Forum:Template:Citation and Template:Link

Template:Citation is a uniform citation template that can be used for all sorts of references. It is more general than the Cite XXX templates (only a few of which have been installed on familypedia anyway). Back in May, Phlox installed the version from wikipedia. However, when I've tried to use it, there are problems (which can even be seen on the documentation page for the template): in any part of the citation for which there is an optional url (such as a book title), the link is displayed instead of the the base text (and if there is no url specified, then nothing is displayed at all). I think I've tracked down the problem, but since it appears to be something systemic I'm punting to the site administrators for a solution/decision.

Digging down into Template:Citation/core, I found a use of Template:Link to generate the text+link parts of the citation. Unfortunately, familypedia's Template:Link is completely different from wikipedia's. A workaround would be to create a new template (e.g., Template:Link-wp), and edit Template:Citation to use it instead of Template:Link. But this would need to be done for everything imported from wikipedia... which doesn't seem like a sustainable solution in the long term, if we want to routinely take advantage of wikipedia's advances. And of course, the obvious alternative of redefining the local copy of Template:Link might well break all sorts of existing pages.

If there's not a general solution I'm happy to set up the workaround to get Template:Citation working, but thought I'd check first to see if the more savvy users/admins have a better solution. Bruce Kendall 14:55, November 6, 2009 (UTC)