referencing#Request for feedback. If successful, this could eliminate the need for {{tl|sfn}} and its ilk. (For the Beta Cluster you might have to sign up for an account. Also, it isn't always working.) I am not a developer; maybe one of these days they will officially designate me as a pest. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:46, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

::That seems a bit restrictive in terms of narrative footnotes which say something like {{tq|Gruen 1995, p. 123, however notes that Dio, 3.14.15, contradicts the narrative in Suetonius, Julius, 1.2.3}} or {{tq|But see Woodman 2021 for alternative views on blah blah}}. While {{t|sfn}} is somewhat inherently restrictive, ref + {{t|harvnb}} essentially solves. One of the developers notes that those notes automatically merge, though, which is a must-have. I'm also not a huge fan of the anchors; imo anchors should match display text. Ifly6 (talk) 15:53, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

:::I'm afraid a talk page is not the right medium for Ifly6 to convey their point. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:57, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

:I would strongly oppose any push to require citation templates, because (1) the citation templates more and more over the years have been pushed into a rigid format that makes it very difficult for human editors to edit by hand and get right, (2) this rigid format makes it frequent that what you want to cite does not fit into that format and should not be distorted to make it fit, and (3) we have bots running rampant over our articles repeatedly massaging templated citations into what they think is the corrected version of the same citation, but the bots often misunderstand citations (especially when the citation is to a review of another citation or to a reprint of another citation) and formatting a difficult citation manually can be a deliberate defense against those bots. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:23, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

::Can you show an example of this for illustration? Ifly6 (talk) 16:36, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

:::Just trawl through the history of User talk:Citation bot and you will find many errors of these types. Often they get fixed, meaning that the exact circumstances that caused this behavior will not immediately trigger the same error. This does not fix the general issue. (The same issue extends to gnomes as well as bots; I had to today revert a gnome who tried to insert repeated fake titles on a collection of book reviews that had no title and were properly formatted using citation templates using title=none, presumably because that parameter value lists the article in CS1 maint: untitled periodical. Manually formatting the book reviews would have avoided that problem and in part because of that I have been manually formatting book reviews more often recently.) —David Eppstein (talk) 23:29, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

::::Making a {{tl|cite book review}} would help bots and people distinguish between an author incorrectly being put in the title vs. the name of the author being reviewed being part of a correct title. Using a template like that would make it easier for downstream machine consumers (like sites that aggregate references to a work or an author across many sources) to parse these weird cases as well.

::::I expect most people prefer to use HTML forms or wizards to make citations rather than raw wikitext, unlike us long-time editors. It is difficult to implement that without machine-writable templates. If templates don't support pretty much the full universe of cases, then we're discouraging a lot of editors from properly citing their work, so we should make an effort to flesh them out. Personally, I find it's a big pain to remember what punctuation to use where; it's much easier to use templates that tidy up after me. It also would be soooo much easier to change the output later across millions of pages if consensus changes about the punctuation and formatting.

:::: -- Beland (talk) 09:43, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

:The current status is one may follow a printed style manual (like The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), and other editors will respect that choice. (Actually respect, not just tolerate). If an editor makes up a style just for a certain article, theoretically it's allowable, but in practice other editors can't follow it because they can't read the original editor's mind. The nearest thing we have to a style manual for citation templates is Help:Citation Style 1, but it has problems.

:#It doesn't purport to be complete. On many points it defers to the style in a particular article, such as sentence case or title case for titles of works cited, giving full first names for authors or just initials, etc.. It is only 25 pages long when exported to PDF, compared to 177 pages for the relevant chapters in CMOS 18th ed.

:#There is no policy that the implementation of the citation templates follow the documentation. If a graduate student at a US university submitted a paper that was required to follow a published style manual, but the citation software used by the student flagrantly deviated from the manual, the student would fail the course. In Wikipedia, some comments would be put on some talk pages and nothing would happen.

:#It is absolutely fundamental that a reliable source should never be disqualified because there isn't a citation template to support it. Hand-written citations must always be allowed in this case. But there is no manual to follow when writing such a citation.

:#Since 2020 parenthetical referencing has been deprecated on Wikipedia. As a result, the only acceptable remaining style is endnotes. Respectable published style guides that recommend endnotes or footnotes separate citation elements with the comma, as in "James II of England". But most Wikipedia articles separate them with periods, as in "Nato phonetic alphabet". This should be fixed.

:Jc3s5h (talk) 16:27, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

::If we want to change the "neither encouraged nor discouraged", then we probably need an RFC.

::I suggest keeping it simple and focused. For example, despite what @Ifly6 says, mentioning {{tl|sfn}} will provoke opposition (because it is not used in ~98% of articles and is not wanted in subject areas that rely primarily on short articles instead of books/sources that need to give specific page numbers), and it is largely irrelevant, so it shouldn't be mentioned.

::The simplest is probably to use the "change X to Y" format. For example:

::* Should we change "neither encouraged nor discouraged" to "gently encouraged but not required"?

::* Should we change "neither encouraged nor discouraged" to "preferred but not mandated"?

::* Should we change "neither encouraged nor discouraged" to "by far the most popular choice, but not required"?

::I have, in other areas (e.g., MOS:APPENDIX), had good success with declaring a given option to be "popular" rather than "preferred". Editors tend to choose the popular/normal/usual approach. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:00, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

:::When wording the RFC, keep in mind that if it succeeds, some editors will try to interpret the new wording as license to change articles to citation templates without seeking consensus, just as one may now change an article from parenthetical referencing to endnotes without seeking consensus. Jc3s5h (talk) 17:14, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

::::Perhaps the entire WP:TEMPLATEREFS sentence (or even the whole/short paragraph) should be in the RFC. The specific sentence currently says: {{xt|The use of citation templates is neither encouraged nor discouraged: an article should not be switched between templated and non-templated citations without good reason and consensus – see "Variation in citation methods", above.}}

::::That could be changed to something like "The use of citation templates is popular, though not required. However, an article that predominantly uses a non-templated style should not be switched without prior discussion – see "Variation in citation methods", above" (example text only; write whatever you think would be helpful). WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:39, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

::(1): I don't see much ambiguity about when to use sentence vs. title case; the CS1 page has guidance for which fields use which. For the "first initial vs. first name" question, it seems to me we should always put the full name, unless only the initial is available, for disambiguation purposes - especially given that Wikipedia citations have machine consumers that correlate authors. Are there only a few remaining questions we could easily answer? Or would we want to pick the third-party style guide closest to general Wikipedia practice as a default? Or provide a short list of third-party guides and let articles pick one?

::(2): Isn't it common sense that if a template does not match its documentation (or the MOS), one or the other should be changed? Making that common sense into a policy wouldn't magically summon volunteer labor to do the implementation work.

::(3): If we decided to go full-template, presumably if there are situations not covered we'd add parameters or additional templates. Situations not covered in the meantime would simply remain non-compliant. We could, if we wanted, designate a third-party style guide as a default or allow an article to choose from a short list of popular third-party styles.

::(4): I think what you are describing is Citation Style 2? I would support merging these two styles so that there is more site-wide consistency, but I have no opinion as to the most "respectable" punctuation. -- Beland (talk) 09:25, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

:FAs are allowed to have any consistent citation style, whether produced by templates or handwritten. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:34, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

::Pinged here ... agree with Nikkimaria. I don't see a need for any change; not broken, doesn't need fixing. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 01:32, 2 April 2025 (UTC)

:I would support changing guidance to say templates are "preferred" and letting people change articles to use them without any further discussion. This makes formatting more consistent because there's less room to be sloppy, automates the process of finding some incomplete or bogus citations, makes it possible to write user-friendly GUI tools that hide the raw wikitext, significantly simplifies the parsing downstream consumers have to do thanks to COinS (e.g. citation aggregation sites, author profile builders, archive.org). Clarifying badly-formatted citations will probably help with the enormous task of fact-checking all our content. This process will probably also shake out some citation styles that should not be used on Wikipedia because they are so radically different from what is done on the rest of the site. And maybe one or two we want to keep but give them their own templates. -- Beland (talk) 10:01, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

::Does the community actually want to be "letting people change articles to use them without any further discussion"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:32, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

:::I would support doing an RFC to find out. I often do so for one or a handful of citations at a time, and I don't remember anyone reverting that on the grounds the article doesn't use a template-compatible citation style. (I do remember some confusion about how to cite web pages that are only accessible from archive.org.) Often I'm switching to templates because they handle square brackets in titles without awkward escaping. -- Beland (talk) 19:26, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

::::I suggested a couple of possible alternative wordings above. Do any of those appeal to you? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:30, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

:::::I would go for the full throated version - change "neither encouraged nor discouraged" to "preferred", not "preferred but not mandated" or the other suggestions which seem to leave a lot of wiggle room for arguments to break out. -- Beland (talk) 19:42, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

::::::I realized another benefit of going full template - just as we have the ability to set "mode=cs2" once for an entire article, we could add "mode=chicago" or "mode=mla" or whatever alternative styles the community can't bear to part with. This would let us change styles for an article very easily (except perhaps if downcasing is needed?) if consensus changes about which articles need which style, and it would also strongly enforce per-article consistency without forcing any particular citation style. I like the idea of having a short list of approved styles, because readers encountering a very rare citation style are likely to be confused or maybe assume it's the result of sloppiness. The fewer citation modes the better in my opinion, but this might be a compromise of the sort you're looking for in order to widen support. -- Beland (talk) 19:48, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

:::::::All I can say is that if we go “full template”, I will no longer be able to contribute to Wikipedia. Perhaps I am too old. I still think in terms of sentences and paragraphs, not data parameters and fields. I never learned how to use templates, and don’t really have any interest in learning now. I still format citations by hand. I am fine with others following along after me and inputting my citations into a template, but I’m never going to create a new citation using one. Oh well… time to catch the early bird special at the Golden Corral and then go watch Matlock. Blueboar (talk) 20:25, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

::::::::{{ping|Blueboar}}{{tq|All I can say is that if we go “full template”, I will no longer be able to contribute to Wikipedia.}} You appear to be assuming that you'd have to type these templates out by hand, which has never been true. Polygnotus (talk) 01:44, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

::::::::There's no reason for you to quit Wikipedia; even if the MOS says templates are preferred, I (and I hope all other editors) will be happy to accept your hand-formatted citations, and leave converting them to templates to a wikignome. -- Beland (talk) 20:55, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::I've inquired about the prevalence of citation templates at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Prevalence of citation templates, and it looks like ~80% of articles use the main citation templates.

:::::::::I hope that if the community decided to officially "prefer" citation templates, they would also choose to reiterate the main behavioral goal: {{xt|While you should try to write citations correctly, what matters most is that you provide enough information to identify the source. Others will improve the formatting if needed.}} Or, to put it more simply, do your best. Nobody should get hassled about how they format a citation so long as (a) we have enough information to identify the source and (b) they don't revert if someone comes along after to "fix" it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:20, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

::::::::::If the community decides to officially "prefer" citation templates, it should only do so at a time when the citation templates are capable of fully formatting all citations. That time is not now; the citation templates are too inflexible, and too prone to raising errors in common use cases (such as that we wish to cite the original publication of a book source but include the isbn of a reprinted copy of the same book). —David Eppstein (talk) 00:17, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::::Isn't that already possible? There's no validation of ISBNs, but you could always do {{cite book |title=Original book |year=1901}} etc. for the original copy, followed by a separate {{ISBN|1234567890}} if you wanted to keep them apart. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:39, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

::::::::@Blueboar Few thoughts (speaking as someone who remembers time before the Internet, too...). First, I'd expect that "old geezers" from my and older generations are familiar with forms to be filled in. Templates are just that. I don't think filling in a form takes longer than writing a citation by hand. (I am assuming, of course, the use of VE or such, doing this by typing the code is painful, please don't). Second. Templates enable various uses of metadata. They make citations better just like hyperlinks makes text better, or computers enable Wikipedia. They are a step in the right direction. That third, my third point - frankly, conversion of citations from free flowing whatever written format into templates is something that AIs should be able to handle. I don't know when we will have a bot or gadget for that, but just run ChatGPT or such in a window where you run a task telling it to turn it into Wikipedia citation template code, and voila, you should get a well formatted code to paste back into wiki in a second. So, errr, there's no need to leave or such. Learning how to use the better system (and yes, because of metadata, it is strictly better, no ifs and buts) in this case is not hard - just fill in a simple form, or have AI give you a code. Look, I understand the issues (annoyances) of unfriendly new interfaces well, but in this case, it's easy to move from old, inferior output to the new, superior one. Really. Try it. _{Piotrus at Hanyang| reply here} 04:47, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::Forms work great for a database… not an encyclopedia. Blueboar (talk) 12:13, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

::::::::::Huh? They work perfectly fine for me and all others who use VE, or tools like TWINKLE... _{Piotrus at Hanyang| reply here} 13:25, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

:::::::There have been similar entertainings regarding other styles in the CS1 module (MLA and Vancouver particularly), and they've either just gotten nowhere or I suspect more commonly were not friendly to integrate with the current structure of the module set and so were given up on. Were something like this to be done, I suppose it would be possible to place them in their own modules and then call those only when a certain parameter is provided to the CS1 module, but even today there are some checks that CS1 makes very early in the execution of the module which may be inapplicable in other older/recognized citation styles. So you might as well start your own module. Module:Cite LSA used to exist as one attempt at this, and there are a few Bluebook style citation templates that have a bare minimum of centralization. For what code sharing might be possible because arbitrary style does ask for a review, I've mused before on the CS1 help talk page, but I suspect those have gone nowhere for time and little or no known potential users. (For example, the ID and access date checking that CS1 does. Of course, then we're imposing some burden both on CS1 and external users of CS1, primarily at our sister and sister language wikis.) Izno (talk) 23:04, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

{{ping|David Eppstein}} you mentioned above that the current set of citation templates are not ready to be preferred because not all works can be cited with these templates. It seems to me they're really not ready for use at all, because at any time a need to add a new citation to an existing article that already has a long list of citations, but no existing template is suitable for the work to be added. The problem is all the existing template documentation is focused on which template to use, and how to set the parameters. It's hard to find examples of how citations should look when they are rendered; any such examples are scattered and disorganized in the documentation.

If proper documentation existed, an editor who had to add a citation for something that isn't supported by any existing template could decide which template is the closest fit, and hand-write a template that generally resembles one of the existing templates. Jc3s5h (talk) 01:05, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

:It's a fair point that existing templates don't handle all use cases, but that may be because there is no guideline pushing people to use them in all cases. My expectation if templates are "preferred" would be that unhandled cases would be left hand-written until someone created a template to handle them. Based on this feedback, maybe we need to say that explicitly. How about:

::The use of citation templates is preferred for situations the templates are designed to handle. Templates should be expanded or created to cover the remaining situations that would otherwise need to be manually formatted.

:"Situations" might include the need to support rare citation styles, though I hope this is not the case. I see templates supporting CS1, CS2, Vancouver, Bluebook, and Harvard. Do we know of any articles that consistently use a style that is not one of these?

:I don't see why extensive documentation is needed, though some basic points are helpful. But if you need to create a new template and you want to see how e.g. the CS1 templates render something close to your use case, just plug the relevant parameters into a template and preview it or put a copy in your sandbox. Adding too much documentation increases the risk that the code and the documentation get out of sync, which will not help someone trying to expand the system.

:In any case, I think the existing templates cover 80-90% of what is needed, and I'm sure we have plenty of work converting those to keep us busy while template builders expand support. -- Beland (talk) 02:23, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

::There are plenty of FA-level articles that use nontemplated styles. Many people who do scholarly work off-wiki can comfortably format citations consistently by hand, so I don't know why we would do "plenty of work" to change them. And it's trivially easy to create inconsistently formatted citations using templates. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:47, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

:::Those scholars can continue to contribute hand-formatted citations, and if you don't want to do any work on this, you don't have to. A good reason to change them is that they are not emitting COinS metadata, and thus are slightly less useful to downstream consumers. It's easier for scripts to validate the contents of individual fields than it is to make sure that all the punctuation and italics and everything in a hand-formatted citation is done correctly. I mean, how would a script be able to tell the difference between a chapter in a book and an article in a journal if the formatting can't be trusted because it's what's being checked? Featured articles are about 0.1% of the overall encyclopedia. The fact that they're nice and tidy should be celebrated, but that doesn't obviate the problem of the millions of untidy articles. -- Beland (talk) 08:18, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

::::I personally think that millions of articles looking untidy is a feature, not a bug. What a focus on compliance with the MoS even for poorly written articles that cite unreliable sources does is put a huge amount of precisely defined lipstick on pigs. Unifying the citation style of articles should not be done before checking the actual content of the citations. —Kusma (talk) 08:42, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

:::::I see your point, and I do actually use poor formatting as a proxy to automatically identify articles with dubious content, though that's usually a pile of unreferenced strings. But it would be awkward to try to preserve this potential signal as long as possible by making a rule that wikignomes aren't allowed to clean up spelling, punctuation, citation formatting, etc. without verifying the claims being made in the prose they are tidying and that the sources are cited accurately. Often that happens naturally, and it's easy to catch glaring problems when doing that, but fact-checking takes so much longer than tidying up, it lags by decades. We also don't have a way of checking which passages have already been fact-checked, which would lead to a lot of redundant work. At the very least I do tag prose I've just made from a pile of dubiousness into a clean, grammatical flow as needing citations if it doesn't have any.

:::::The Guild of Copy Editors does actually reject unreferenced passages; these do tend to change a lot when the first sources are added, which is extremely healthy. But after that, as soon as someone has put in enough effort to make plausible footnotes, the text is considered stable enough to deserve tidying.

:::::If I had to guess, I'd say we have greater problems with claims not matching cited sources with mature citations rather than when the citation is first added. People tend to edit article prose without verifying that the new claim is still supported by the footnote at the end of the sentence, and sometimes sentences get combined or split and footnotes wander around. -- Beland (talk) 09:38, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

:Jc3s5h, can you give me an example of a work for which "no existing template is suitable"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:58, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

::{{tl|Cite map}} requires a title. Suppose a map doesn't have a title. Style guides typically say to give a description of the map where the title would usually go, but not use quote marks around the description, and not use italics, so readers can tell it's just a description. Jc3s5h (talk) 04:32, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

:::@Trappist the monk, what would you recommend for a CS1 template that doesn't require a title when the work is untitled? WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:24, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

::::Jumping in randomly here...my first thought would be we could add a "no-title-desc" parameter to {{tl|cite map}}? I would also be tempted to put parens instead of quote marks like, (untitled map of Massachusetts Bay Colony) but perhaps this is not common practice in professional citations. I'm also wondering if this has actually come up or if this is speculative? Text works with no title (as used to be common practice) are named by the first few words; see MOS:INCIPIT. -- Beland (talk) 08:27, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

::::

::::cs1|2 journal templates support {{para|title|none}} which suppresses the rendering of the article title. That was intended to be used for en.wiki articles that followed the citation tradition wherein the title of the cited article is not made part of the citation. I suspect that most if not all uses of {{para|title|none}} are not used to maintain that traditional substyle.

::::

::::I once suggested that cs1|2 might support a {{para|description-in-lieu-of-title}} sort of parameter (in need of a better name) that would render an unstyled description in place of {{para|title}}. That suggestion died aborning.

::::—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:30, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

:::::@Trappist the monk, are you sure about that? This: {{cite web |title=none |url=https://www.example.com}} doesn't look like suppressing the rendering of the article title to me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:55, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

::::::{{tq|cs1{{!}}2 journal templates support {{para|title|none}}}}

:::::::{{cite journal |title=none |journal=Journal}} → {{cite journal |title=none |journal=Journal}}

::::::—Trappist the monk (talk) 21:27, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

:::::::Perhaps that feature should be extended to {{tl|cite map}} (or generally; there are webpages with no titles, too). WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:06, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

::::::::Journal templates do not support title=none when there is a url present. In general, webpages are going to have urls and urls are going to block the citation templates from supporting title=none even if that support is extended to non-journal templates. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:28, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::That makes sense because we need a title for the link.

:::::::::Not putting the title of the article being cited in the citation to the article...sounds crazy when I say it out loud? Is there an article with an example of this? -- Beland (talk) 01:10, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

::::::::::Sometimes there just isn't a title. Consider a sign: Maybe it will have a title, and maybe it won't. A letter is another source that often doesn't have a title. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:39, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::::Sure, but a sign is not an journal article. What I'm scratching my head over is why a citation wouldn't have the title of a journal article when one exists. I feel like I need an example for context. -- Beland (talk) 02:46, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

::Another example that I run into all the time is book reviews, which don't usually have titles, or are labeled with things formatted as titles that are not really titles like "Reviews - Euler’s gem, by David S. Richeson. Pp. 336. £16.95. 2008. ISBN 978 0 691 12677 7 (Princeton University Press)". When the review is published in a journal and has only a doi link, then the cite journal template can handle it with title=none, but most other formats of book reviews cannot be handled by the templates without making up a nonexistent and therefore false title. We should not be putting false information into the encyclopedia, not even in references and not even because the template doesn't work without it. And the bots that run around "improving" citations will often get confused by citations to reviews and mix them up with citations to the thing being reviewed or vice versa (an egregiously bad example from today: [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fundamental_theorem_of_calculus&diff=1288133688&oldid=1288020772]). To avoid both problems I've taken to frequently formatting references to book reviews manually instead of with the templates. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:53, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

:::It's unclear to me if the example you link to is a problem with the bot or the human operating it? It's also unclear to me what the thing being cited is. Is it a book or an article or a review of a book or ?

:::If a journal publishes a book review just titled "War and Peace by Herman Melville" then I agree it might be confusing and arguably incorrect to put "title=Review of War and Peace by Herman Melville". It seems better to have output like:

::::"[Review of] War and Peace by Herman Melville". Archimedes Syracuse.

:::or

:::: "War and Peace by Herman Melville" (review by Archimedes Syracuse).

:::or whatever the professional style guide specifies for these situations. It might be useful to have separate fields like "reviewed_title" and "reviewed_author" if we need to fabricate strings but make it clear they are not a word-for-word title the reader should be looking up. Or a separate template like {{tl|cite review}} to take the same fields as e.g. {{tl|cite journal}} but produce different output with "review" in there somewhere. -- Beland (talk) 08:50, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

::::The example I link to was a perfectly good and perfectly normal citation to a book. Until Citation bot got to it. Citation bot somehow discovered the existence of a review of that book in the journal Nature and half-converted the citation into a Frankenstein citation half about the book and half about its review.

::::It is useful to cite things that have reviews. It is also, separately, sometimes useful to cite the reviews of those things (for instance in articles about the things being reviewed). Many humans are capable of distinguishing which kind of citation is intended and keeping them distinct from each other. The bots have demonstrated themselves to be incapable of this. This bot misbehavior makes it problematic to have templated citations to reviews because the bots are likely to misinterpret them and break them. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:47, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

:::::Huh. I would expect citations to books to use {{tl|cite book}}. Still unclear to me if there is a human review step that should have caught this? -- Beland (talk) 01:13, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

::::::If you're referring to the fact that the bot citation damage involved a {{tl|citation}} template rather than a {{tl|cite book}} template: that is one of the key differences between Citation Style 1 and Citation Style 2. In Citation Style 1 editors have to figure out which of many different citation templates to use and the automatic tools frequently get it wrong calling them all cite web. In Citation Style 2, everything uses one template, {{tl|citation}}. The other difference is. That Citation Style 1. Has many periods. That break up. The flow. Of the citation. Citation Style 2 uses commas, instead.

::::::I'm surprised you wouldn't know this already. Am I misinterpreting your reply? —David Eppstein (talk) 07:46, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

:::::::Either template can produce either output style with the "mode" parameter if the default output is not desired. I guess I'm just not in the habit of using {{tl|citation}}; it seems a bit more vague, but of course it's not wrong to use it.

:::::::That really wasn't the important part of my comment. Since no one was answering my question, I went ahead and tested the Fundamental theorem of calculus scenario. Citation bot does not give humans a chance to preview its changes before it makes them, it only gives them a link to the diff afterwords. Though in this case, even if I had manually checked the source, it's unclear I would have noticed that it was a review and not the original work. Both the bot and the humans can be confused because the review has all the same metadata as the original work (with the complication that two authors are usually mentioned rather than one). I can't think of a good way to distinguish the two automatically, so humans just need to look out for this. It's possible looking for key phrases on the page (in this case, "review" isn't used, but "Books Received" is) could be used as a trigger to put up a red flag for the human user. This isn't 100% reliable because e.g. "reviews" would also show up on literature review articles. It's also possible the review is in fact what is being cited, so it's not great to use as an automatic exclusion. For now, I have added a note to User:Citation bot flagging this for humans generally.

:::::::The point of Citation bot is to provide readers with easier access to sources, gets get quite a bit of use, saves a lot of work, and works well in the vast majority of cases - so I would be reluctant to try to revoke its bot approval. Even this error will bring readers to a review of the source they are looking to read, which has a relatively straightforward recovery since they still have access to all the correct metadata once they realize what has happened.

:::::::There is no need to use hand-formatted citations to prevent the bot from altering a citation. Its documentation shows how to exclude the bot from an entire page or from a single citation known to be problematic (I would prefer the latter for ease of long-term maintenance). -- Beland (talk) 22:04, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

::::::::And then the people who maintain the bot go around removing these exclusions when they think they have fixed the very specific issue that caused the bot to misbehave once and be tagged for exclusion. But the problem is not specific bugs; it is that certain classes of issue require human understanding that the bot lacks. We have just this month had a Citation bot user blocked after an ANI thread because they thought the bot could be run without supervision and were blowing off complaints about the resulting bad edits. The bot is usually useful but occasionally causes problems, and needs checking. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:20, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

:::::::::I've not seen people removing nobot exclusions, but if they do, it could help to put in the exclusion comment what to check after removal. But people could just as easily go around switching hand formatted citations to templates and not know that the reason they were hand coded was bot danger, rather than simply laziness. It seems better to explicitly declare bot incompatibility than lay a trap of a secret workaround. -- Beland (talk) 01:50, 4 May 2025 (UTC)

{{User:ClueBot III/DoNotArchiveUntil|1746554468}}

Is consistently using the capitalization used by sources (except for all-caps titles) considered an acceptable reference formatting style? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:27, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

• No. "Matthew Stafford Voted Comeback Player Of The Year By PFW/PFWA" is leading case. "League's 1st championship game, draft highlight NFL in 1930s" is sentence case. "1976 Detroit Lions Rosters, Stats, Schedule, Team Draftees" is title case. Putting all three of these capitalization styles into the same article would not be "a consistent style" within the meaning of WP:CITESTYLE. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:28, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• I want to add: The most important thing about citation formatting is that you do your best to identify the source. That has been a key point in the lead of this guideline for many years. So what this really means is: If you copy/paste from the sources or use a ref filling tool (which most of us do), and someone else decides to WP:VOLUNTEER their time to capitalize all the titles one way or the other, you shouldn't revert them back to a mishmash of styles. But if you don't think capitalization is all that important, then IMO you are still free to focus on the things you believe are important, and leave the capitalization question to people who care about it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:33, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• :Instead of running around and changing the style it sounds like that's something that should be discussed on a case by case basis, as we would normally do when changing the style of citations in an article. Many people, myself included, prefer to preserve the capitalization used by sources, keeping a source to reference integrity in a sense. Additionally, how do you deem what the better style is? All sentence case? All title case? Either way, it's something that would be discussed on a per case basis instead of something that should be mass changed across articles. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:36, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• ::Some readers find inconsistent capitalization in footnotes on the same article looks sloppy or jarring or unpleasant. If "retain the capitalization of each source" is banned as a "consistent" style because of that sort of objection, the style that each article adopts would be controlled by WP:CITEVAR. Which mostly means, whichever style arrives first, if one is not already dominant. There is no need for a source-by-source or article-by-article discussion, unless an editor wants to change an established style to a different one - for example if a specific style is common in the field the article is describing. -- Beland (talk) 19:28, 29 April 2025 (UTC)
• : With apologies to WAID (I'm not trying to nitpick), the title case in your example should read: "Matthew Stafford Voted Comeback Player of the Year by PFW/PFWA". Boghog (talk) 18:54, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• ::Leading case upcases every word, not just the ones your (and my) English teacher approved of.
• ::Those three examples were all taken from a real article. Josh's claim is that since the source – https://www.prideofdetroit.com/2012/1/16/2712497/matthew-stafford-pfw-pfwa-awards – has chosen a headline style that upcases every word in their headlines, then the Wikipedia article should upcase every word in the title for that source (and use ordinary title case if the source uses title case, or sentence case if the source uses sentence case, etc.). @Dicklyon made the corrections you suggest, and Josh [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Detroit_Lions_seasons&diff=next&oldid=1278253438 reverted them], saying that having a mismatched capitalization scheme is consistent, because they're consistent with the various sources. That dispute is why we're here.
• ::NB that the question at hand isn't whether using leading case for every single citation in an article would be an abomination. It's whether "consistent" means that whatever case scheme you choose has to be used in all of them, or if visually mismatched capitalization, if consistently taken from the individual sources, is consistent in its own way. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:07, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• ::{{ping|Boghog}} It was my correction of that citation title to title case as you suggest that got reverted and started this discussion. To me, all those capitalized little pronouns just look so out of place on Wikipedia that I hard a hard time imagining that someone would fight for them, but here we are. Dicklyon (talk) 23:16, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• :::And to me forcing our personal preferences is just straight up wrong. But I don't try to stand in the way of others applying a consistent style (which you did not do with your edit, changing it away from consistency). Hey man im josh (talk) 23:44, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• ::::I don't see anyone forcing anything. You're right that I didn't move that article's citation style to a consistent style; I only fixed what looked like a glaring outlier, as I was not aware that anyone thought it would be OK the way it was. You objected, so now we're trying to get a better idea how to interpret the idea of a consistent style. Dicklyon (talk) 02:14, 2 April 2025 (UTC)
• :::::It is forcing a specific style, it's taking away the option to preserve the titles of works and articles when promoting content. Many of us believe it's important to preserve the title of the work's capitalization, instead of having people change it based on what they like. It's also creating a lot more work for those who are promoting content. Hey man im josh (talk) 15:52, 8 April 2025 (UTC)
• Yes: Consistently using the capitalization used by sources (aside from an all capitalized word) is clearly appropriate. If we decide that it's not, then it sounds like our citation tools need to be changed to reflect this, since that's what they do. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:32, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• :Realistically, this discussion is about whether only title and sentence case are acceptable for reference titles. We explicitly do not have a defined allowable citation style. This will create insane amounts of busy work that does nothing to improve the site, will result in countless additional fights over whether specific terms should be capitalized, restricts editors' freedom, and will only do more to harm the integration of new editors. For what? Because people like certain things and don't like the style others choose to apply consistently? There's plenty of styles I don't like which I recognize as being okay and acceptable. I stand on the side of logic, and what best allows Wikipedia to continue to grow and be improved upon. If we keep forcing ridiculous nitpicky rules like this it just adds more barriers and rules for people to get involved and contribute. Hey man im josh (talk) 23:42, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• ::Also asking, what makes this a not consistent style, if the style is applied consistently? Keep in mind this is WP:NOTAVOTE, and I've personally not been convinced this does anything to improve the site. Truth be told, it makes me more likely to go back to gnoming instead of content. Hey man im josh (talk) 15:25, 4 April 2025 (UTC)
• :::What makes a quasi-random collection of styles imported willy-nilly from sources with divergent styles not be consistent is: It doesn't look consistent to the reader of the Wikipedia article.
• :::Compare "My clothes match because they are all the same color" vs "My clothes match because they were all bought on the same day". There is an underlying logic to the second one, but that logic is not visible to someone who is looking at a person wearing a pink shirt, a blue jacket, brown trousers, a black belt and white shoes. Someone looking at a person dressed that way would think "Wow, he's wearing mismatched clothes today. I wonder if he's color blind". Someone looking at such a person would not think "I'm sure that's totally consistent and everything matches according to some perfectly logical system that just isn't apparent to me". WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:48, 5 April 2025 (UTC)
• ::::It doesn't matter what looks consistent, it matters what is consistent. There are plenty of styles that I don't personally like the looks of, but I recognize are applied consistently. I've learned about a lot of different styles while doing source reviews at content promotion avenues.
• ::::As for your example, someone's personal style, which is subjective, is your argument here? There are so many things that people would say are a consistent look but look awful. For instance, head to toe camo, I don't think that looks good, but a lot of people may, and it doesn't mean it's not consistent. Additionally, what you perceive as matching colours may not be perceived as such by others in the world, as I've learned from some of the people in my life who have told me things don't match. Hey man im josh (talk) 15:50, 8 April 2025 (UTC)
• :::::It's not about whether it "looks awful"; it's about whether it matches. You can have mismatched capitalization, but you can't call it matching. You can wear mismatched color combinations, but you can't call it matching. This is a matter of "you are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts". The fact is that using mismatched capitalization schemes for the different sources listed in the ==References== section is not "consistent" because it's mismatched. It might have many other virtues, but using a visibly consistent style is not one of them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:31, 15 April 2025 (UTC)
• ::::::I can and do call it matching. What one perceives as matching does not have to fit what others perceive as such. I also absolute consider it consistent to respect and use the same capitalization used by the title of the work being cited, but I also respect your right to disagree. Hey man im josh (talk) 11:46, 15 April 2025 (UTC)
• No. No printed style manual I've ever seen recommends importing style decisions of a cited source into an article one is writing, on a source-by-source basis. One always chooses a citation stye for one's article and sticks to it. It is only within direct quotes where one defers, to some extent, to the style of the source. Jc3s5h (talk) 17:35, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• I think the section title should be changed to "RFC on whether using capitalizations from sources is a consistent reference style". It's more direct and straight forward. The current title of this section implies this might be related to article capitalizations instead of reference capitalizations. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:39, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• :I don't want this confused with Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization), about which there is a completely unrelated discussion open. But that's twelve words long, which is a bit much for a section heading. We're already at eight words, which is already on the long side of normal. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:09, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• Yes This is common practice, so at least it needs to be an acceptable option. As others have pointed out this is how citation tools import titles, very few editors are likely to care enough to change the titles in the articles they are creating. All that's not to say it should be encouraged or that something like the FA process can't require a more formal style. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 18:07, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• Yes No with the following clarification: The available options should be limited to "Sentence case" or "Title Case." Capitalizing every word should be discouraged. Boghog (talk) 18:38, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• :The options should not be limited to sentence case or title case. This isn't what respected published style guides do. As an example, [http://journals.ieeeauthorcenter.ieee.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/IEEE_Reference_Guide.pdf IEEE Reference Style] uses title case for book titles and names of journals, but sentence case for journal articles and chapters of books. Unfortunately, editors of Wikipedia articles almost never record what style is being used, so style must be deduced from existing citations. Jc3s5h (talk) 19:44, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• :: You're right that different respected style guides, like IEEE, apply both sentence case and title case depending on context. However, I think that you misunderstood my original point. My suggestion isn't to require one style across all uses, but rather to clarify that the available options should be limited to sentence case or title case, not an arbitrary mixture that includes capitalizing every single word. This kind of inconsistent and nonstandard capitalization should be discouraged, as it doesn't follow any major style guideline. It is entirely reasonable to have both sentence case and title case within an article, just as IEEE does across different reference types. But each instance should conform to one of these recognized styles—not a third, ad hoc style. Boghog (talk) 20:35, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• :::Agree. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:52, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• :Agreed: No, + options should probably be limited to title case or sentence case.
• :An editor taking the time to fix a jarring source title (e.g., any of: I Think This Guy Is Player Of The Year, I THINK THIS GUY IS PLAYER OF THE YEAR, i think this guy is player of the year) ought be thanked, not reverted!
• :Himaldrmann (talk) 15:43, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
• No(see below) if you feel that some form of consistency is required. I am not happy about imposing any such requirements on reference titles rather than just getting the complete information in there. I come from a field where references are unhelpfully abbreviated to {{tq|Aller H. D. and Reynolds S. P. 1985 ApJL 293 L73}}. This RFC as worded seems to imply that the alternative will be to require changing book titles to War and peace and Little women to match journal titles in sentence case. Please be more specific. — Preceding unsigned comment added by StarryGrandma (talk • contribs) 18:58, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• :@StarryGrandma, the question is whether a Wikipedia article is allowed to combine multiple different capitalization styles. It's not whether to have "War and peace"; it's whether you can have both "War and peace" and "Little Women" in the same Wikipedia article.
• :The three examples I gave in my comment above are all taken from the same Wikipedia article. One editor tried to "fix" one of them. Another editor wants those three examples left untouched, because they're already perfect as they stand. Which approach do you think is appropriate? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:14, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• ::It's not combining capitalization styles. The style is preserving the proper title used by the source. Hey man im josh (talk) 23:12, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• :::It is combining capitalization styles, in the sense that the articles ends up containing multiple capitalization styles in it: leading caps for the one ref's title, title case for the next, and so forth. All of these styles are combined ("intermixed", to give the definition from Merriam-Webster) in the Wikipedia article.
• :::The opposite of combining capitalization styles is requiring that only one (1) capitalization style be visible to readers of the article: the Wikipedia editors choose title case or sentence case or leading caps or (*shudder*) even all caps, but every news article cited in the Wikipedia article gets the same approach to capitalization. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:46, 2 April 2025 (UTC)
• ::@WhatamIdoing, I believe this page is a guideline. By "allowed" are we talking about an RFC on policy. However I sympathize with the problems caused when some editors want it some way and some another. And I will grant that book titles are already covered by the section of the MOS, Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles of works#Capital letters, stipulating that "major works" in English use title case and so won't be affected by choices for journal articles, newspaper articles, or chapter titles. And on further reading of that section I see it seems to cover the issues here.
• ::I would rather see titles as published, because it simplifies creating references. However the same section says: {{tq|WP:Citing sources § Citation style permits the use of other citation styles within Wikipedia, and some of these expect sentence case for certain titles (usually article and chapter titles). Title case should not be imposed on such titles under such a citation style consistently used in an article.}} I interpret this to mean that the guideline is saying editors at each article can decide whether the article's citation style uses sentence case or title case for "minor works" like journal article, chapter titles, etc. And probably means the issue is subject to WP:CITEVAR, follow the first major contributor. The section also contains the specifications for Wikipedia's own version of title case to be used in converting a sentence case title to title case. We do have a house style for this and are not dependent on external style guides.
• ::As to leading case, the section says {{tq|Other styles exist with regard to prepositions, including three- or even two-letter rules in news and entertainment journalism, and many academic publishers call for capitalization of no prepositions at all. These styles are not used on Wikipedia, including for titles of pop-culture or academic works}} I interpret that as emphasizing that the choice is between Wikipeida's title case or sentence case, not title as published. So capitalizing all words in a title is against the guideline.
• ::So I guess the answer to the question at the top of the RFC is No, the current guidelines say this is not acceptable. Sadly. Though I think we can avoid having infobox-type arguments over, how to format reference titles. StarryGrandma (talk) 01:12, 2 April 2025 (UTC)
• :::Do you think it would be desirable for WP:FAs to have the title of one newspaper article written in sentence case, and the title of the next newspaper article written in Title Case?
• :::I'm having trouble understanding why picking one capitalization style for the whole Wikipedia article is something we should view with sadness. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:35, 2 April 2025 (UTC)
• ::::I come from a field that capitalizes article titles. I would hate to have to reduce them to sentence case when adding them to an existing article. This RFC isn't about featured articles, its about guidelines for citing sources anywhere. References should be easy to add and the current tools are very helpful. But I have already changed my response to the RFC to No. The guidelines I quoted are pretty clear. An article can use sentence case for minor titles if the citation style is consistently used in the article. Using "should", not "must" but FAs follow "should". And titles with all words capitalized are not used in Wikipedia as a definite statement - "are not used". StarryGrandma (talk) 02:32, 2 April 2025 (UTC)
• :::::{{tq|I come from a field that capitalizes article titles. I would hate to have to reduce them to sentence case when adding them to an existing article.}} Why? The publisher is simply applying a style guide to their titles. I don't see a need to import theirs into ours in a piecemeal way. — HTGS (talk) 20:44, 2 April 2025 (UTC)
• :::{{ping|StarryGrandma}} You asked about "allowed", a loaded word for sure. This RFC is about "acceptable", probably also not the best choice of word for a guidline. The question is really about whether the "style from sources" style is consistent with the guideline or not (and maybe about whether we should clarify the guideline if we come to a consensus on that question). Nobody is going to be chastised or punished for not following guidelines, but for gnomes like me that like to move things in directions supported by guidelines, it would be good know a consensus interpretation, to avoid arguments there and there. Dicklyon (talk) 02:10, 2 April 2025 (UTC)
• ::::@Dicklyon, the "style from sources" is not consistent with the guidelines at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles of works#Capital letters (MOS:TITLECAPS). The information on titles is scattered quite a bit, and I did not find it until I had initially said Yes above (now No). I think this page should refer editors to MOS:TITLECAPS for more information on titles as well as MOS:ALLCAPS. Or maybe one section somewhere should say it all. StarryGrandma (talk) 03:02, 2 April 2025 (UTC)
• :::::Good work—it seems like this might already be covered by the guidelines, then?
• :::::Himaldrmann (talk) 15:47, 16 April 2025 (UTC)
• Yes. It is consistent to defer to the capitalisation as provided for in the thing being cited. Whether that is what should be done is a related but different issue; inasmuch as we're keeping the current thing that says consistent is acceptable that feels clear to me. Ifly6 (talk) 19:59, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• :I disagree. If we review several respected style guides, we see they require consistency throughout the work. See for example Chicago Manual of Style ¶ 2.55, 18th ed. But they also specify rules about capitalization of source titles that have nothing to do with how the source wrote the title. So your definition of consistent is just wrong. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:58, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• ::That's the funny thing about personal definitions, to me yours is wrong. Preserving the capitalization used by the source is not actively harmful in any way, and to me is actually an active improvement over modifying all of the titles to fit whatever one's personal preference is. We also don't follow any one specific style guideline, so citing what one does isn't particularly relevant. Hey man im josh (talk) 23:16, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• :In a way it is consistent, in that it is a mechanistic rule that cam be followed by an algorithmic process, but is it reasonably practicable? The only reliable way to be sure what the source uses is to check the source. In a significant proportion of cases it is not reasonably possible for the average editor to check the source. This impractcability makes this option unsuitable for Wikipedia, without even considering other stylistic and aesthetic aspects. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 06:41, 15 April 2025 (UTC)
• No (where by not acceptable we mean not aligned with guidelines, therefore up for improvement). The guideline page whose talk page hosts this RFC has in the lead "Each article should use one citation method or style throughout". The section WP:CITESTYLE further details what some consistent styles are, by referencing style guides. It says "nearly any consistent style may be used", but gives no hint that copying an inconsistent bunch of styles could be considered a consistent style. Furthermore, it is pretty much impossible for an editor to tell from looking at an article what style is being used in an article if it looks like a jumble of styles. In general, when there are strange outliers from the usual standards of reference title capitalization (sentence case and title case), I tend to fix those, in the direction of being consistent with most others in an article. This never makes the sources hard to identify, just as using any of the styles recommended in style guides does not. Dicklyon (talk) 23:12, 1 April 2025 (UTC)
• :The guidelines simply state to be consistent, they do not state we must edit the reference titles to match what Wikipedia uses for capitalization.

Just curious - does the wide latitude our MOS provides to editors to use any of a wide range of citation styles prevent us from having better tools for adding/managing citations? If so, how and to what extent? — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 21:03, 1 April 2025 (UTC)

Breaking Cat News has a lot of refs that are just URLs. I know how to convert them but it's just too much work, and I seem to recall seeing a bot that will do this. One problem is that Gocomics recently started requiring payment to see archives.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 19:23, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

I recently noticed this text in the guideline which was added in 2023 in response to Wikipedia talk:Citing sources/Archive 53#Emojis in citation titles. The question was about how to handle emojis, but the text that ended up in the guideline covers all characters. It actually uses the word "glyph" which goes way beyond what is actually meant - that would require using exactly the same font as the source, rather than merely the same character. (For example, a {{serif|serif "A"}} is the same grapheme but a different glyph than a sans serif "A".)

{{reply|Jc3s5h}} You reverted Special:diff/1286457140 with the edit summary "The bullet point in MOS:CONFORMTITLE that begins "A particular specially treated word within an otherwise" is not appropriate for citations." That bullet point specifically says "convert any such highlighting to plain wiki ... markup in a citation template". If you disagree with that recommendation, you should start a discussion on the talk page there to have it changed. In the meantime, the instructions for editors who are writing citations should mention the scattered guidelines that are already in effect that apply to citations. -- Beland (talk) 01:32, 20 April 2025 (UTC)

The idea of putting all the guidelines that apply to citations in one place was mentioned above. I think that for clarity and ease of use it would be nice to list them, but to avoid duplication and disruption I would not move or copy them. I did a search of the Manual of Style for "citation" and found all the parts that contain guidelines that explicitly apply to citations. Certain phrasing also seems to be creating confusion about guidelines that are clearly operating as de facto standards for citations. I propose the following:

I have proposed to clarify which MOS guidelines apply to citations. Please see the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style#Proposal to clarify which MOS guidelines apply to citations.

And if and when we do, I hope that will be compatible with our current tools. Thanks. Doug Weller talk 16:37, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

To what extent is a press release a reliable source? They are mentioned in passing in WP:RS, but I cannot track any direct comment on them.

I used the Template:Cite web for a [https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=77072468&caseSearchType=US_APPLICATION&caseType=DEFAULT&searchType=statusSearch webpage on the US Patent and Trademark Office's TSDR], and I was wondering whether there is a special way to cite a US trademark registration in an article. I saw that there's a template for a patent (Template:Cite patent) and was curious if there was something similar for a trademark as well. Appreciate any guidance. (Guyinblack25 ^talk 03:04, 29 April 2025 (UTC))

I've always "known" that direction quotations must be cited immediately after the quote, even if an end of paragraph citation would normally cover it. This leads me to write paragraphs like: