Forum:Template:Citation and Template:Link

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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 Template:Link. 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)

Bruce- I took a look at this. See if it doesn't work better now. I tried it on some of my citations where I was using cite book and cite web and picks up fields that I wasn't getting the old ones to display. On our quality article guideline article, I think we should guide users to {{Citation}} rather than the cite book etc family of templates. IMHO no familypedia article should even get a C class rating without proper cites.

On a technical note, actually the problem was the printonly CSS class- in any case, I have uploaded a current version of the templates. The two chief reasons why WP don't run on wikia wikis is 1)htmltidy bugs on table formating 2)CSS classes being used in the templates that were not copied over from wp:wikimedia:common.css or monobook.css to our common.css or monaco.css.

Not all docs on the modules were transfered- perhaps you could help with anything glaring that i missed. The Wikipedia: links were changed in some cases to Familypedia, and there may be some crucial redlink articles we need from WP. Actually most of the MOS and behavior guidelines should be moved over at some point. If you see docs pages that need moving, by all means transfer them , but add the usedwp template in respect of CC3.0 rules on reuse. ~ Phlox 20:31, November 6, 2009 (UTC)

Thanks - I could never have worked that out (I can puzzle my way through simple templates, but don't know know anything about the guts of wikimedia programming). I started fixing some of the redlinks on the documentation page, but quickly found that the citation template itself generates links to wikipedia pages we don't have - such as Online Computer Library Center. Others include doi, PMID, ISBN, etc. Although we could make local copies of such pages, their content seems to still be actively changing (e.g., most recent major edit of OCLC was on Oct 7 2009). Perhaps a better solution would be to modify our version of Template:Citation to point to the WP pages? Or simply remove the links to those terms? Bruce Kendall 20:55, November 7, 2009 (UTC)

Sorry for the lack of clarity. I'll take a look at the links inside the template- I'm not sure there should even be a link for some of those- it might be disconcerting to move the user offsite. OTOH, it is easy enough to put in the link to wikipedia, and see how it goes.

I transferred a lot of stuff and saw some docs that needed attention, like links that refer to style guidance but apparently most of that was in the submodules. I agree Familypedia does not benefit from mirror copies of general encyclopedic content like the article on "online computer library", what an ISBN is, and so on. Practically every link I see on the citation doc page should be pointing to WP articles to explain what they are. But that page does need attention I see a broken ref on the citation page, in the date section. Some /doc pages were not moved over such as for {{harv}}. Anything you can do to tidy up things that a general user would want to look at would be appreciated. Note that {{Citation}} works fine in Showfacts forms and templates, but like most other templates and wikitext in SMW fields, you must use a {{!}} in place of the | "bar" separator between the parameters. For example:

{{citation {{!}}author=William Addams Reitwiesner {{!}}url=http://www.wargs.com/political/obama.html {{!}}title=Ancestry of Barack Obama{{!}}accessdate=2009-11-05}}

generates:

William Addams Reitwiesner, Ancestry of Barack Obama, http://www.wargs.com/political/obama.html, retrieved 2009-11-05 

I know the syntax of wikitext citations is too imposing for the bread and butter of every genealogy article- the cites that demonstrate why we believe what the article is saying is true. It is possible I or others may improve them with a javascript fill in the blank subwindow, but I for one don't have time for it until the basic infrastructure and content is in place. You can see an example of javascript popup windows on the media pages for annotating who is who in a photo (like Facebook and Flickr). Play with "add note". ~ Phlox 00:55, November 8, 2009 (UTC)

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Although escapement of the vertical bar works as described above, I have found that in practice it is error prone because the addition of extra braces or vertical bars can create unusual results for regular contributors. For this reason, I have also put in support for special characters in place of vertical bars and braces. Using the above example,

<<citation ^^author=William Addams Reitwiesner ^^url=http://www.wargs.com/political/obama.html ^^title=Ancestry of Barack Obama ^^ accessdate=2009-11-05 >>

generates:

William Addams Reitwiesner, Ancestry of Barack Obama, http://www.wargs.com/political/obama.html, retrieved 2009-11-05 

They aren't required- it is an alternative to the encoding above that just uses the {{!}} to replace the vertical bar. If anyone prefers different escapement characters, feel free to suggest modifications. I wanted chars from the keyboard, and considered a doubled ^^ and << to be unusual enough to not occur in citations or in footnotes. To be super safe, I could have used something like ↑↑ in place of ^^ and ♣ and ♥ in place of braces. That just seemed too weird, so I opted for greater legibility. ~ Phlox 20:04, November 10, 2009 (UTC)