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Should list-defined references be discouraged?

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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)[reply]

VisualEditor is crap. It's VisualEditor that should be discouraged. Jc3s5h (talk) 21:10, 1 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Two notes on this:
  1. 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.
  2. 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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
It is so disappointing. I raised the issues that VE would cause for their plans 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 {{sfn}} feels like putting a puzzle together and {{rp}} is so basic. Rjjiii (talk) 00:40, 18 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
Template {{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)[reply]
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)[reply]
@Michael Bednarek, that seems too low? At least one list-defined reference is used in at least 179,000 articles, based on the "ref" parameter in {{reflist}} transclusions. Rjjiii (talk) 04:26, 17 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
I suggest using "<references>" rather than "{{reflist|refs=", as shown here. The difference is not significant for source editor users, but "<references>" will not make references hidden for the VisualEditor users. Alenoach (talk) 02:37, 24 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
@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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
Almost 20 years ago, Aaron Swartz made 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)[reply]
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)[reply]

New proposal: deprecate {{reflist|refs= in favor of <references>?

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Per Alenoach above, <references> 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 {{reflist}} and use a bot to replace all such occurrences with <references>? Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 12:49, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Isn't there, at the very least, a difference in font size? Gawaon (talk) 13:05, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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 <references>. 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)[reply]
It would be good to have the software engineering perspective, so I opened 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)[reply]
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)[reply]
Might be good to wait for a deeper understanding of the problem before taking a decision. Alenoach (talk) 17:10, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, apparently this is the main page where the software developers handle it: 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)[reply]
This is essentially just substing a somewhat-redundant template. When called in LDR contexts without other parameters, {{reflist}} appears to just call <references /> 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)[reply]
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)[reply]
@Sgerbic: Note the proposal in this subsection is to require doing LDR using <references>...</references> rather than {{reflist|refs=...}}, not to deprecate LDR. Anomie⚔ 18:09, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
@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 <references> tags on either end. Cremastra talk 01:34, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
The only difference is that where you currently type:
{{Reflist|refs=
<ref name="NYT Obit">{{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:
<references>
<ref name="NYT Obit">{{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 </references>). 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)[reply]
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)[reply]
I opened a bug report here. Alenoach (talk) 18:01, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Strong support In addition to better visualeditor support, using <references>...</references> means that most of the citations will still display even if the WP:PEIS limit is exceeded. All the old reasons to use {{reflist}}, such as font sizes or responsive columns, have long since been overcome by the software. Nothing about using <references>{{cite foo|...}}</references> 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)[reply]
Oppose: visualeditor is broken, not |refs=. Boghog (talk) 19:37, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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 <reference> tags now have all the same functionality), or from using LDRs. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 20:02, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There's no reason for anyone to use {{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)[reply]
I think @Ahecht is right. Most of the times, using {{reflist}} instead of <references /> 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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
Bots are hidden from watchlists by default, I think. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:21, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, it's quite trivial to hide bot edits, either through preferences at Preferences → Watchlist → Changes shown → Tick Hide bot edits from the watchlist, or ad-hoc using the filter button on the watchlist itself. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 03:55, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
Is that pressure having any effect anyway? Anomie⚔ 11:28, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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 making up a list of hack templates that each wiki uses, which is a WONTFIX if ever there was one which I agree with) solution. Aaron Liu (talk) 12:27, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support : the problem seems unlikely to be solved any time soon (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}} instead of <references>. Alenoach (talk) 20:31, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support I use list-defined references as the most convenient way of handling citations. I wasn't familiar with the technicalities which have been presented here but they seem to make good sense. I'll start using <references> to see how it goes.
Note that this discussion has technical issues because of embedded tags which need considerable effort to decativate. I've just fixed Alenoach's post to turn off template bracketing which was messing up my post. We need some clerking to keep everything well-organised.
Andrew🐉(talk) 06:51, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
One of the most basic use cases of {{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)[reply]
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)[reply]
That's not entirely correct. <references /> and {{reflist}} both use 30em columns when there are more than 10 refs. This can be disabled with <references responsive=0 /> and {{reflist|1}}. OTOH, reflist has more options: {{reflist|2}} and {{reflist|30em}} do columns without the "more than 10 refs" condition, and other widths besides 30em can be passed to {{reflist}} too. Anomie⚔ 11:45, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This (having multiple columns without using the template) was implemented in 2017. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:11, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Including widths besides 30em? Aaron Liu (talk) 17:23, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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 {{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)[reply]
What about {{reflist-talk|refs=}}? --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 08:26, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

Working proposal (please edit)

Rationale

Reflist no longer needed in most cases

Early features of {{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 <references />. Usage of {{reflist}} where the |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 support

VisualEditor cannot handle list-defined references when those references are defined inside of a template like {{reflist}}; however, it can handle <references><ref>...</ref></references> properly due to its closer integration with MediaWiki. Almost 200,000 pages have references defined inside of {{reflist}} and thus those entire articles cannot be contributed to by VE users (parameter usage report).

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 <ref name=":0"> tags everywhere, "WMF should fix it, we shouldn't have to touch our templates" has gotten old.

Sub-referencing

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 {{reflist}} were cited as a major hurdle in the development of this tool.

Better handling of template limits

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 <references /> tag will still function (although some citation templates may not render properly).

Sister projects have managed this

The Polish Wikipedia editors routinely check if {{Przypisy}} includes a list of references and, using pl:MediaWiki:Gadget-sk.js#L-575, replace it with <references />. One sticking point to keeping {{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.

Proposal

Change to documentation

The following pages will need to be updated to remove the equivalence between {{reflist}} and <references /> and encourage use of the latter by new editors:

Bot replacement

Uses of the {{reflist}} template that do not rely on its <div>-based formatting features should be replaced by a functionally identical <references /> tag.

−
{{reflist}}
+
<references />
−
{{reflist |refs=...}}
+
<references>...</references>
−
{{reflist |group=lower-alpha |refs=...}}
+
<references group="lower-alpha">...</references>

Discussion of proposal re deprecate {{reflist|refs= in favor of <references>?

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" The use of citation templates is neither encouraged nor discouraged"

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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)[reply]

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)[reply]
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. Zerotalk 10:27, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
I would also support a default for switching to CS1 citation templates with default short citation formas in {{sfn}} – imo {{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 Suetonius, Augustus) as is common in classical studies. They can similarly can be used if an article benefits from shortened anchors (eg CAH2 9) or general short cites by title.
One of the huge benefits of the {{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 Smith 2000, § 3.14 with no corresponding bibliographic entry for Smith 2000 is nonsense and we really need ways to track this automatically. Then we can actually go and solve those problems. Though, for some certain self-contained corpuses of citations this can be unnecessary. Eg 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)[reply]
We should consider the new parameter, details, being developed for the <ref> tag, currently under development. See 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 {{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)[reply]
That seems a bit restrictive in terms of narrative footnotes which say something like Gruen 1995, p. 123, however notes that Dio, 3.14.15, contradicts the narrative in Suetonius, Julius, 1.2.3 or But see Woodman 2021 for alternative views on blah blah. While {{sfn}} is somewhat inherently restrictive, ref + {{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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
Can you show an example of this for illustration? Ifly6 (talk) 16:36, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
Making a {{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)[reply]
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.
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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)[reply]
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 {{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)[reply]
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)[reply]
Perhaps the entire WP:TEMPLATEREFS sentence (or even the whole/short paragraph) should be in the RFC. The specific sentence currently says: 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)[reply]
(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)[reply]
FAs are allowed to have any consistent citation style, whether produced by templates or handwritten. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:34, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
I suggested a couple of possible alternative wordings above. Do any of those appeal to you? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:30, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
@Blueboar: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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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: 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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
@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)[reply]
Forms work great for a database… not an encyclopedia. Blueboar (talk) 12:13, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]

@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)[reply]

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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
{{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)[reply]
@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)[reply]
Jumping in randomly here...my first thought would be we could add a "no-title-desc" parameter to {{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)[reply]
cs1|2 journal templates support |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 |title=none are not used to maintain that traditional substyle.
I once suggested that cs1|2 might support a |description-in-lieu-of-title= sort of parameter (in need of a better name) that would render an unstyled description in place of |title=. That suggestion died aborning.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:30, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Trappist the monk, are you sure about that? This: "none". doesn't look like suppressing the rendering of the article title to me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:55, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
cs1|2 journal templates support |title=none
{{cite journal |title=none |journal=Journal}} → Journal.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link)
—Trappist the monk (talk) 21:27, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Perhaps that feature should be extended to {{cite map}} (or generally; there are webpages with no titles, too). WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:06, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
There's plenty of solutions for this, see Help talk:Citation Style 1/Archive 98#Handle title=none with url better.
Why those aren't implemented is beyond me. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:53, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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: [1]). 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)[reply]
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 {{cite review}} to take the same fields as e.g. {{cite journal}} but produce different output with "review" in there somewhere. -- Beland (talk) 08:50, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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)[reply]
Huh. I would expect citations to books to use {{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)[reply]
If you're referring to the fact that the bot citation damage involved a {{citation}} template rather than a {{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, {{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)[reply]
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 {{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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]

I have started Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#RFC on preferring templates in citations. -- Beland (talk) 23:54, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

RFC on consistent styles and capitalization of titles

[edit]

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)[reply]

  • 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)[reply]
    • 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)[reply]
      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)[reply]
      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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
    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 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)[reply]
    @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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
  • 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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
  • 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)[reply]
  • 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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
  • 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)[reply]
  • 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)[reply]
    The options should not be limited to sentence case or title case. This isn't what respected published style guides do. As an example, 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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
    Agree. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:52, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    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)[reply]
  • <YesNo(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 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)[reply]
    @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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
    @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: 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 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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
    @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)[reply]
    @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)[reply]
    Good work—it seems like this might already be covered by the guidelines, then?
    Himaldrmann (talk) 15:47, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • 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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
    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)[reply]
  • 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)[reply]
    The guidelines simply state to be consistent, they do not state we must edit the reference titles to match what Wikipedia uses for capitalization.
As one example, the NFL and all 32 teams consistently capitalize "NFL Draft" and each event, treating the names of the events as proper names. Are we to then apply the style that we personally see fit? What happens when one person doesn't like it? Does it then become we MUST adhere to whatever Wikipedia uses for capitalization? It's forcing specific citation styles on people who are consistent in what they do, and for what? To create busy work that actively slows down improvement of the site for no gain?
The goal appears to be to force Wikipedians to use either sentence or title case specifically, when there are countless styles which are consistent and differ drastically. Hey man im josh (talk) 23:17, 1 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Countless styles of capitalization? So far, we've only found five:
  1. Title case: On War and Peace: A Few Thoughts
  2. Sentence case: On war and peace: A few thoughts
  3. Leading caps: On War And Peace: A Few Thoughts
  4. All caps: ON WAR AND PEACE: A FEW THOUGHTS
  5. Library style: On war and peace : a few thoughts
WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:30, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure I'd agree that sentence case means use sentence case for subtitles, too, but maybe it does; I hadn't heard of Library style, but that does look a lot like what I see from Library of Congress (minimal capitalization). I expect there's no precedent in Wikipedia for using either all caps or leading caps as a consistent ref style in Wikipedia; it would be quite contrary to our general practice of avoiding unnecessary capitalization. I doubt that anyone would complain if we said not to do leading caps generally. That's orthogonal to the present question though. Dicklyon (talk) 02:20, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The listed styles are visibly consistent. A reader can inspect a small sample and work out the pattern. A "style" that is not visibly consistent leaves the reader at a loss as to how to add another item consistent with the existing material. The likely consequence is that they just make a wild-assed guess, or use whatever capitalisation they like best, and the probability of achieving consistency by WAG is low, so there is a drift to inconsistency. This is about as good or bad as "do whatever" Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 08:29, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia does have a house style on capitalization of titles including those used in citations at MOS:TITLECAPS, For subtitles see MOS:TITLECAPS#Subtitle. StarryGrandma (talk) 03:18, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This comment does not correctly summarize MOS:TITLECAPS. The phrase there is "In titles (including subtitles, if any) of English-language works (books, poems, songs, etc.), every word is capitalized except for the definite and indefinite articles, the short coordinating conjunctions, and any short prepositions. This is known as title case." But if you read the whole section yo see this means mentioning a title in a Wikipedia article, outside of the reference section. It also doesn't apply to titles of journal articles, although it does apply to the title of the journal. it goes on to say

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.

Jc3s5h (talk) 14:40, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes (while fixing all-caps and isolated glaring outliers should be allowed and encouraged): Copying from the source is simple to do and it preserves the integrity of the source, and it is what happens from automatic tools. There have been several times when some question arises (usually in an RM discussion) about about someone's "Favorite Theory" or "Infamous Incident", leading me to take a look at the citations for evidence of what is in them, and I notice that many of them refer to the "Infamous Incident" in their headlines, but when I actually open a few of the links, I see that the citations are not accurately representing what the sources have in them. With a little sleuthing, I sometimes find that just a week or two (or 5 minutes) before suggesting to rename the page, someone has edited the page to change the capitalization of that one phrase in many cited headlines and quotes and the article body. I don't like it when I see they have altered the cited titles to support their agenda. I want to be able to see whether a source referred to the topic as Il bidone or Il Bidone or I clowns, or as the EDGE Group or the Edge Group or EDGE Foundation. I also tend to find that if I get an itch to clean up some citations, I find no lack of other, more useful things to do – like add and correct author names, correct the usage of the |publisher= parameter, add |url-access= indications to help readers avoid wasting their time, adding {{dead link}} tags, adding links to author articles, adding links to articles about the publications, merging duplicate citations to the same source, changing POLITICO and TIME to Politico and Time, adding publication dates, making the date format more consistent, and tagging or removing citations to low-quality promotional or biased sources. All of those things help the reader, while I've never noticed anyone being especially worried about establishing a consistent styling of the capitalization in the cited headlines. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 03:38, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes - Accurately reflecting the casing of sources has been the de facto reference formatting style since Wikipedia began, which is why all of the citation tools that have accumulated over two decades follow it. --PresN 03:59, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    That's completely and utterly wrong. Going into an article that has a consistent style (e.g. title case for major works like journals and book titles and sentence case for minor, like articles and chapters, one of the more common styles) and imposing instead the exact case-spellings used in the original sources, all written to completely different style guides or not at all (it's common enough to encounter things like "Across A Gulf Of Time" due to no-smarts content management systems that auto-capitalize after after space character) would be against WP:CITESTYLE by changing from a consistent style to random chaos.

    Various half-baked citation tools (many of which have not been updated in years and nearly all of which introduce at least one kind of citation template formatting error that we have to clean up latter), generally do nothing with case because their coders haven't figured out how to do it. It's very simple to create code to copy string X and reuse it verbatim, but quite challenging to create one that transforms particular strings, depending on their template-parameter destination, through a carefully crafted title-case rule (e.g. one following our MOS:5LETTER system and not some off-site variation (of which there are many). But it's a moot point anyway: The tail does not wag the dog – citation tools are to be written to conform to our citation needs (and abandoned if they will not be repaired to do so); we do not shape our guidelines or our practices to suit limitations of third-party tools.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:42, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

    Across A Gulf of Time or Across A Gulf Of Time? (Not that it's important, heh; just figured you may have meant to give the latter as an example—unless I've misunderstood!)
    Himaldrmann (talk) 15:52, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, fixed. But odds are you can find examples capitalized like "Across A Gulf of Time" due to poorly coded scripts, anyway.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:12, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I disagree that all of the citation tools that have accumulated over two decades follow it: correctly applying sentence casing algorithmically to an article title is effectively impossible. BibTeX attempts this, but any long-term user will attest that it often requires quite a bit of escaping capitals ("DNA" becomes "dna" sometimes without escaping). Zotero, probably the most-used GUI reference management software, explicitly does not sentence-case its entries automatically, and its reference document on this topic explains that it's functionally impossible to translate from title to sentence case. Wikipedia's much-less-powerful citation tools could not be expected to do this and it should be on editors to ensure consistency when an article approaches featured content status. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 19:09, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Absolutely not. This idea is completely counter to the entire purpose of WP:CITESTYLE and its WP:CITEVAR. This is the third time we've been over this already in the space of a few weeks.

    WP:STYLEVAR requires a consistent style of citations in output for readers. It has absolutely nothing to do with a particular person's WP:NOTGETTINGIT and WP:1AM weird notion of "consistent way of entering citations, by just copy-pasting them as found". It is entirely fine for someone to do that (no editor has to comply with any style guideline of any kind to add content and citations). What is not permissible is WP:STONEWALL editwarring against other editors normalizing such a person's chaotic input to conform to our guidelines. These guidelines require consistent presentation of citations to our readers, with no regard for whether editors are "consistent" in how they (individually or collectively) go about producing that result; there is of course no way for WP to magically determine from a distance whether someone is being consistent in their data gathering and entry practices, and no reason to care.

    The entire notion that "consistent/consistency" in this guideline could have anything to do with how an editor likes to handle text on their end is nonsensical, and aside from being an obvious WP:WIKILAWYER / WP:GAMING tactic, is a classic fallacy of equivocation: trying to change the clear meaning of a term on-the-fly to a contradictory one to try to get a cogently indefensible result that they desire for subjective reasons (mostly often convenience AKA laziness, but occasionally as with PresN's strange notions above some idea of "obeying" external publisher's style preferences, which is the exact opposite of why we have a style guide at all).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:42, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  • No – It must be permissible to correct a cited title like … Voted Comeback Player Of The Year By PFW/PFWA to … Voted Comeback Player of the Year by PFW/PFWA – preferrably in the context of a more substantial edit. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 04:47, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Who determines what the "corrected" version of the title is though? Must we use what Wikipedia uses as the capitalization for articles, or cam we use what sources treat as a proper name? Hey man im josh (talk) 14:23, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    It's determined by an editor who is cleaning up the article. Ideally the cleanup-editor owns at least one printed style guide. The procedure is to look through the citations to see if it's apparent which style is being followed. If no pattern is evident, the cleanup editor can do what they want as long as it's consistent. In case of disagreement it's discussed on the article talk page. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:46, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The problem with that idea is that Wikipedia's guidelines for capitalization very often do not match other guidelines. This is one step towards "Every capitalization used by titles must be used in references as well". Hey man im josh (talk) 19:33, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    To be clear, I meant the first step would be to look through the talk page and see if there is a discussion. If not, look at the early versions in the edit history; if most of the book titles are title case and most of the journal and newspaper article titles are sentence case, then that's the style. If the styles are wildly inconsistent until a cleanup 8 months ago, go with the style in the 8-month-old cleanup. If the style has always been wildly inconsistent, right up to the current version, the cleanup editor can choose any consistent style. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:55, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No – The only purpose of keeping capitalisation the same as the source is to help web searches when the source disappears. Luckily, most web search engines totally ignore capitalisation. And like all other aspects of references, we are not bound by the source's choice of ordering, date format, etc. Therefore capitalisation can be treated the same as font choice - ignore it totally. I have a strong preference to sentence case but can live with capitalising every major word (typically skipping "the", "and", etc). All-caps is the same as SHOUTING - which is the source's intent to grab your attention but I don't want references to MOLEST me. But I'm not too fussed if some of the references use sentence case and others capitalise every major word - as said above, that's just busy work and too onerous to demand on volunteer editors. And I doubt if the majority of our readers even notice.  Stepho  talk  05:46, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I expect that some of the automated citation-creation tools will grab a title that does not reflect the real title that's found when reading the work on paper or in a PDF. For example, I used the Cite tool in the Visual Editor and entered the ISBN for the The Chicago Manual of Style EIGHTEENTH EDITION (that's how it appears on the title page, the ISBN is 978-0-226-81797-2). The Cite tool rendered the title as The Chicago manual of style (Eighteenth edition ed.) Jc3s5h Jc3s5h (talk) 16:53, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Many web pages have sentence case in the HTML source but use CSS rules to display it as uppercase. So it displays as uppercase but copy/paste and scrapping tools see sentence case. This is also common for author files for web news articles.  Stepho  talk  23:46, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No, per various above, including Whatamidoing and Jc3s5h. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 18:15, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No. The title of any work as published is conforming to some style guide. It is not our job to import a dozen different style guides into our own. In saying that, it is quite "acceptable" to import citations quickly, via copying and pasting or other tools, and as BarrelProof has said, there are a multitude of other things to fix before capitalisation of citations. BUT, where someone has chosen to fix titles, this should be in one direction (towards a unified citation style) and not in a dozen different directions (towards every publication's unique style guide). We are our own publication, not merely an online depository, as many still seem to think. Following that philosophy, we should and do have our own style guide. — HTGS (talk) 20:56, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No. I don't care much what capitalization rule is used, but adopting this as a rule would make it very tedious to verify and impose consistency. An automatically generated citation is fine as a starting point, but often needs improvement in many ways, not limited to capitalization. (I'm also puzzled by the arguments being put forward by proponents, which seem contradictory - if "correcting" source capitalization is an integrity problem, why is it not an integrity problem to change all-caps titles?) Nikkimaria (talk) 01:56, 3 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No CITEVAR, unfortunately, results in lower-quality citations than a proper style guide, but a key positive function of the guideline is resolving disputes. To cut short a debate about formatting any particular citation, we can say "Make it consistent." The borrowed capitalization interpretation subverts that benefit. It introduces several potential ways to string along or exacerbate a dispute. What if only one or even zero editors can access the source? What if two editors access the source in two different ways, and find two different styles used? What if the method to access the source does not make it clear what the original capitalization was? It's okay to ignore CITEVAR when the citation can be made more functional by maintaining consistency with the source rather than the other citations in an article. For example, having ISBNs formatted with different numbers of digits and hyphens could help a reader determine if they have the same copy of the book by seeing the same ISBN. You can argue that better aligns with WP:V. That doesn't apply to capitalization though. As another editor pointed out above, search engines ignore capitalization, so it doesn't help locate the source either. Rjjiii (talk) 03:03, 3 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No, per WhatamIdoing, Dicklyon, SMcCandlish, Nikkimaria, and others above. It would also be annoying and potentially discouraging if someone fixes the capitalization of cited works (e.g. by correcting overcapitalizations in title style) and then gets reverted despite doing what was arguably an improvement, if a minor one. Gawaon (talk) 07:32, 3 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I find it discouraging to go against the actual title used by the source, and to actually have to fight about what should and shouldn't be capitalized. What I consider a proper name others may not, and I KNOW that fight will happen. Hey man im josh (talk) 15:35, 4 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Another issue that hasn't been considered so far but that should be considered before this RfC closes it that a Yes outcome would be absolutely unworkable in practice since nobody will know any more whether citations use a consistent style. Consider an article with 50 references, some of them printed books and articles, the rest web articles. Some use Sentence case, some Title Case, and some All Words Are Capitalized Even Articles And Prepositions Style. Is that a consistent reference formatting style? Nobody can know without having clicked on all the web references and having manually verified the case form of the title, as well as having retrieved all the cited books from libraries and verified their title page or table of contents. Nobody will do that, of course. So nobody would know any more what's consistent and what isn't. Gawaon (talk) 15:05, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    How on earth would a yes outcome be unworkable? That simply means not blindly changing capitalization, which is super easy and workable. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:57, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    It could perhaps be made workable if articles could be tagged with a "Citation case copied from sources" tag, to distinguish from articles that use a more conventional capitalization style. But as it stands, there's no way to know without looking at most of the sources whether that's the intended style, and no way to know it's consistent with that intent without looking at all the sources. Dicklyon (talk) 18:15, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    (edit conflict) I was about to say the same thing: Corresponding templates could be created such as {{Use capitalisation from sources in citations}}, {{Use title case in source citations}} and {{Use sentence case in source citations}}, similar to other templates we already use, like {{Use dmy dates}} and {{Use Oxford spelling}}. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 18:24, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    It's already workable, just don't needlessly change citation cases. Hey man im josh (talk) 18:59, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    If you and I are working to develop an article, and you add citations with capitalization matching the sources and I add citations in title case, that is inconsistent whether this closes as Yes or No, and one or the other would have to be changed either way. This RfC is not "let's decide not to care about capitalization at all"; it's only "which of those would have to change?".
    I fully understand that copying and pasting is easy from a just-get-a-reference-in perspective. But as a frequent source reviewer at FAC, I'd have to agree that from that perspective a Yes outcome is unworkable, or at least massively more tedious. And that's before we get into any additional complicating factors, for example different versions of a source having different capitalizations (eg accessing via a database vs directly from a publisher site). Nikkimaria (talk) 01:57, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    A book's cover will be capitalized differently from its title page. A wire services article will appear with different capitalization in different newspapers. The HTML title property might use different capitalization than the displayed title. Which one is the One True™ Capitalization for that source? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:40, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    We should try to avoid tedious requirements where there is no clear benefit to the reader or the majority of editors. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 07:04, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    In addition to what Nikkimaria and WhatamIdoing said: The problem with a "Use capitalisation from sources in citations" template is that it still leaves editors clueless about which existing citations already comply with this style and which doesn't. Everyone who has edited more one very few articles will know that "Use DMY dates" doesn't mean that every existing date in the article already does so. It means that any existing date that deviates from this pattern should be adjusted to adhere to it, and very often that is indeed necessary, since less than 100% of all editors will read that note and follow what is says. Likewise "Use capitalisation from sources in citations" would only express an ideal, but which of the existing citations actually follow it is impossible to know without following up every single citation, which I have pointed out is entirely impractical, if not impossible in practice. That's the huge difference to "Use DMY/MDY dates" and hypothetical "Use title/sentence case in source citations" templates which can be easily verified by editors by just looking through the content of the page. And going beyond that is frankly not something we can and should expect editors to do. Gawaon (talk) 07:17, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The problem with needing manual checking of sources is broader than questions about capitalization. The primary way we know whether any information in citations is correct (and whether a provided URL is broken or not) is for people to go look at the sources and see what they have in them. Anyone who has bothered to do that kind of gnoming will know that there's no shortage of things needing checking and correction or addition of missing information in Wikipedia article citations. Yet we don't consider the practice of citing sources as generally unworkable. Indeed, it's a core principle. And automated tools (e.g. Wikipedia:reFill) seem to copy the capitalisation from the sources by default anyway, AFAIK. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 15:43, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    There's a huge difference between editors collectively checking the sources of an article, and one individual editor being able to check all the sources of an article. Using "Date of Easter as an example, I was able to check some dates which the article implied came from Astronomical Algorithms 2nd ed., because I own that book. (It turned out the dates in question weren't in the book.) But if I wanted to check the capitalization of the title of Handbuch der mathematischen und technischen Chronologie I wouldn't be able to, because I don't own that, and I doubt any library near me has it. Since article cleanup is usually done by a single editor, we should use styles that can be checked by a single editor who doesn't have access to many of the sources. Jc3s5h (talk) 16:10, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    This is true, but I think the artument—that adding (in effect) a requirement to check the source (to determine if formatting is correct) will likely lead to more incorrect formatting—might be sound; a guideline that requires only looking at the article itself, on the other hand, enables lots of lazy people with OCD (such as myself) to ensure that at least the formatting is correct.
    Of course, adopting a guideline that says "sources don't have to actually support what they have been adduced to support" would also make things easier, so "easier" isn't a bulletproof (or BarrelProof! heh! heh...) argument...
    Himaldrmann (talk) 16:14, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I think Gawaon is correct in two ways:
    • You can't know whether mismatched capitalization is intentional merely by reading the article. This could be mitigated by adding an invisible template.
    • Even if you know that mismatched capitalization is intentional (e.g., you saw the hidden template in the wikitext), you can't know whether any specific ref is "correctly" capitalized without checking each source individually. This cannot be mitigated by anything we do on wiki. Making all the titles follow a standard scheme is easy; some of us can do it practically in our sleep, and if you want proper Title Case, there's a script to automate it. But if you want to use mismatched styles, then there is no way to find or fix any errors without manually checking each source individually.
    WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:36, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No, per Nikkimaria, WhatamIdoing, SMcCandlish, etc. Consistency is one of the key factors for the output for readers, rather than a jumbled mess of different styles. - SchroCat (talk) 03:43, 5 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes. This never should have had a standard at all per WP:CREEP. There is just no value add; the whole point of CITEVAR is to let major editors use whatever consistent style they prefer, and it's fine. It's not worth edit warring over, it's not worth telling them they're "wrong". Wikipedia is not a monograph collection where all the chapters use the same formatting style; it's closer to a library where it's not surprising if one book uses one style, and another a second style. That's fine. Standardizing all books in a library would be madness and counterproductive - if an editor wants to use a style (whether it be title case, original case, sentence case), let them. As far as Gawaon's comment, the whole point of this proposal is to deem original casing an accepted style. So messing with it would not be a "fix" at all. SnowFire (talk) 07:11, 5 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    • Side comment: Looking up, there is a lot of ...questionable... claims here, but to weigh in on one claim in particular: the whole accusation that the pro-honoring-the-sources side is really just about auto-formatted citation tools is completely irrelevant and should be discounted by the closer. It is of course correct that the tools should serve the policy, not the other way around. But A) formatting a title is a solved problem, don't trust a tool that can't handle this anyway, and B) Even if it wasn't, it is a principled and reasonable style for an editor to prefer to honor the original casing, even if this was somehow more work for the editor. I'm not thinking website links here, I'm thinking more like old-fashioned books from the 1800s which used capitalization liberally. If someone wants to do this - let them. Just as if someone wants to format everything in sentence case - also let them do that. It doesn't matter. Most editors will be happy to seek advice from the guidelines anyway, it's fine, but we trust them to make the call at the end of the day. That is the Wikipedia way. SnowFire (talk) 07:33, 5 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
      Freedom to preserve the capitalizations used by sources and freedom to utilize sentence or title case, it's how it should be, and it's absolutely a consistent style. Hey man im josh (talk) 13:20, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
      I don’t think “Freedom” is a useful argument here. We don’t encourage freedom-to-write-whatever-you-want on Wikipedia, nor freedom-to-cite-whatever-you-want, and likewise, I see no benefit to being “free” from any cohesive style guide. — HTGS (talk) 21:45, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
      @HTGS: That's not a useful comparison. The argument is that some perceive the style of preserving the actual title used as being a consistent style. Being allowed to preserve the title is a freedom when it comes to writing and improving content. Hey man im josh (talk) 12:37, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
      @Hey man im josh And being allowed to change the title is a freedom when it comes to writing and improving content. My point is that “freedom” is not a useful lens here. — HTGS (talk) 05:10, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • The problem with this argument is that most articles have more than one author, and no chief editor coordinating style. Nobody is penalised for adding content or references that are inconsistent, but nobody should be stopped from editing to make them consistent within guidelines. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 07:09, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No. Book titles should consistently be in title case, article and chapter titles should consistently be in either title or sentence case. In both cases regardless of how they appear in their original. Gog the Mild (talk) 14:57, 5 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No YesWhy should we spend our time enforcing a policy that reduces (however slightly) the reader's ability to find sources? If It Is Written Like This, Then It Should Be Presented Like This. JuxtaposedJacob (talk) | :) | he/him | 20:22, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Did you mean "yes"? —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 20:33, 7 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Looks to me like they did. Pinging @JuxtaposedJacob for clarity. Hey man im josh (talk) 12:38, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, sorry for the error. Thanks for the note. JuxtaposedJacob (talk) | :) | he/him | 15:06, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Preferred but not mandatory, and this shouldn't be forced on the editor adding the citations. Editors should be allowed to input citations in the way they are capitalized in the sources, and other editors should be allowed to change them to a preferred consistent style. This way, we don't add an unnecessary barrier to entry, but we still allow editors who want it to make the citations more consistent. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 10:30, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
So, in the context of this RFC, I suppose you argue for No (since "other editors should be allowed to change them")? Gawaon (talk) 11:18, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Mostly, but I don't want the result of the RfC to be interpreted as editors not being allowed to input the original formatting used by sources, which was brought up by multiple users on the "yes" side as a potential barrier to editing. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 11:21, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Consistency is always just an option, never a requirement, so I don't know how a "No" result of this RfC could be interpreted as forcing anyone to do anything. All it does is giving other editors the possibility of further improvements by making reference formatting more consistent. Gawaon (talk) 06:55, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Gawaon: Saying it's "never a requirement" is incorrect. Consistent reference styling is a requirement at WP:FAC and WP:FLC. Hey man im josh (talk) 16:29, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
True, but FAC and FLC are themselves optional activities, and so is reverting someone who voluntarily corrected the capitalization in an article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:45, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
"Corrected" is subjective, I believe it to have made the references worse. That's the fun thing about opinions and perspectives. Hey man im josh (talk) 12:11, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
No. It is by far not the most important thing to get right, but a mish-mash of capitalisation styles looks sloppy and unprofessional. Respectable journals and books don't do this, since style manuals recommend to apply the publication's own style to the formatting of reference lists (not just capitalisation, but italics, etc.). So if someone cares enough to correct this, I don't want someone else saying that it is not an improvement, because copying the original is an approved style. JMCHutchinson (talk) 12:06, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes. edited to clarify: Any capitalization other than all-caps or all-lowercase should be acceptable. The last thing we need is to throw up more obstacles to getting the source cited at all in the first place. Personally, I give few to zero hoots about citation capitalization. I'm fine with describing a preferred style that editors are encouraged to apply and is a legit cleanup task; I could even live with it as a requirement for FAs. But adhering to a specific capitalization style should absolutely not be a requirement for a citation to be correct. Let's not add to the number of details an editor must know and understand to comply with basic expectations. Or nitpicky rules for crabby, territorial editors to use as bludgeons against one another. It's difficult enough onboarding people and getting good, cited contributions as it is. -- Avocado (talk) 13:57, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I would pretty much agree, which makes me realize something curious – rather than a simple "Yes/No" binary question, this discussion appears to really have three possible options: making casing consistency mandatory for citations, making it a "preferred" style but not a mandatory one, and not making it preferred at all. I've seen good arguments for all three, but people supporting the second option have !voted both "Yes" and "No" (with @Gawaon telling me above that he considered my similar opinion to be a "No" vote), and this does add to the complexity of a future close. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 16:26, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The wording of the question sort of lends itself to this confusion. I'll clarify my response. -- Avocado (talk) 17:22, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't think anyone has voted or argued for making casing consistency mandatory for citations. As I stated above, consistency is always just an option, never a requirement, and inconsistencies give an opportunity for further improvement. Gawaon (talk) 07:00, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    As mentioned above, saying it's "never a requirement" is incorrect. Consistent reference styling is a requirement at WP:FAC and WP:FLC. Only replying here as well in case anybody just gleams this comment, and I don't want it to be incorrectly assumed that consistency is never a requirement. Hey man im josh (talk) 16:31, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I think people are using "requirement" and "mandatory" in two different ways here. It's not a mandatory requirement in the sense that editors can make contributions that are non-compliant, and they should not be reverted. It is a mandatory requirement in the sense that inconsistent capitalization is non-compliant, not one of several compliant styles. The possibility is left open for a second editor to come by and make the contribution compliant with the MOS. This is different than say, the requirement to cite sources in biographies of living people, which is a "mandatory requirement" in both senses. -- Beland (talk) 19:38, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The problem is determining what inconsistent capitalization looks like. We have people downcasing titles to sentence case, but leaving book titles as capitalized. That's arguably an inconsistent style, one which is harder to track "at a glance", when compared to simply using the capitalization of the title that the sources used. Hey man im josh (talk) 13:28, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm not sure which "titles" you mean are being downcased which are not book titles? Certainly mixing title case and sentence case for the same type of work in the same article is inconsistent, and it's easy to see a glance whether or not that is happening. It's much more time consuming to verify that every single citation is pairwise consistent with the typography of the cited source, because you have to actually load every web page cited and look up every book cited in a database. -- Beland (talk) 19:33, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I’m not sure what your exact thinking is on this, but I don’t think we should imagine someone inputting a badly formatted citation being punished, or having the citation removed. If someone adds a citation that does not conform to the page’s style, and someone else corrects it, that is just the normal process at work; just like punctuation, spelling, template formatting, etc. — HTGS (talk) 04:14, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Right, and the idea of forbidding such minor improvements strikes me as very odd. It's like editors would be forbidden to fix typos, split overly long sentences or paragraphs, and make other stylistic and grammatical improvements. Gawaon (talk) 14:52, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The point here is whether those changes would constitute improvements. Improvements are acceptable, whatever they are. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 11:22, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    But that's a matter of perspective. I personally do not think it's an improvement to change all the titles to sentence or title case, I think it actually worsens the references. But I respect that others are permitted to do so. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:51, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes. In a sense, we are quoting the name of the work, and I think the name should reflect, as much as is practical, the source. Of course, I still advocate changing allcaps to title case, which does weaken that argument. Beyond that, I think this focus on capitalization style in citations is rather nitpicky, and doesn't need strong policing. - Donald Albury 14:49, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Donald Albury, Why would you allow changing all-caps? Isn’t that part of how the publishing journal or author chose to present their titles in the same way as all-lowercase? — HTGS (talk) 00:29, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    All-caps is just too jarring in a list of citations. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 02:36, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Wouldn’t allowing that exception undermine your point too though, Barrel? If you wanted to confirm how something was written when published, you would then have to know that the citation is accurate to the publication except when the original was published in all-caps. — HTGS (talk) 04:33, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Rather few sources use all-caps, so changing those doesn't affect the overall impression much. All-caps (for a whole citation title) is just too ugly to copy. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 16:29, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes Presenting the title as it is given in the reference should be normal practice. I don't have a problem with taking best-guess for all-caps titles, since that reduces readability. --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 14:56, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes per BarrelProof, Avocado and others. There are so many things that often need fixing in references - bare urls, no author name or date, etc etc, all of which matter to finding the ref and assessing its reliability, independence, sustained coverage, etc. Differing title styles in the sources does not impact this as much. As for the visual impact - it's much more important for the article text to use consistent styles than the references. RebeccaGreen (talk) 17:50, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes I use the "Add a citation" tool in the visual editor. I use the automatic import when possible or copy and paste from the source. I will never, ever manually futz with the the capitalization of all the words merely to match whichever style(s) are already in an article. As much as I appreciate our style guide and consistency, this is busywork that results in minimal improvement. Reywas92Talk 20:25, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    @Reywas92, I think the question here is less like "I would manually futz with capitalization myself" and more like "Would you recommend reverting an editor who fixed the capitalization on a source?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:48, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    But that's not at all the question, the question is whether consistently using the capitalization used by sources should be considered a consistent reference style. Hey man im josh (talk) 12:26, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    If I understand WhatamIdoing correctly, her point is that we are not proposing to ban pasting in citations with the original source capitalization. Many people do that now and it's not a cause for concern. What will change if this passes is that if an article adopts the standard "Source capitalization is allowed to stand" then when someone changes capitalization throughout to title case, someone could then revert, saying "this is already in a consistent capitalization format". If this does not pass that would not be a valid revert. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 12:39, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    That's one way to phrase it I suppose. In essence, we're simply not meant to change citation styles in an article just based on what we like if it's already consistent. Just something to clarify so that we can all get along. Hey man im josh (talk) 14:13, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Well it looks like no chance of finding a consensus in this RFC, so I'll not worry about it. I'll fix things that look like they need fixing (such as the "Matthew Stafford Voted Comeback Player Of The Year By PFW/PFWA" that started this), and you can unfix things that you think need unfixing based on them being in some sense "consistent" when you think that's the case. Dicklyon (talk) 00:56, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Perhaps you should consider trying to work better with others considering your behaviour has led to 15 blocks so far, not counting the ban on using automated tools. As has been made clear by this discussion, the changes you intend on making are not uncontroversial, so you should leave them alone if not otherwise discussed. Hey man im josh (talk) 16:36, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, per Reywas. Worrying about capitalization in cited sources is approximately the least important possible thing we could be doing with our time. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 23:06, 8 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes. 1. Retaining the source style (except for all caps) is the most accurate reflection of the source. 2. Requiring one of two citation styles for all references creates a huge amount of busywork that no editor should be doing. These are cosmetic edits and a huge waste of time, especially now that a huge number of references are automatically generated. If you're looking for something to do, go vote on AfDs or fix dead links or something. (I say all this as someone who's had similar disagreements with Hey man im josh as mentioned at the top of this discussion.) Toadspike [Talk] 06:44, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    It's hard to see how "...except for all-caps" doesn't undermine the rationale here—the arguments given for "source style" seem to be, mainly, (a) "it's consistent, even if the basis for that consistency is not immediately apparent to the reader"; (b) "it helps identify sources" or "logically/aesthetically, the source titles ought to match exactly between original & Wiki"; and (c) "it's too much trouble to make sources conform to a style".
    Of course, (c) is sort of a non-starter anyway—it is more work to ensure that the formatting matches source formatting; automated tools do and/or can easily be made to render results in title case; and the question at hand isn't about requiring anything but rather about which standard ought be "reversion-proof".
    But even aside from that, the "all-caps exception" renders the two proposals essentially equivalent, seems t'me: now the (a) argument doesn't obtain ("source style" is, with the exception, less consistent than a universal "title case" style), and neither does (b) (why would any benefit from "matching" cease to apply in the case of caps? "it's just too ugly" is fair—but that's exactly the same reasoning behind the alternative!).
    ...not that it's very important, heh. Really, either side is decently justifiable. (My ever-growing obsessive-compulsive side just prefers the "No" vote, mainly on aesthetic grounds...)
    Himaldrmann (talk) 16:36, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    (Re: the "busywork/effort" argument, just saw that @Nikkimaria said it better than I did, above! IMO, worth a look; I think the comment makes a point which many—myself included—miss or lose sight of: "let's not care about capitalization at all" isn't, strictly, on the table here; either a "Yes" or a "No" will "create" an equal amount of work.
    (Or, well, I'd argue the former actually ends up as more work, overall... but whether either creates it seems less certain, to me—esp. since lots of editors will go around copy-editing by preference regardless. I.e., the effort's not necessarily fungible.)
    Himaldrmann (talk) 16:59, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes It's what I usually do and seems common practice. And our customary practice is what determines policy per WP:NOTLAW. But what does this mean for this page? It doesn't seem to get into this fine detail. Andrew🐉(talk) 07:54, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No - WhatAmIDoing is on it. Much contemporary journalism is based on "sentence case." Wikipedia has always been more or less built around Title Case. Flipping current fashion to our traditional style for consistency is highly desirable. Carrite (talk) 16:58, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Isn't it the opposite? Article titles and section headers on Wikipedia are usually written in sentence case. And both are already considered established styles for citations if used consistently, this isn't what the discussion is about. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 20:21, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    This is correct. Wikipedia style generally favors sentence case and avoiding caps, per MOS:CAPS. "Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization." Popcornfud (talk) 12:48, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Not really. When we refer to the title of a published work, Wikipedia prefers title case! MOS:TITLECAPS and Help:CS1 prefer title case. MOS:TITLECAPS says "In titles (including subtitles, if any) of English-language works (books, poems, songs, etc.), every word is capitalized except ... Wikipedia normally follows these conventions when referring to such works, whether in the name of an article or within the text." And in Help:CS1, "Use title case unless ..." —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 16:40, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes. The references are not part of the article prose; it's not our job to decide how titles of articles should have been written, and prettify them (except for allcaps, which is often an artefact of web formatting; note that copy-pasting allcaps titles of recently published articles usually gets you a title with only initial letters capitalised). Also, accuracy helps in retrieving articles that have been moved to a new URL. (Also, languages other than English have different capitalisation rules, so foreign-language sources should always muss up the uniformity.) Yngvadottir (talk) 22:57, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, if an article used the capitalization used by sources, I would consider that be a consistent citation-titling format with regard to the sources themselves, as long as the citations are using the exact capitalization of the source titles. However, formatting them consistently in sentence case, or title case, is also consistent with respect to what the readers see. I don't think either of these is unprofessional or inconsistent. – Epicgenius (talk) 23:49, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes. I wrote a longer !vote with more swears in it but it boils down to: per PMC. -- asilvering (talk) 01:59, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes and what is this completely unimportant issue even doing at CENT? Shouldn't that be reserved for discussions with actual importance? Fram (talk) 10:21, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm the one who added it to CENT @Fram, based on a suggestion by someone else. It felt relevant enough from my perspective and I believe the ramifications of this RfC, which I expect would result in mass changes to citations, was important enough of an issue. Hey man im josh (talk) 11:18, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Irritating question-dodging response: Is it acceptable? Sure, in that having any reliable source, however formatted, is better than nothing. Is it the best way of formatting a citation? No, I don't think so. It makes sense to format citations in accordance to Wikipedia style for consistency, readability and sense, just as we do with all other content derived from external sources, such as names or quotes. (Arguments about whether this is the best use of editors' time are red herrings. This is all volunteer work, and editors are free to work on what they're interested in and what they think they're good at. Are we going to tell editors not to work on articles about obscure jazz records when there are articles about important global conflicts that need improving?) Popcornfud (talk) 12:57, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    It's hardly a red herring, it will be just another avenue for AWB warriors next to capitalization sprees, hyphenation sprees, busybodywork with talk page templates, ... which adds no value but lights up watchlists, pollutes edit histories, and causes friction when things go wrong or aren't as clear as the AWB warrior would like. Codifying into policy or even simply the MOS that this or that is the way things must be done, for as little (dubious) benefit as claimed here, is in the long run causing much more issues than it solves. Fram (talk) 13:24, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • A rule is not needed here, and what the project doesn't need is more excuses to make mass edits which make little or no contribution to the quality of pages or the ability of citations to eb used, while breaking things and annoying editors.Nigel Ish (talk) 15:07, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I feel like the breaking things issue can be dealt separately, without forbidding small edits. Wikignoming can be an essential part of the encyclopedia, and restricting cleanup on the basis that it makes "little contribution" isn't especially productive. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 16:23, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    @Nigel Ish: For what it's worth, I would have previously agreed, and I believe our existing WP:CITEVAR actually covers this, but others have interpreted it differently. There's disputes regarding this subject and it affects content promotion, particularly at WP:FAC and WP:FLC, which have requirements for consistent capitalization styles. Hey man im josh (talk) 19:12, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No per WhatamIdoing. The purpose of WP:CITESTYLE is that we should aspire to display references in a professional manner (though we don't care which professional manner). No serious publication styles its references willy nilly based on each referred work's house style. Ajpolino (talk) 22:56, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No. While I understand and empathize with the position of many of the yes !voters — citation formatting can be pretty boring work — I believe it's effort that's worth putting in. Beyond the point that consistency looks nice (and I don't think the aesthetic consideration should be dismissed out of hand), consistency also helps readers parse information better. Even seemingly small inconsistencies with capitalization add distractions to articles, and the more of those we can eliminate, the more that readers can focus on the content that matters. (please Reply to icon mention me on reply) —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 22:10, 11 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    @TechnoSquirrel69 I would argue that using a different title format than the source is itself an inconsistency that bothers readers. If I click on a link to a source, I expect to see the same title as I saw in the citation. Toadspike [Talk] 14:50, 13 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't know what to say to that except to disagree. I've never had that thought myself nor heard of anyone else finding that to be an issue, including in this discussion, as far as I can see. —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 17:31, 13 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    @TechnoSquirrel69: I respect your right to disagree, and I will not try to convince you otherwise, but this is actually my stance as well. I strongly prefer and believe that references should reflect the title used at the source, instead of being modified based on what the person adding the reference likes b est. Hey man im josh (talk) 19:13, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes. Preservation of the original formatting (where possible) prevents further disputes over what is ultimately an extremely minor issue, like many of the busywork-creating proposals that have been brought as of late. SounderBruce 00:07, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Seems to me that either choice prevents further disputes, just as well as t'other.
    Himaldrmann (talk) 17:18, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • yes PER sounderBruce, tHis Is A very Stupid THING to cAre About. charlotte 👸♥ 01:53, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Nuh-uh. & In fact: i move that anyone who is—apparently—unable to Capitalize correctly be barred from voting.
    Himaldrmann (talk) 15:22, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, it is one perfectly reasonable way in which an editor might choose to format citations. Like any other intelligible choice, it is capable of steady, regular, continued implementation once established as the pattern in an article. Adumbrativus (talk) 04:42, 14 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No we write articles using multiple sources, they may each have their own style, but that cannot dictate our style. The proposed rule is also internally inconsistent, with its carve-out for rejecting 'all cap style'. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:42, 14 April 2025 (UTC) Perhaps this goes without saying, but I completely reject the notion that our consistent style choice for article titles in cites has anything to do with text-cite integrity, nor with substantively following sources -- as noted, the proposal is not even based on that unrecognizable notion of text-cite integrity, otherwise it could not exclude all-caps. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:19, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    @Alanscottwalker: I completely reject the notion that our consistent style choice for article titles in cites has anything to do with text-cite integrity.. – That's literally the entire premise of how many of us do our citations. How can you reject that as a notion...? It's fine to disagree with it, but I find the idea of "rejecting the notion" to be confusing, and to be implying that some of us are not being forthcoming with why we do things. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:53, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    What? I reject the notion because it makes almost no sense, as I said. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:22, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I question how preserving the capitalization used by the source makes no sense, but everyone is entitled to their opinion. Hey man im josh (talk) 15:30, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    What makes no sense is imagining that has anything to do with substantive text-source integrity. Text is what is written in the Wikipedia article, source is what's used to support it -- it strains credulity that anyone won't know what the source is because of a title style, and title style certainly does not change, or alter, what the text or the source says. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 23:36, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    This makes sense, and as far as I can tell, is accurate. Is there any evidence available to the contrary? It is supported by the long term existence of house styles in the publishing industry. If there were problems, it would likely have been recognised before this, and mentioned in the authoritative literature. The argument that the proposed "style" is consistent is orthogonal to the functionality of the citations. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 03:48, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree that the claim of text-source integrity here is on its face absurd. If the style of capitalization on the cover page of a book or journal article was somehow relevant to the claims in its content, then this issue would have come up before in the past thousand years of writers citing each other. Instead, we've done the opposite and developed style guides that maintain consistency within a work. Citations are to help direct a reader to the source, and the style of capitalization in the citation is vital information that tells them what type of reference it is (in most guides that's sentence case for a chapter or article, title case for a book, etc.). Copied-and-pasted styles tell us nothing. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 15:30, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, it's fine. I don't think the question necessarily has a clear answer, probably lots of considerations, but if the question is being reduced to a binary then the answer should be that it's fine. CMD (talk) 01:14, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes If this is not allowed, then there should be tools available by default in both source and visual editors to convert the case appropriately. Also, it is common for a document or section to use title case but keep specific words in lower case; the MOS should address this. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 12:37, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    There is. It is called a keyboard. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 14:33, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    There's apparently a script that auto-converts to Title Case on demand.
    However, @Chatul, I think the question here is "If someone converts the case appropriately (e.g., to match APA style), should you be allowed to revert them on the grounds that you really intended to use the original capitalization of each source?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:58, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Despite your assertions, the definition of "appropriately" is what the discussion is about. Just mentioning it because, as this discussion has signaled, many belief retaining the capitalization of the source to be appropriate, making changes inappropriate to some. Hey man im josh (talk) 16:07, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Would you claim that changing the capitalisation of a new citation to an already established consistent style for an article is inappropriate? · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 03:57, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    There are plenty of citation styles that I don't like that I recognize as acceptable. Hey man im josh (talk) 19:34, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    That does not answer the question. Is it not sufficiently clear? · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 08:08, 25 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes I have always made it a practice to copy exactly what the source does, and would strongly grumble if forced to do otherwise. I understand that standard capitalization is important in many fields of formal writing. But in this field, the sources are what underpin everything. Preserving the sources exactly is part of our legitimacy. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 17:38, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Note that nobody will force you do to otherwise, unless you want to bring an article to featured status. At which point a little time spent to polish it is probably not too much to ask for. Gawaon (talk) 06:38, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    @Gawaon but I do like taking articles to FA. My concern wasn't being forced to do something. It was that matching the sources exactly is better for our legitimacy. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 03:33, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Wouldn't legitimacy be better served by designing our articles to look and feel like professionally-typeset journal articles or book sections? If so, we should use citations stylized like those publishers use. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 05:56, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Can you show any evidence supporting this claim that the practice supports our legitimacy? Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 06:28, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Can you show me evidence that it hurts our legitimacy? Hey man im josh (talk) 16:21, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Since I made no such claim, I am under no moral obligation to do so. I expect the person making a claim to provide the evidence that the claim they make has some basis in reality beyond a personal opinion. Deflection is not a valid argument. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 16:39, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes per WP:CREEP. No need to add more standards for such minor cosmetic aspects. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 19:39, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
        I see several people citing this guideline, but I'm not sure 100% WP:CREEP applies, very much:¹ the RfC seems to be about what principle to use for cases of conflict resolution, rather than about adding a new rule per se.
        A clarification, not an addition: i.e., "what counts as consistent? must the reader be able to tell it is consistent... or can an editor choose to adopt a style with some—perhaps, prima facie, opaque—internal logic, from which (once established & upon explanation) others ought not stray?"
        Possibly relevant: it seems we've already got some (de facto, at least, but I think maybe de jure also? see: some of SMcCandlish's & StarryGrandma's replies here) standards for the matter—"you ought not use ALL CAPS for source titles", say, or the universally beloved "be consistent"—and so this is really just a question of who gets to revert whose changes (see: original dispute).
    _____________
            ¹ Bit uncertain of my interpretation, admittedly: perhaps the point of WP:CREEP is also—or entirely—to avoid multiplying regulatory content regardless, new rules & clarifications of old ones alike—a "keep 'em lean or people will ignore 'em", sort of thing...?
            ...Hold, though—what's wrong with me? wait. why am I putting so much time into this? no, something... something's not ri
    Himaldrmann (talk) 16:22, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: I’m seeing a bit of confusion on what this discussion means, and how it will affect the average editor’s ability to edit. I see this especially by some of the recent “yes” votes, but I’ve also seen “no”s who seem to misunderstand. The short story is: This discussion will not affect whether editors are allowed to be careless when they put in references.
    Editors are currently, and will continue to be, careless with citations, capitalisation and typographic details. But so long as they are inputting citations in good faith, and in a way that is not disruptive, they will not be punished or sanctioned just for not bothering to match house style precisely. If your opinion is “this question doesn’t matter much”, you’re right, and that’s fine… and because you don’t care, it will not affect you. You will be free to copy and paste references as you currently do, no matter what outcome we arrive at here.
    This discussion is for the gnomes; it is for people who care how the encyclopedia is supposed to look when it’s finished (as in “fit and finish” or as in “done and completed”); and it is for those who are worried how a given style will affect usability for readers and editors. If you do not care about such things, the outcome of this discussion should not concern you. This discussion is—among other goals—to prevent disagreement and warring and time-wasting between those editors who do care. — HTGS (talk) 20:54, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think it's not just a matter of how we prefer articles to look. Maybe this falls under what you refer to as "usability", but preserving the information provided by the sources can be a factor. If we edit the titles of the cited sources to conform to our own capitalization preferences, we are losing some of the information about what was in the sources. Per Wikipedia guidelines, we often look to the sources to find out whether a particular styling is being consistently used in sources or not. If we have edited the titles, that information has been lost and we may be giving readers and ourselves an incorrect impression about what the sources contain. Editing the capitalization of minor words in a cited title is not so much of a problem, but when we start editing brand names, organization names, the names of people, the names of films, etc., that seems like a more touchy subject. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 19:21, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think yours is a valid and rational reason to !vote “Yes” (even if I ultimately disagree). My comment just above is really only directed to those who think a “No” outcome would mean that they would be in some way liable for copy-pasting rough citations. And fwiw, yes, “usability” is for you. — HTGS (talk) 02:22, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strongest possible oppose to the endless discussions about capitalisation that do nothing to advance this project. Seriously. FOARP (talk) 07:47, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Thank you so much for coming to a discussion that you care nothing about to let us know that you don't care! Dicklyon (talk) 03:56, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No, largely per WAID. Articles are (marginally) stronger with consistent capitalization style. The (likely quite few) readers who notice capitalization style would not perceive "use whatever the source uses" as consistent. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 16:54, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I want to support and highlight one of Peter Southwood's points. Many of the "Yes" comments are based on some variety of the text-source integrity argument ("preserving" the style, "accurately" copying the source, "quoting" the source title, etc.). As PS indicates, the weakness of those arguments is "supported by the long term existence of house styles in the publishing industry. If there were problems, it would likely have been recognised before this, and mentioned in the authoritative literature". Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 12:43, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree, such arguments seem to be objectively without merit. Just as well one could postulate that the original font style (serif vs. sans serif) or font size should be preserved. Gawaon (talk) 17:49, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    So because it's a style that some have not chosen to adopt, it's unacceptable? Hey man im josh (talk) 19:35, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    In the long history of the written word, publishers have universally chosen not to adopt this "style" because it has fundamental issues. Standardizing the style of citations within a reference section benefits the reader by providing important context about the nature of the sources and presents a uniform look and feel to the document. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 19:52, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Every single style has fundamental issues, that's why there's not a universal one. It's not clear to me why we retain the capitalization of books vs change titles of other works as we see fit. Hey man im josh (talk) 20:06, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I disagree with the assertion that "Every single style has fundamental issues". There may be advantages or disadvantages (e.g., amount of physical space taken up), but that doesn't mean "fundamental issues".
    And Dan's correct, AFAICT: despite the existence of dozens of modern style guides, there isn't a single one (except what you call your "personal house style") that requires, or even permits, retaining the capitalization from disparate sources. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:42, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    That's fine for you to disagree. I'll stick with my personal house style when I'm writing and improving content if people stop having needless arguments that make life harder for those who write and improve content, and I'll let you not like it while I dislike your style and say nothing to stop you from using it. Hey man im josh (talk) 23:30, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    @Hey man im josh: Is it your intention that every article should use titles unchanged from their publication, or would you treat this as one style among many that editors might choose to apply to an article? — HTGS (talk) 21:04, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Obviously it's not my intention to state one style is the correct style, I've been pretty clear on that. I have my perspective for why I think this is a good approach, and I respect that others prefer different styles. I just don't believe that if I apply a citation style consistently, and with a reasonable explanation for what I do, that others should come along and change to their preferred style for no other reason than they like it. Hey man im josh (talk) 23:28, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No, per WhatamIdoing, Dicklyon, SMcCandlish, Nikkimaria, and others, including my own comments in various subthreads. We should avoid "styles" which are not visually recognisable as styles.· · · Peter Southwood (talk): 14:47, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No I am surprised at Toadspike and Hey man im josh expecting source links to have the same capitalization as their target because any differences convey no information on whether the original editor accurately interpreted the source. Using convertcase.net to quickly convert source titles to a consistent title case does not seem overly burdensome. As Peter Southwood puts it, while the original article writer might be annoyed by a gnome imposing uniform title case, it does not make sense to recognize the sources' varied capitalization as a style unto itself. Editors who find articles on the cusp of uniform title capitalization should not have to search through the original sources' titles, which may span web and physical content, in fear of breaking WP:CITEVAR. As alluded to by Rjjiii, Google Books often logs titles with capitalization differing from the original cover, spawning unnecessary dispute over the "original" capitalization. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 22:15, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The main window at Convertcase.net doesn't work at all for me (maybe it's my browser security settings). Its page for title case doesn't seem to follow MOS:5, and its sentence case uses lowercase for "boston", "johnson" and "fred". That doesn't seem very helpful. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 22:37, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The site is currently working for me on Firefox with uBlock Origin enabled. While the five-letter rule of MOS:5 seems to be followed, I assume you are noting that Convert Case leaves some short verbs like "is" in lowercase. On that point, the line above MOS:5 linking to WP:Citing sources notes that source titles in citations can differ from MOS:CAPTITLE as long as they are consistent. The site is not useful for setting to sentence case, hence why I only suggested using it for title case, but Microsoft Word's sentence case feature does retain capitalization for the proper nouns you listed. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 01:17, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The title case converter capitalizes "into" and "upon", which MOS:5 says to put in lowercase. It lowercases "is", which MOS:CT says to capitalize. It also gives a different result for "Puttin' On the Ritz" than what MOS:5 recommends. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 04:50, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The above mess just shows how much of a fiddly waste of time it is to try achieving uniform capitalization on articles. any differences convey no information on whether the original editor accurately interpreted the source – No, and nobody said it would. What it might convey is whether the source I'm looking at is the same one the original editor used, or if I've got the wrong one, which is in fact very important. Toadspike [Talk] 06:27, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The information in a citation should be sufficient to identify the source without relying on typography, which may or may not have been changed by the citing editor or someone else, without notice. There has never been a requirement to rely on typography to identify the source on Wikipedia, and probably not anywhere else either. Considering the considerable extra effort it would require from reviewers to check, and the insignificant utility of a typographical check, and that hardly anyone would either expect it to be useful, or wish to use it, I think that those claiming it is useful should come up with some evidence supporting the claim. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 09:48, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The purpose of a citation is not merely to identify the source. If it was, then something like a DOI or an ISBN or a (permanent) URL alone would suffice. Citations also provide more information about a source than its identification, and should. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 16:15, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I think @PeterSouthwood was just responding directly to the above user's argument about a purported benefit of "source style", rather than claiming citations have only the sole purpose (...although I'll admit, I can't really think of any information they ought convey besides, maybe, "identify source & where exactly within source"). Himaldrmann (talk) 16:42, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Correct. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 08:42, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    While citations have secondary functions, such as an old publishing date raising doubts on the source's continued accuracy, I struggle to imagine readers unsure in source identification over varied capitalization. It beggars belief that one would rely on title capitalization to distinguish two works of the same name over the array of other atributes in the citation. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 17:38, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, I would be interested to see a case where this actually occurred in real life. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 08:45, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    It is strange that this comment from ViridianPenguin is a reply to a comment saying that citations are not just for source identification. There is no need to try to imagine readers having difficulty in source identification if it is clear that citations are not just for source identification. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 15:02, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
        Well, since "helps source ID" is an argument several commenters here have adduced in favor of "retain source formatting" (incl. immediately above in this sub-thread), I imagine that's why @ViridianPenguin is trying to imagine it! (But I myself have a "diseased imagination", it has been said–)
        Is there another citation-function that is assisted by retaining source capitalization?
        I see your argument, above, about editors "look[ing] to the sources to find out whether a particular styling is being consistently used in sources or not"—meaning, as in:  "Wiki editors do this when there is some question about the styling of a brand name or so forth"?
      If I understood correctly, then... well, fair point, I suppose!—but:  two questions:
      • 1.) Wouldn't the editors in such a case be better served by checking the originals regardless?  I.e., no matter which decision is made re this RfC, one cannot assume  (a) that the styling used in the title of the ref will be that used in the main text;  nor (b) that the editor who created the citation did so correctly (esp. if the case is contentious/puzzling enough to require combing through sources in the first place).
      • 2.) Does either "title case" or "sentence case", as used in professional publications, require turning—I dunno—"Cool eSports™" (a hypothetical company) to "Cool Esports™", or "FBI Agent Boogaloo" (a hypothetical movie) to "Fbi Agent Boogaloo", or... &c.?‍¹ If not, then in what instances does the standard cause issues, for this purpose?
        ¹: (I'm honestly not sure—I had imagined that the original formatting would be preserved, in a sort of recognized exception; like, were I citing a book entitled The Semiotics of Cool eSports™ Events or whatever, I'd probably capitalize it just like that. Perhaps it is not always so clear-cut as I had assumed!)
        The only other possibility (that I can think of) for "information in citations that ought be preserved" (& which is affected by capitalization) is:  whether the thing is a book, a paper, a chapter in a book, &c.
      For this particular purpose, then, it seems as if both:  (I.) "Title Case for the former, Sentence case for the latter two";  & (II.) "use source styling regardless"—...might have much the same final effect.
      I suppose this could be a decent rationale for the "keep source formatting" position... although—I think that, even here, (I.) would both be easier to apply (esp. for "Wiki-gnomes"), and render the desired result more consistently.
    Himaldrmann (talk) 19:24, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Wait... now I'm not actually sure a standard like (I) is much easier for "Wiki-gnomes" (you've got to check the source anyway, in that case, to see what kind of publication it was?).
    Well, might look nicer still, anyway...
    Himaldrmann (talk) 19:56, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    @Himaldrmann, I don't think that retaining the source's capitalization can help. Here's an illustration of why:
    Today's Amazon #1 bestseller is The Let Them Theory. Here are the "retained" capitalizations:
    • The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can't Stop Talking About – Amazon's page title
    • A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can't Stop Talking About The Let Them Theory – front cover
    • The Let Them Theory – spine
    • The Let Them Theory – back cover
    • The Let Them Theory – title page
    • The Let Them Theory A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can't Stop Talking About – second title page
    • The Let Them Theory – front book cover flap
    • The Let Them Theory – also front book cover flap
    Which is "the" source's capitalization? WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:55, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    If you asked the publisher they would probably look at you nervously and quietly back away;-) · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 12:33, 27 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Another fair point! I just found a monograph which had "a" (the word, & after a colon) & "oromo", uncapitalized, on SemanticScholar & the university archive ("UiT Munin"); "A" & "Oromo", capitalized, on Wiley & Google Scholar; and—in the published version in Studia Linguistica—the entire title was ALL-CAPS'd!
    Admittedly, it seems clear that "oromo" was an error, and all sides reject all-caps'd (all-capped?–) titles outright anyway... but still: what about the "a", eh?!
    (...But, on the other hand, I'm not so sure about my point 1.), above, any more: true, such an editor would be better-served by checking the originals... but this might not be much of a strike against the given rationale for "source formatting"—the "well it could be wrong" objection I gave there is maybe too general an argument: it applies to other things that are still worth doing/helpful, too.
    (That said, I think I still prefer a visually-consistent style, overall... y'all just need to calm me down when I start getting militant, alright; I obtain strong opinions from the æther & militate against the vile opposition at the drop of a hat, sometimes— [cough])
    Himaldrmann (talk) 01:25, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I guess that's where we disagree @ViridianPenguin, and I respect your right to do so. From my perspective, I strongly prefer source to title integrity when citing something, and view it as entirely relevant. I respect if someone is working on something and changes that, but it's a consistent style, and that's the point being discussed at the moment. I also think it's a bit silly to call this absurd, but to each their own. Hey man im josh (talk) 16:12, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    No offense intended, and I have replaced "is absurd" with "does not make sense" to avoid any offense caused. My point remains that it is impractical to prioritize "source integrity" when the "original" capitalization may be difficult to pin down. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 17:38, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    While I respectfully believe we should respect the capitalization of the source being cited, and to edit it to conform to our personal house style feels flat out wrong to me. But to each their own. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:50, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    A "house style" is quite opposite to "to each their own". There's no such thing as a "personal house style" in play here. Dicklyon (talk) 03:44, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm sorry you feel that the personal house style I use is not a personal house style, but I respect your right to feel that way. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:54, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The point here is that 'house style' and 'personal style' are mutually exclusive. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 02:19, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Except for the fact there are a number of acceptable house styles on Wiki, one of which is my personal choice, as in my personal house style :) Hey man im josh (talk) 15:32, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Is it really an acceptable Wikipedia house style? I thought that is what we are currently trying to establish. One of the usual (and useful) characteristics of a house style is that it is visibly consistent at the point of publishing. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 04:11, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think, in the context of any article with less than stellar assessed quality, that I care more about having citations than I do about whether the titles are capitalized "correctly". But in the context of A/GA/featured content, my answer to this question is no. Fundamentally, style as such should be recognizable for the purpose of maintenance. A tag to that account and then following arbitrary many other company's style books for titles is not sufficient to be maintainable, as then we would have to deeply trust that whoever last laid eyes on a book will find that capitalization sufficient, rather than being able to make the assessment ourselves. And suffice it to say, I'll expect images of the lettering on the side of dead paper sources to prove following of this imagined style. (This is all ignoring the question's "all-caps titles" as being inconsistent with this probable guideline.) I suspect were we to survey actual other citation styles rather than coming up with the answer on our own, that those styles would have opinions about this question, and would not settle on "however the 'source' styles it!". So no, the use of "source's style" is not a style point to be protected by CITEVAR (or, in fact, more broadly per e.g. previous consensus at WP:BIRDCON as a particularly large consensus on the point of capitalization and "source's style"). (Speaking of which, I assume the context of this question is when we are not using another outside established style, such as Vancouver, MLA, or APA. Answers in the context of an external style guide may differ, but I also know outside styles to be rare, at best.) Izno (talk) 15:10, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes - I do consider that consistently using the capitalization used by sources (except for all-caps titles) is acceptable. I certainly wouldn't choose to amend capitalisation myself (apart from all-caps), but neither would I revert edits that did so - in both of those cases I think that there are other uses of that editing time that would improve the encyclopedia more. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 10:01, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Can you clarify what you mean when you say you wouldn’t revert capitalisation changes? Do you believe that changes in one direction or another should be favoured? — HTGS (talk) 20:56, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Sure. I generally use an automatic citation generation tool, the one that comes with the most recent wikisource editor. Most of the time that grabs the title from the source, and I use the grabbed title as is, though I remove extraneous bits if they should go elsewhere. For example, if the title came up as "The Cat Sat On The Mat - LMN News", I'd remove the dash and LMN News, and put LMN News in another field, like the website or work or publisher or something, leaving "The Cat Sat On The Mat" as the title. I wouldn't change the capitalisation. If another editor subsequently changed the capitalisation of the title to, for example, "The cat sat on the mat", I wouldn't revert that edit. I wouldn't really care how the capitalisation was altered. My position is probably influenced by my spending most of my editing time on poorly referenced articles, where the addition of decent sources is the vital thing, not whether I should write "On" or "on". Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 22:54, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks SunloungerFrog, I edit citations in much the same way as you, but I still believe that having a consistent citation style is a position that Wikipedia should take, even if I’m not the one enforcing it. — HTGS (talk) 02:53, 27 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Bad RFC: SMcCandlish, et al. are correct that the capitalization style in a reference should follow a consistent style and copying-and-pasting from the source doesn't make sense as it'd be a mix of inconsistent style guides. However, the RFC being framed as acceptable is silly as Wikipedia does not have a single house style for citations. Of course it'd be acceptable to have a miscapitalized reference just as it's acceptable to have an all-caps or otherwise malformed reference. The question should be Should editors be allowed to standardize the capitalization of references in an article to be consistent with one capitalization style? to which the answer should certainly be yes. It's still acceptable to have poorly-formed references in an article below FA. Striking my complaint after seeing how many revisions this RFC prompt went through and simplifying to No per SMcCandlish, et al.: copying and pasting a citation from a Chicago-styled reference and including it next to one copied-and-pasted from an APA one is obviously inconsistent and outside the bounds of WP:CITEVAR. A featured article should look like a formally published work (or at the very least a graduate student's paper), where an editor has taken care to harmonize the references to one citation style. And on that phrase, I strongly disagree with the comment far above that "CITEVAR is not restricted to 'published styles'". If where the MOS mentions citation style we must accept some editor's idiosyncratic mix of incompatible styles, then the term is meaningless. That's not a style. Per Jc3s5h above, 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. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 17:58, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'd like to challenge "yes" voters to explain how a copy-and-paste style can be consistent in situations where there isn't a consistent original source:
ISBN 978-1-003-09408-1
On the cover WIKIPEDIA AND THE REPRESENTATION OF REALITY
Library of Congress data
(inside cover page)		 Wikipedia and the representation of reality
Google Books Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality
WorldCat Wikipedia and the representation of reality
Publisher's website Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality
How would one use this reference in an article? One could copy and paste from any of these five places and claim it's the authoritative "original" title. However, there's a consistent, logical solution here: apply a style guide and format the citation to fit the article. This doesn't stop readers from finding the original, and a reader who encounters a title-case reference and goes to find the book won't be somehow surprised at the alleged lack of text-source integrity if they use WorldCat (which displays sentence case) to go find the book in person on a shelf (where it's all-caps). Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 20:43, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I would use the style of the source that I read, that would be the 'original title' that would be copied from. As the purpose of reference to show where you got the information. How it was listed at Google books or Worldcat would be irrelevant. That all-caps isn't acceptable is part of the original question, so any 'yes' vote is already against that. If the original title was all-caps on the covers I would look at the title page. In the odd situation where that was also in all-caps I would use what I felt was appropriate. However I feel this misses the point, the question isn't about how a particular source is styled but whether a mixed style is something that must be changed. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 23:18, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not so sure how it's listed on GB or WC is irrelevant—those places could very well be where an editor encounters a title, or whereto the reference actually links.
Hence, I think friend WhatamIdoing's point is that: as the question is about what can (rather than "must", I mean) be changed without being challenged & reverted—i.e., whether a "keep source formatting" policy "counts" as a "consistent" style (whew, lotta quotation marks–)–these examples proffer some possible complications for such a policy.
E.g., does an edit to match a linked Google Books ref to "publisher's page title" get reverted under a policy of "keep source formatting", or not? Or: does an article with one ref cited from a LoC/inside-page title, and another based upon actual front-cover title, count as "consistent"—or no? In a dispute like the inciting incident for this RfC, what determines which edit stands in such a case?
In most instances, I expect, these "title versions" won't diverge much (excepting LoC/inside-page vs. publisher/GB/WC, the latter of which will nearly always be the same as each other & different from the former—I think?); but it would be ideal to have a clear standard for the edge cases.
Himaldrmann (talk) 12:16, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Where they encountered the title isn't the question, only the details of the sources they read to verify the content. You can't read sources on Worldcat, so how it handles the titles capitalisation is irrelevant. You cite what you see, not what a catalogue tells you about the source you should already be looking at. Nothing is cited from Worldcat or LoC they are cited from the work. Any link to Worldcat, LoC ot Google books are just links of convenience for anyone wanting to verify the content. The question is whether an editor can chose to use the style present in the sources they see, or whether they must follow some external style guide. Editor regularly already do the former. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 13:28, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
"Where they encountered the title" might be multiple places: when I cite a dead tree from my bookcase, I try to find an online copy, or, failing that, a catalog entry. The capitlization isn;t always consistent. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 14:19, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If you citing a dead tree cite the dead tree, you didn't read the content from the catalogue entry. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 15:29, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with ActivelyDisinterested, I will use any citation details from the paper copy, not an online catalog. (Although I will base capitalization of the title on the style I discern in the Wikipedia article without regard to the capitalization style of the source). Further, if I cite an online copy, I will obtain citation details from the online image of the copyright page, not any description that may appear elsewhere in the website. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:36, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Catalogues matter, because the principal advocate for the pro-match-the-original's actual goal (as stated above) is to accept whatever the automated ref filling tools supply, without having to waste time on correcting it, even to achieve Featured List status. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:25, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think you've really hit it on the head with accept whatever the automated ref filling tools supply, without having to waste time on correcting it. It's fine if editors want to be quick with adding to articles and use automated tools, that's perfectly fine. But to bring content to featured status (which any MOS rule is really about) we need the human touch to ensure our articles are actually high quality for our readers. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 18:21, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Dan Leonard: Just noting that the featured list venue does have a requirement of consistent formatting in references, and we've long treated this reference style as appropriate. You'll note that both PresN and myself are delegates at WP:FLC and have weighed in on the matter, and I'm also a frequent source reviewer there. Hey man im josh (talk) 18:38, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, but this is an RFC on clarifying the MOS's definition of "consistent", which will obviously affect featured article criterion 2c, regardless of previous discussions on the matter. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 18:46, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
(Apologies to @Dan Leonard, whom I somehow got mixed up with @WhatamIdoing—I think because the latter also used the example of various title formats in a response to me, further up. Oops!–)
Where they encountered the title isn't the question, only the details of the sources they read to verify the content.
Okay, suppose an editor is using Google Books and, upon noting a particularly informative passage, cites the work in some article; another editor cites the same (or a different—I think the question remains either way?) work from their physical copy—but either the title is ALL-CAPS or else they have lost their copy's dust-jacket, and so they choose the LoC format on the inside page as "source format"; a third editor also has a physical copy, but looks it up on a catalogue to be sure they've got it right (to steal @Chatul's example).
Suppose further that we thus end up with two or three different capitalizations, in the same article.
Is this consistent? Can one of the editors change the citations of the other two to match his or her own—and if so, which editor; which version counts as authoritative? In the ALL-CAPS case, is the LoC/first-page format then to be taken as authoritative (since it exists within the book the editor is reading)—or else the title-cased Google Books version, since that's also in "the details of the source [the editor] read"?
You might say, I dunno, "the front cover version, & if that's ALL-CAPS then title-case it"; and sure, fair enough... but that still needed specifying, not being immediately obvious from a "keep source formatting" policy—which I think was @Dan Leonard's point (although I can't speak for Mr. Leonard, of course; just my interpretation!).
The question is whether an editor can chose to use the style present in the sources they see, or whether they must follow some external style guide. Editor regularly already do the former.
Indeed—although, since no one (AFAIK) is suggesting that something be forbidden, maybe the question is better-phrased as being about "what standard to use in deciding whose edit can be reverted" (cf. the original incident that spurred this RfC).
Himaldrmann (talk) 15:00, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If the article originally had a consistent style, title or sentence case alone. Then editors in good faith make edits inconsistent with that style, tidying those edits to match the article style is fine. If any editor, as many do by common practice, chose to use style consistent with the sources they used when originating the article, then why should anyone insist on changing that style. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 15:34, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The lead of "Citing sources" states "Each article should use one citation method or style throughout." Implicit in that statement is that a citation style should be one that is detectable, maintainable, and something that "writers of research papers" would recognize as a plausible style. Copying capitalization from the sources is none of those. (Second quote copied, with capitalization changes, from front cover, MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th ed.) Jc3s5h (talk) 15:44, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This. This is reasonably practicable. It allows corrections, expansions and improvements of citations without requiring editors to jump through hoops blindfolded, and one does not have to do all of them at once, just the ones that one can do at the time and are reasonably convenient, and the next editor can go on from there, also relatively easily. It encourages collaboration. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 16:03, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is getting very far away from Dan Leonard original question, which I've answered. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 16:23, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
AD, if the goal is for the capitalization in the Wikipedia article's ref to match whatever is used "Where they encountered the title", then how is a subsequent editor (e.g., one who is doing formatting work for FAC) supposed to know whether you encountered the title on the cover, on the copyright page, on the title page, in a running headers at the top of the cite page, etc.? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:23, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Is there any need for an editor to change the capitalisation, what practical effects does it have, and why shouldn't it be covered by the rules set out for all other tinkering with references. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 16:53, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Essentially, the reason is because they like it and prefer one way over another. That's the real reason for changing it. We match the capitalization of books, and some people will change references aside from those to sentence case, while leaving the book titles capitalized. That doesn't improve the article in any way, and it goes against the argument that it's more obvious at a glance that the references are consistent. Personally I still haven't heard a good reason not to match the capitalization the sources use, or why such a style would be considered inappropriate. Though, I do respect that others have a preference for a style that they may use. Hey man im josh (talk) 17:37, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Because there are two classes of subsequent editors: FAC reviewers, who must check for citations within any given article should follow a consistent style from WP:CITESTYLE, and who have no idea of the way a previous editor encountered the source and copied the style of the source that I read, that would be the 'original title' that would be copied from; and second, editors contributing new citations, who must follow WP:CITEVAR's defer to the style used by the first major contributor and for whom if the article you are editing is already using a particular citation style, you should follow it, but also have no idea of the intent of earlier contributors. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 18:28, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm a regular source reviewer at WP:FLC, as well as a delegate there (responsible for promoting from nomination to featured status), and this style does meet our requirement of consistent reference formatting for what it's worth. I mention that because we also require consistent reference formatting. Hey man im josh (talk) 18:39, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hey man im josh, as a source reviewer, how do you assess whether this style has been consistently used? Particularly for non-web sources? Nikkimaria (talk) 18:42, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Nikkimaria: I do my best, that's about all you can do. It becomes clear, rather fast, whether they're using title or sentence case when you look over a reference list. If they're not consistently using one, you check whether they're matching the titles of the sources. I'm opening up at least half the links in most cases, and all of them in a lot of cases. It's not that hard, for me at least, to find the titles of works when verifying these sorts of things. I think the difficulty of verifying/telling whether this style is being consistently applies is being vastly overstated. That aspect of it is very different than the rest of a source review, but it is one thing that I check when doing these reviews. Hey man im josh (talk) 18:51, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Certainly it's very clear if someone is using title or sentence case, but we're speaking about when they are not. How are you verifying consistency when no links are provided? Nikkimaria (talk) 18:57, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is an RFC redefining/clarifying "consistent" in the MOS and thus WP:FACR#2C and WP:FLCR#5 regardless of previous discussions. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 18:50, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes. In citations, titles of articles and book chapters are enclosed in quotation marks, and the principle of minimal change (WP:PMC) style guideline states that "the wording of the quoted text must be faithfully reproduced". — Newslinger talk 03:14, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    PMC goes on to say: “insignificant spelling and typographic errors should simply be silently corrected”. I would take minor capitalisation differences—such as we are talking about here—to be “insignificant” for the purposes of PMC. Ultimately though, I just don’t think PMC applies at all one way or another, as we are talking about the most minor of style changes, not faithfulness to quoted materials. — HTGS (talk) 03:39, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    It is not a "typographic error" for a source to use a different letter case than the one an editor prefers. Changing the capitalization of quoted text in this way in the article body, without the use of brackets, would be unacceptable. Moreover, doing this type of change hundreds or potentially thousands of times in an article with a large number of citations is not "insignificant". — Newslinger talk 07:27, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm not so sure about this:
    (a) The accepted standard for citations in e.g. academic papers or published works is—as far as I'm aware—to sentence-case or title-case the referenced work (depending on a few factors, such as what exactly one is citing); i.e., it is an unusual position, again just AFAIK, to hold that the titles of referenced works count as quotations that must have capitalization changes bracketed. (Also, are referenced works enclosed in quotation marks? E.g., in the case of a book title, they're just italicized, no?)
    (b) I think the term "insignificant" is being used there to refer to the magnitude of the change in the single case, and not the amount of work involved when extrapolated out across an entire article. I.e., changing "Of" to "of" is "insignificant" for the purposes of the rule, regardless how many times the work might be cited.
    I could be wrong about any of the three major claims above, but this is my thought off the top o' me head, anyway!
    (Also, see below, @Joe vom Titan's comment: maybe MOS:TITLECAPS covers this?)
    Himaldrmann (talk) 10:59, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    @Newslinger, please look at the list of faithfully reproduced titles above. Which one of those is "the" faithfully reproduced version? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:28, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No. MOS:TITLECAPS says that either titlecase or sentencecase should be used consistently in citations. A mix of styles looks unprofessional and distracts the reader. Therefore:
    • Editors should be encouraged to make citations consistent. (However, this is a lot of work, so it's okay if editors don't care and just copy the source. Others can fix it.)
    • As far as it's technically possible, our tools (e.g. citation templates) should help editors apply a consistent capitalization style.
    • The text of WP:CITE should refer to the established guideline at MOS:TITLECAPS.
    — Joe vom Titan (talk) 10:42, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes. Anyhing else leads to potential original reasearch and/or misrepresentation of the title. Wikipedia follows the sources unless there is a good reason not to, disliking the capitalisation used in the title is not a good reason. Thryduulf (talk) 21:49, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Conditional no. In the abstract, I believe that a consistent formatting style within a given article has a much more convincing value-added argument going in its favour, compared against the notion of variant cases, just for the sake of fidelity to the original sources. This is an encyclopedia, and some degree of standardization of format and style is to be expected. While a project wide effort to create one uniform standard would be a waste of community resources (if not a borderline infeasible task), we already have a (well-considered, in my view) rule for at least creating consistency within a given article.
    Now, all of that said, there are some major caveats here. While I endorse the notion of an internally consistent style, the principle should only guide in the case of content disputes. That is to say, if two editors are arguing between "be consistent" vs. "be faithful" approach on a given article, the former should prevail. However, what we absolutely do not need is having this principle abused for time-consuming behavioural disputes. No one should ever be brought to ANI with the rationale "This user refuses to follow WP:CITESTYLE, despite my pointing it out to them repeatedly. This disruptive behaviour needs to stop, and they should be blocked until they accept the standard." That level of investment in, conflict over, and community involvment regarding capitalization is completely out of proportion with the importance of such a style determination. If someone uses the "copy and paste" principle of source citation and the result is an inconsistent style in an article, anyone who wants a consistent style should have two choices available to them: change for consistency's sake themselves, or just live with varying style. No volunteer should be chastized or harassed for a failure to correct the case in a source, no matter how man times they are told about and fail to comply with CITESTYLE. It's just not worth turning up community heat or discouraging good faith editors over. Ever.
    I believe that it is concerns about such nitpickery and weaponization of style guidance which is driving a number of the references to WP:CREEP above, and the general resistance for further formalizing what is clearly an already implicit rule in the existing policy/style guidance. And those concerns are very reasonable. The mere existence of this discussion (and numerous others of a similar nature before it) shows just how misplaced and severe the emphasis that attaches to these types of issues can become, to the dettriment of much more important project priorities.
    So, yes, in principle, I think there is a very preferable approach here. And yet, any codification does carry with it a risk of giving rise to some of the most mind-numbingly pedantic and needlessly combative discussion of the sort that saps community energy, and which we already deal with too much of. In the final analysis, I don't think the recognition of the fact that some people will lose perspective and abuse the rule is reason enough not to have it. That's a slippery slope of its own sort. But we should be able to recognize as a community that certain style matters are so trivial that we should severely limit any implication of behavioural issues from failure to follow the standard approach, even if we maintain the rule as the one which previals when editors go head-to-head over the issue. SnowRise let's rap 23:01, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes. I'm amazed this is even a question, given that not using the actual source's capitalization is not using the actual source. It's frustrating enough that Wikipedians have chosen to mandate different capiltization styles from what's in official sources in many cases; actually mandating altering the titles of actual sources themselves is several bridges too far. - The Bushranger One ping only 00:25, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Did you ever read a style guide? Any style guide? They all mandate either sentence or title case and I imagine every author or editor who has followed a style guide would be most amazed to hear that this means they advice to "not use the actual source". If you were right, essentially every professionally printed book would commit this sin, since every serious publisher follows some style guide or other. Gawaon (talk) 06:49, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    While I think we could defintely do without those first two sonewhat provocative questions, I otherwise have to agree with this (reluctantly, as I have generally found myself in agreement with, and appreciative of, many of TB's perspectives in a number of community discussions). Our policies require us to show fidelity to sources for the purposes of WP:Verifying claims and establishing WP:WEIGHT to shape how we relate the facts of a given subject matter. I know of not even a single policy that requires us to adopt the style or formatting of a source in any respect. If there's even a single style page that does so, I'm not aware of it, and would guess that any such would be concerned with particularly niche and highly specific scenarios. Outside of instances where case may be necessary to properly identify an acronym or proper noun, I see no reason why we would consider ourselves bound by the house styles/stylesheets of our millions of disparate sources when it comes to something as superficial as capitalization--or formatting as a broad matter. That would seem to conflate two very different parallel editorial processes, one of which gives our editors substantial autonomy (style considerations) and another of which affords us very little at all (framing of substantive content), per longstanding community consensus on both. SnowRise let's rap 22:52, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    MOS:QUOTE does require a certain amount of retention of source formatting, and there have been claims that it applies here. (not in my opinion). Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 06:15, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    What do you mean by "certain amount"? That section seems to be a litany of ways in which quotations can be reformatted. -- Beland (talk) Beland (talk) 06:57, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    In direct quotations, retain dialectal and archaic spellings, including capitalization (but not archaic glyphs and ligatures, as detailed below in § Typographic conformity). (my emphasis) · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 16:52, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Hmm, I agree that probably in that case the spelling would be retained but not the capitalization, unless we treat that under the rules for non-English citations. -- Beland (talk) 22:10, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Not quite sure where you are going here, but to clarify my position, I do not consider citation of a publication's title to be bound by this rule, specifically because we are requested to prefer a consistent citation style, following the principles of published style guides which in most, possibly all, cases require the titles to follow a particular capitalisation format. I make no claims to be expert on style guides, and would be interested to see a counterexample from the real world of reputable paper publishing. · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 06:38, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Pah-per puhb-leesh-eeng? You speak the words of the Before Time, in the Long, Long Ago! Great sage, there are many things I would know: What is the significance of the lines of the land? By what magic did little scraps of paper and bits of metal compel strangers to do your bidding, and how is it that former was more valued than the latter? Who shot Jay Are and how many licks did it take to get to the uhtzi-rahl center of the uhtzi hop? SnowRise let's rap 17:11, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Gjillions of people still read content on paper, and Wikipedia takes steps so that it can be republished on paper as well. -- Beland (talk) 02:24, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Oh, no doubt. I'm still one of them to some extent. Indeed, I'd probbaly be even more wedded to traditional print, but for the fact that my ecological concerns/values put some pressure on me to keep up with the times. Although I do think it is worth occasionally stating the obvious point that Wikipedia derives many of its advantages as an encylopedia from its non-print nature and that best practices in Wikiepdia editing take this into account. SnowRise let's rap 22:17, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Do you have a point you are trying to make here? Could you try to make it in a comprehensible dialect? · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 05:34, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    No, I apologize: perhaps my reference points were a little more dated or obscure than I realized. Suffice it to say, I was not attempting to refute your point. It was merely an incidental attempt at levity over how much things have changed in the last couple of decades. The irony is that the heart of the joke was someone looking back at declining media, but now I'm the one who feels like a fossil... SnowRise let's rap 22:17, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No. Professional publications define how each type of work (book, chapter, web site, etc.) should be capitalized and apply that regardless of how the original work is capitalized (except in special cases [2]). This makes their footnotes look tidy instead of sloppy; readers are distracted less and tend to find the source more trustworthy. A good thing in a world where some people are trying to undermine sources of truth. I think we should be happy to accept non-compliant contributions and happy to let the wikignomes (who may be uninterested in working on other tasks) do compliance work. I agree with editors who have pointed out that determining the "correct" capitalization used by the original source is impossible for some works (like books), time-consuming to verify, and more likely to result in tedious discussions. We already have clearly defined rules and already apply those rules to fix all-caps titles. The fact that sloppy capitalization in citations is widespread does not seem like a good reason to leave it that way. If someone is worried about the number of person-hours we spend on this, then the best solution is to partly automate the process.
If this RFC is resolved in favor of "no", then we will affirm article-level consistency internal to footnotes. I think the next step would be to change the MOS to have Wikipedia's flavor of title case (defined at MOS:TITLECAPS) override the capitalization style of the citation style being followed, in the same way that we override curly quotes and other formatting elements. Right now, capitalization in the article body can be inconsistent with capitalization of the exact same work in a footnote, which looks like an error. Such a change would bring about full per-article consistency, but also increase site-wide consistency in a relatively gentle way (compared to say, requiring Citation Style 1 for all articles). -- Beland (talk) 07:52, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
FTR, we actually already have a semi-automated way to tidy up, mentioned in a previous section: User:ZKang123/TitleCaseConverter. -- Beland (talk) 08:31, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Which, as mentioned above, has flaws in what it chooses to downcase. Common nouns may be downcased when in actuality they're parts of proper names. Hey man im josh (talk) 13:32, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, that's why it's partly automated and not completely automated. Human review is still required on every edit, but humans are saved from having to do most of the mouse and keyboard work. -- Beland (talk) 19:40, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No mainly per SMcCandlish; treating a title as quoted text is possible because our citation template are coded against the norm. And it is not OR to change a title in leading case to sentence case. Frankly title case should be the norm, but that won't happen. In the meantime, nor should this. Cheers, Fortuna, Imperatrix Mundi 13:57, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sometimes yes, sometimes no. If you're following a specific style guide, use its capitalisation rules. If you're following APA, Man Bites Dog is wrong, because Man bites dog is the only correct capitalisation. But if you're consistently using a style guide that says "use the original work's capitalisation", or consistently doing something else (e.g. I always write in a variant of MLA that accommodates <ref> and I always capitalise; see my Southworth House (Cleveland, Ohio) GA) that says to use the original or doesn't specify anything, Man Bites Dog is correct. Nyttend (talk) 06:10, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Is this a variant of MLA that's professionally published or your own customization or ? FWIW, Chicago style has an exception to its capitalization rules for works that are strongly associated with a specific capitalization. -- Beland (talk) 09:08, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No. It's clearly not that important to follow the source capitalisation consistently given that this proposal comes with a baked in exception for allcaps titles: what is it about sentence case titles which makes them specially worthy of respect in a way that allcaps titles are not? That aside, this would be at best an impractical policy both because formatting is not necessarily consistent even within a publication (if a book has its title formatted in one way on the cover, another on the title page, and a third in running text in e.g. the foreword, which is the canonical formatting? similarly for journal articles, where the listing on the contents may not match the title as given at the start of the article or how that journal formats its own references to that article), and because it's much more work for anyone trying to make the formatting consistent. MOS:CONFORM already says Formatting and other purely typographical elements of quoted text should be adapted to English Wikipedia's conventions without comment, and MOS:TITLECONFORM specifically says that title capitalisation should be made to typographically conform with the citation style used in the article. Why should we have an exception to this purely for references? Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 10:43, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No. Articles should use an internally consistent style. Graham (talk) 07:45, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • No. Articles should have an internal, consistent, style. John Smith (2005) "HELLO MY NAME IS BOB" NEW YORK TIMES in one citation, Bob Kane (2019) "Review Of Hello My Name Is Bob" Chicago Tribune, and Norm Manning (2009) "I like apples, but not cherries" ohio daily news is nowhere near a sane way to present things. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:53, 5 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Conforming citations to Wikipedia style

[edit]

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 "A" is the same grapheme but a different glyph than a sans serif "A".)

This new directive to preserve all characters conflicts with general practice and how we import text in names and quotations per MOS:CONFORMTITLE (which references MOS:CONFORM) and MOS:TMRULES. In citations, we follow guidelines like MOS:STRAIGHT and MOS:APOSTROPHE, which means we replace e.g. ’ with '. For conforming citations with MOS:FRAC, which is sometimes necessary for screenreader accessibility, we use {{citefrac}}. MOS:TMRULES bans characters like ™ and ® from citations.

To resolve these conflicts, I propose scoping down the change closer to the original question and explicitly referencing the other guidelines so hopefully in the future they will stay in sync:

  • Remove the last sentence "Retain the original special glyphs and spelling."
  • Change the first sentence from "In general, the citation information should be cited as it appears in the original source." To "Retain emoji, abbreviations, and spelling variations (including variety of English) in names and titles, but otherwise substitute characters when called for by MOS:CONFORMTITLE to avoid conflicts with Wikipedia house style. Remove ™, ®, and similar symbols per MOS:TMRULES."

I just synced MOS:CONFORM with MOS:AMPERSAND and MOS:LIGATURE, which have overrides for proper names that would presumably apply to cited works (e.g Encyclopædia Britannica). MOS:CONFORMTITLE and MOS:CONFORM do not say anything about emoji, which is why I kept that advice here explicitly. MOS:TMRULES says emoji and stylized spelling should be avoided, so I'm not sure how that is supposed to interact with citations. -- Beland (talk) 03:45, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with the original poster, Beland. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:10, 15 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that "Retain the original special glyphs and spelling" is problematic and ambiguous, but it seems clear enough that "special glyphs" does not mean "all glyphs". Similarly, "spelling" does not mean "capitalization", which is a widespread confusion. The proposed fix may be fine, but I'd entertain alternatives, too. Dicklyon (talk) 01:03, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The first change seems reasonable, but the second is unnecessarily complicated; the original is fine. Nikkimaria (talk) 01:10, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Leaving the first sentence in place doesn't seem to resolve the conflicts with MOS:CONFORMTITLE and MOS:TMRULES. I agree I am being overly wordy as usual; we could shorten it to something like: "In general, the citation information should be cited as it appears in the original source; exceptions are noted at MOS:CONFORMTITLE and MOS:TMRULES."? -- Beland (talk) 01:40, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That's better, but I think the discussion that prompted this whole thing disagrees with TMRULES? Nikkimaria (talk) 01:49, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Giving this more thought, citations are allowed to follow a consistent style (for example, Chicago Manual of Style), not withstanding Wikipedia's "Manual of Style". So any title formatting requirements that are to apply to all titles in citations should be placed in "Citing sources", not "Manual of Style". Jc3s5h (talk) 02:34, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not entirely sure I understand. Both the Chicago Manual of Style and the Wikipedia Manual of Style apply to Chicago-style citations on Wikipedia. For example, this quotes section 6.122 of the Chicago Manual as requiring curly quotation marks. But the Wikipedia Manual of Style requires straight quotation marks. So citations on Wikipedia use straight quotation marks, including the millions that are auto-formatted with templates and the examples on Wikipedia:Citing sources. -- Beland (talk) 15:05, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That's a good point. "Citing sources" and "Manual of Style" make reference to each other, but it's as if they were written by two different groups of people who don't pay much attention to each other. For example, there is no mention in "Manual of Style" of "Citing sources" being part of the "Manual of Style". Maybe that's because "Citing sources" is a mixture of "how-to" and style requirements. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:50, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Certainly the other way to resolve the conflict with MOS:TMRULES is to change MOS:TMRULES. I'm not sure the previous participants were aware of that guideline. I wouldn't support changing it, but we could start a discussion to do so on its talk page if people think that would be preferable to leaving it alone. -- Beland (talk) 14:52, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've implemented the revised suggestion without prejudice to starting a discussion revisiting MOS:TMRULES. -- Beland (talk) 00:59, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Table the question. I suggest putting this discussion on hold until RFC on consistent styles and capitalization of titles is closed. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:01, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Why, would the outcome on the question of capitalization change your feelings about whether special characters should be allowed? -- Beland (talk) 15:08, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
One of the themes in the RFC is that copying the title as represented in the source, even though that will lead to a mish-mash of title styles in the references list, is a valid, consistent, citation style. And we can't be sure where any changes that result from the RFC will be placed, whether in "Manual of Style" or "Citing sources". So this thread is suggesting changes to something that might change as a result of the RFC. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:55, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The reverse is also true; you could argue the other discussion should be put on hold until this one is finished? I don't think it matters which one finishes first; the output of one will have to be updated with the results of the other. -- Beland (talk) 16:40, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The other discussion started first. Jc3s5h (talk) 18:11, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If it doesn't matter which one finishes first, I'm not sure how that's determinative. -- Beland (talk) 18:46, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I would say that the whole passage mentioned in the first post should be deleted, because it is in such an obscure spot that most editors will never notice it, and not be able to find it if wondering about how to write titles. Instead there should be (a) section(s) on how to write certain parts of the citation, such as the title, authors, and date. These sections might say that any style that is consistent throughout the Wikipedia article is acceptable, without regard to the "Manual of Style", and without regard to the style of the various sources being cited. It may add, or relocate, a few general rules, such as no all-numberic date formats except YYYY-MM-DD, no curly quotes, no emojis, no characters that are hard to read such as "⁴", and so on. Maybe a few sections from "Manual of Style" could be adopted, but that's dangerous because "Manual of Style" is likely to be changed and nobody notices the change is not suitable for citations. Jc3s5h (talk) 19:15, 16 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The place to look to answer the question "how should titles of works be written on Wikipedia?" is Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles of works. The section "§ Typographic conformity" now links to Wikipedia:Citing sources § What information to include. It should not be hard for someone looking up how to typeset titles of works to notice that there is some advice specific to citations, if that applies to their work. Likewise, if the proposed text is adopted, it should not be hard for someone looking up how to typeset citations to learn about these more general rules that also apply to citations, because they would be linked from Wikipedia:Citing sources.
Don't we want the Wikipedia Manual of Style to automatically remain in sync with the expected style of citations? For example, if MOS:STRAIGHT is changed to require curly quotes, that should apply to citations, too, to avoid distracting inconsistencies. It also seems unlikely that the editors who have been building the MOS and promoting consistency for decades would agree to suddenly have none of it apply to citations, and then have to rebuild the rules for citations in a separate doc that could go out of sync.
It also seemed like consensus was to include emojis in citations? -- Beland (talk) 00:47, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Citing sources#Citation style states

While citations should aim to provide the information listed above, Wikipedia does not have a single house style, though citations within any given article should follow a consistent style. A number of citation styles exist, including those described in the Wikipedia articles for Citation, APA style, ASA style, MLA style, The Chicago Manual of Style, Author-date referencing, the Vancouver system and Bluebook.

Since these stiles do not agree with some parts of the "Manual of Style", it's apparent that generally speaking, the "Manual of Style" does not apply to citations. I see nothing in Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Typographic conformity saying it applies to citations. Jc3s5h (talk) 02:09, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

But in practice, as I mentioned above, we do apply the Manual of Style for imported text to citations, such as MOS:STRAIGHT overriding any of these styles that call for curly quotes (which I know Chicago does). The above-quoted text should probably be clarified to point that out. In some places the Manual of Style is explicitly applied to citations, such as MOS:TMRULES. And two paragraphs after the one you quoted, this page explicitly says to follow Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters#All caps and small caps, which also overrides the above-listed third-party citation styles. -- Beland (talk) 05:57, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It's true that over the years the editors who contributed to the two guidelines have been careless about avoiding contradictions between the two guidelines. This leaves us in a situation where editors who want to launch a script to accomplish a fait accompli on their favorite hobbyhorse are free to try it, and may well get away with it. Also, an editor who reads one guideline and is lead to believe something is OK may not be aware of something tucked away in the other guideline.
And "this page explicitly says to follow Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters#All caps and small caps, which also overrides the above-listed third-party citation styles" isn't so; the "Manual of Style" actually says "For more information on the capitalization of cited works, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters § All caps and small caps." [Emphasis added.] Jc3s5h (talk) 12:27, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure what the purpose of pointing out "more information" from this page would be if not to direct readers how to handle all caps and small caps in citations? If it does not apply to citations, it should be removed or say so explicitly. If it does apply to citations, it should be clarified. So are you arguing that Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters#All caps and small caps should not apply to citations? Looking at the RFC on capitalization above, given how the RFC question specifically exempts all-caps, it seems there is pre-existing consensus that it should.
Let's take MOS:STRAIGHT as a clarifying example. Given the consensus-approved templates that put citations on millions of pages use straight quotes, it's pretty clearly not the decision of one rogue editor, and it's pretty clearly not an oversight or a grey area. Whatever text we agree on must be clear that citations on Wikipedia use straight quotes. You have proposed keeping the MOS and citation guidelines independent. Are you arguing that if MOS:STRAIGHT changes and we start using curly quotes in article text, that it would be beneficial or even plausible that we would continue to use straight quotes in citations? -- Beland (talk) 17:05, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I argue that so long as we don't have a citation style, we shouldn't impose requirements on citations in "Manual of Style", because we can't figure out what the requirements on citations are. We can impose requirements on all citations no matter what style they are following if allowing freedom creates too much of a problem; that's why we won't allow 4/17/2025 as the publication date for something published today. Probably that should apply to straight quotes too.
One reason to allow freedom in citation style is that many journals offer pre-composed citations that readers can cut and paste, often in several different systems. If we force people to use a hodgepodge, this advantage goes away. I'm not aware of a recognized citation style that makes extensive use of small caps or all caps. If some editor decided to do that as an ad hoc style, I suspect consensus would quickly be reached to do something else.
I am arguing that if MOS:STRAIGHT changes and we start using curly quotes in article text, we shouldn't automatically apply that to citations; instead we should edit "Citing sources" to change the requirement about straight quotes to curly quotes. This is for the same reason that Chicago Manual of Style 18th ed. has Part II Style and Usage (542 pages) and Part III Source Citations and Indexes (229 pages), because the rules are different in the two parts. When a rule from part II is to be followed in part III, there is a statement to that effect. It's just too common for an editor to make a change to "Manual of Style" without any consideration of whether the change is suitable for citations. Jc3s5h (talk) 17:52, 17 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think that, even in the absence of a single Official Citation Style™, it's still reasonable to put some limits on the style of citations. "No colored text", for example, would be a style rule, and it's one that would be widely supported by the community in practice, even if someone says that their WP:CITEVAR is Rawls, John (1971). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press. p. 18. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:00, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think MOS:CONFORM sets a pretty good standard for which parts of the MOS should and shouldn't automatically apply to citations:

Formatting and other purely typographical elements of quoted text should be adapted to English Wikipedia's conventions without comment, provided that doing so will not change or obscure meaning or intent of the text. These are alterations which make no difference when the text is read aloud...

I would take this to mean that e.g. MOS:ROMANNUM does apply to citations, but MOS:CONVERSIONS does not. For confirmation, Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Quotations, titles, etc. actually explicitly says that units should not be converted in titles and quotations, but indicates how to do so if needed for clarity.
My proposal attempts to make it so that all known MOS guidelines that apply to citations are mentioned in the citation guideline. I think there would be broad support for automatically applying changes to those to citations, lest we create jarring inconsistencies. I am having difficulty thinking of a change to those which is not "suitable" for citations. If someone discovers a problem with application to citations, they can always go back and either ask for an exception or to change the guideline yet again.
A lot of MOS guidelines just inherently don't apply to citations, like those on section headings, grammar, vocabulary, jargon, and gendered language. For any of the rest that fall into a grey area, I don't think it's necessarily safe to blindly declare that they either do or don't apply to citations. If you want, we can go case by case and try to clarify existing grey areas. This seems to have already been done in a bunch of places. For example, MOS:DATEFORMAT says to see Wikipedia:Citing sources#Citation style for rules on dates in citations. Or, we can simply assume editors will make reasonable choices or open a new discussion if they discover a substantive conflict in the future. We do discover conflicts between MOS pages from time to time, BTW, and they are cleaned up either by an editor doing the obviously right thing or with a discussion.
-- Beland (talk) 09:15, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I just noticed there's an explanatory footnote on MOS:CONFORM which clarifies that it does apply to citations:

"Quoted text" for typographic conformity and many other purposes includes titles of works, names of organizations, and other strings that are, in essence, quoted. Example: things like "Mexican-American War" are routinely corrected to "Mexican–American War" on Wikipedia, including in titles of cited sources.

-- Beland (talk) 08:50, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
No, it does not say that it applies to citations. It says it applies to quoted text, including things that are essentially quotes, such as titles of works. Suppose I was writing in the body of an article about Easter, and I quoted Calendrical Calculations 4th ed, p. 143.

The history of the establishment of the date of Easter is long and complex, good discussions can be found in [3], [7], and [12].

[Brackets in original, source 7 is J. L. Helibron's The Sun in the Church: Cathedrals as Solar Observatories.]
MOS:CONFORM would apply to all of that, but would not apply when I wrote the citation for Calendrical Calculations. Maybe it wouldn't make any difference, but I could go ahead and write my citation without having MOS:CONFORM on the computer screen to make sure I was doing it "right".
This directly impacts the RFC above. If your contention were true, changing the capitalization of a title would be more than what is allowed by MOS:CONFORM and the RFC would be moot; the "yes" site would be the only allowable outcome. Jc3s5h (talk) 11:17, 18 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure why "in titles of cited sources" should be interpreted to include titles cited indirectly by a third-party source, but not titles cited directly by Wikipedia. The text of the guideline doesn't mention the distinction. In practice, we do normalize dashes in direct citations typically seen in footnotes, so how would you rephrase this to make that clear?
If MOS:CONFORM were the only guidance on capitalization, then yes, it would imply that source capitalization should be followed. I wouldn't say that makes the RFC moot; there could also be consensus for an exception for citations which is not made for prose quotations. It is not the only MOS guidance, however. MOS:TITLECAPS says:

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.

This seems to lean toward an RFC answer of "no, use only title case or sentence case as determined by the chosen citation style for the entire article". But again, an RFC could decide to change this; an RFC may have created this text in the first place. I have no particular opinion either way.
-- Beland (talk) 07:19, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Jc3s5h, tell me more about your thinking here. Here's where I'm starting from:
  • MOS:CONFORM links to MOS:TITLECONFORM, which explicitly talks about what to do "Inside a citation template".
  • Consider this example from MOS:TITLECONFORM:

    "a newspaper might have an in-house convention for all-caps in the first part of a title and all-lowercase in a subtitle: 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."

    Does that advice about "the citation style used in the article" sound like it ought to apply to the WP:CITEd sources, or only just newspaper articles whose titles get mentioned in the body of the article? (Just how often do newspaper articles get mentioned by title in the body of an article? Often enough that we'd actually need a rule to explain that it's okay to remove all-caps? I doubt it, but maybe your experience is different.)
  • MOS:CONFORM says that "things like "Mexican-American War" are routinely corrected to "Mexican–American War" on Wikipedia, including in titles of cited sources. Do you think that applies to WP:CITEd sources, or only to "titles of cited sources" that aren't actually WP:CITEd? For example, have you seen AWB editors correcting the hyphenation of "Mexican-American War" in the text of an article while leaving it uncorrected in the refs? (I haven't.)
  • MOS:CONFORM says Direct quotation should not be used to preserve the formatting preferred by an external publisher. How would you apply that principle to the above RFC?
  • Since MOS:CONFORM and MOS:TITLECONFORM seem AFAICT to support normalizing the typography of titles of works, what makes you think that applying those guidelines here would require editors to non-normalize the typography of titles of works?
WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:16, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • "Inside a citation template" only applies to the first bullet point, and only to articles that use citation templates for citations, not articles that use some other citation style.
  • When it comes to converting all-caps to title case, TITLECONFORM only applies it to titles of works mentioned in the main part of an article, and does not apply to the citations. In an article about an author, such as Bede, one is likely to encounter the titles of many works.
  • When it comes to adapting punctuation such as em dashes and curly quotes to Wikipedia style, MOS:CONFORM does not apply it to citations.
  • The guidance in MOS:CONFORM "Direct quotation should not be used to preserve the formatting preferred by an external publisher" is good advice, but is not applied by MOS:CONFORM to citations. (And in my mind it has the smell of something that came out of some edit war; I doubt it needs to be in the "Manual of Style".
  • The editors at an article could decide to normalize the titles of cited sources, and allowing practices such as using different capitalization rules from one cite to the next, using inconsistent quote marks, or using all-caps, would make Wikipedia look amateurish. My concern is that some rules mentioned in "Manual of Style" would be reasonable to apply to citations, and some wouldn't. It should be easy for editors to know where to look. Presently the two guidelines are sloppy about which rules apply where.
  • Always bear in mind that Help:Citation Style 1 is a style unto itself, and rules that are documented on that help page or the template documentation do not necessarily apply to other styles of citation. Jc3s5h (talk) 22:40, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    What makes you think that the advice in the MOS pages "does not apply to the citations" or isn't applied there? AWB's GENFIXES specifically change curly quotes to straight ones in citation templates. Here's some examples of this being applied to a ref in an article: [3][4][5][6] Here's one fixing the dash: [7]
    If conforming the typography of a source's title – when it is used inside ref tags as a reliable source that directly supports the article's content, without being mentioned in the body of the article – is truly not supported by the MOS, then why are we letting a bot(!) do this? Bots are only allowed to make uncontroversial changes, and violating the MOS would definitely count as "controversial".
    I conclude, therefore, that normalizing the typography in the WP:CITEd refs is 100% supported by the MOS. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:36, 19 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Citing sources#Citation style states

    While citations should aim to provide the information listed above, Wikipedia does not have a single house style, though citations within any given article should follow a consistent style. A number of citation styles exist, including those described in the Wikipedia articles for Citation, APA style, ASA style, MLA style, The Chicago Manual of Style, the Vancouver system and Bluebook.

    These citation styles disagree with "Manual of Style" on many points. For example, The Chicago Manual of Style uses title case for major works like books, but sentence case for article titles, in citations. APA Style uses a date format such as (1993, September 30) [example given in 6th ed., p. 200]; this format is not one of the acceptable formats mentioned in WP:MOSNUM. But just because there isn't a rule in any of the guidelines saying something should be done in citations doesn't mean editors can't form a consensus about good practices, and let certain bots edit accordingly.
    In addition, the link you gave is to Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser/General fixes#Citation templates (FixCitationTemplates). Virtually all citation templates are part of Citation Style 1, which is a style unto itself. The requirements for Citation Style 1 do not apply to other citation styles, such as The Chicago Manual of Style. Jc3s5h (talk) 00:00, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm not seeing the connection. WP:CITESTYLE says you can form a consensus. That doesn't mean that it's possible to form any consensus; some elements of them (e.g., WP:PAREN, using all-numeric YYYY-DD-MM dates) are banned sitewide, and others are so far from acceptable that nobody's thought it necessary to write down a rule against it. I just created an article (have a look). As the sole contributor to date, I could have decided to established an initial CITESTYLE that says each element of the citations should use a different color. Maybe I'd pick red for the authors' names and green for the sources' titles and purple for the publishers. But you and I both know that if I did this, someone would promptly slap {{Overcoloured}} on it, even though neither CITE nor even MOS:COLOR actually say "Thou shalt not use colors in citations".
    So I establish that there is precedent for requiring citations to comply with basic MOS rules, even if that prevents editors from choosing certain elements of a citation style; therefore, there is precedent for requiring citations to comply with the basic MOS rules on capitalization, even if that prevents editors from choosing a mismatched capitalization style. Or making the citations the same colors as fruit salad.
    I'm not sure why CS1 is supposed to be a differentiating factor. The RFC above is triggered by someone insisting that the citations be allowed to use a distinctly non-standardized capitalization scheme. Those citations were using CS1 templates. You seem to be claiming that it is uncontroversial to fix one part of the typography (curly quotes) in citations that are using CS1's {{cite web}}, and that this fact is supposed to somehow prove to me that we're not allowed to fix another part of the typography (capitalization) in citations that are also using CS1's {{cite web}}. This does not follow. In particular:
    • I see nothing saying that CS1 has approved capitalization style(s) that differ from non-CS1 citations.
    • I see nothing saying that basic MOS rules don't apply to citations using CS1.
    • I especially see nothing saying that some basic MOS rules about how to format titles (e.g., curly quotes) apply to CS1 templates and that other, equally basic MOS rules about how to format titles don't apply to CS1 templates.
    WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:18, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I'll reply to just the first two paragraphs in this post. Parenthetical referencing is validly banned site wide because that ban is placed in "Citing sources". If it were placed in "Manual of Style" it would contradict WP:CITESTYLE.
    Using all-numeric YYYY-DD-MM dates are banned in citations because "Citing sources" states

    Although nearly any consistent style may be used, avoid all-numeric date formats other than YYYY-MM-DD, because of the ambiguity concerning which number is the month and which the day. For example, 2002-06-11 may be used, but not 11/06/2002. The YYYY-MM-DD format should in any case be limited to Gregorian calendar dates where the year is after 1582. Because it could easily be confused with a range of years, the format YYYY-MM (for example: 2002-06) is not used.

    The need to state this restriction separately from a similar statement in "Manual of Style" underscores the separate nature of the two guidelines.
    There is no need for citations to comply with MOS rules unless the MOS rule says it applies to citations (although doing that makes it hard to find citation rules). But there is a need to follow basic concepts of citation that would be found in any high school or university classroom. If five printed publication guidelines tell me to write citations according to the style book that I've chosen or been told to follow for a paper, and all five say to capitalize titles according to the citation section of the style book, and ignore the capitalization style of the source, then I'm going to do that. I'm also going to edit any messed-up citation capitalization I find in a Wikipedia article on the basis that it's the general practice among everyone who knows how to write citations, not because of any statement I find in "Manual of Style". Jc3s5h (talk) 13:50, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    All-numeric YYYY-DD-MM dates are banned everywhere because the year-first middle-endian date format does not exist anywhere in the real world. It is always wrong.
    For the rest, CITE merely repeats MOS:DATENUM, complete with the nonsensical claim that all YYYY-MM dates must be banned because a small fraction of them (less than 10%) could be mistaken for a date range. 2002–04 might be a date range. 2004–02 isn't. 2024–04 very obviously isn't. The modern, citoid-era story is that if someone typed 2024–04, then we have to throw an error instead of having CS1 transform it automatically because it might have been a typo ...even though automated systems don't have typos. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:22, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I'll reply to the part of your post about CS1 vs. everything else. CS1 is it's own style. That concept is implied by the statement "There are a number of templates that use a name starting with cite; many were developed independently of CS1 and are not compliant with the CS1 style." More explicit statements can be found in Help talk:Citation Style 1 and its large set of archives.
    A problem is that the nature of CS1 as a separate style wasn't obvious right from the beginning, so some rules in "Citing sources" or "Manual of Style" might be left over from before that realization.
    Also, because some editors only use templates and don't think about other styles, they may not think to distinguish the two cases. The fact that the above capitalization discussion only mentioned CS1 templates, and failed to mention other citation styles, indicates the editors involved failed to perform a proper reconnaissance of the situation before starting the RFC.
    Because of the scattered nature of citation rules and delusion of rules, I won't respond to your comment about curly quotes unless you provide exact locations and quotes.
    "*I see nothing saying that CS1 has approved capitalization style(s) that differ from non-CS1 citations."
    CS1 is only a partial style, and most of it is embedded in the programming that makes the templates work, and the documentation of the individual template parameters. As far as I know, CS1 has no separate rule about capitalization of titles in citations. There is a style in the capitalization of some items in rendered citations. For example, when using "cite book" and leaving the mode parameter at the default cs1, elements of the citation are separated with a period and the first letter of the word after the period is capitalized.
    "*I see nothing saying that basic MOS rules don't apply to citations using CS1."
    CS1 is used for citations. The quotation from WP:CITESTYLE above applies just as much to CS1 as it does to other citation styles. If the equivalent of a style manual, in this case Help:Citation Style 1, doesn't have a rule on a topic, there is no rule and the editors of an article can form a consensus about what the rule should be for that article.
    "*I especially see nothing saying that some basic MOS rules about how to format titles (e.g., curly quotes) apply to CS1 templates and that other, equally basic MOS rules about how to format titles don't apply to CS1 templates."
    I agree that in regard to curly quotes, I haven't noticed any rule that would be different depending on whether it's a CS1 style article or another citation style. According to the rules, curly quotes are up for grabs in citations. But there seems to be a consensus among editors not to use them, probably because it's such a pain to type them. Also, once the citations in article are in a stable condition using straight quotes, WP:CITEVAR would require consensus on the talk page to change to curly quotes. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:25, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    You are correct that CS1 has no separate rule about capitalization. It also has no separate rules about curly quotes, emojis, dashes, or date formats. In fact, when I have argued (repeatedly, for years now) with the CS1 maintainers about the need to support ISO date formats, they point me at MOS:DATENUM as their guiding light.
    AFAIK the CS1 template never touches the capitalization, except for seasons – "summer" will be turned into "Summer", but "summer 2004" (also "may 2004") will produce a red error message. Consider:
    • expert, alice (2004). title (third ed.). new york: publisher.
    No capitalization is added.
    This: If...there is no rule and the editors of an article can form a consensus about what the rule should be is just wrong. There's no rule in most style guides about what color to make the citations. Many don't specify a font or a size. Am I allowed now to make up my own rule about what color to make the citations, without having to consider the non-CITE MOS pages? Remember that Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility is part of the MOS. In slightly lawyer-y terms, remember that our advice pages have to be interpreted as an integrated whole, not as isolated bits that can be safely pulled out of context.
    Instead of According to the rules, curly quotes are up for grabs in citations, I suggest that according to the rules, curly quotes are banned everywhere. The absence of citation-specific acceptance of them means that the general rule (which bans them) applies to citations as well. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:40, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree with a WhatamIdoing; I don't know where this idea that MOS guidelines do not apply to citations because they are listed on a different page is coming from. You can argue that guideline pages should be rearranged for clarity, or that more exceptions for citations should be added, but it is not productive to continue to argue that they do not represent current consensus. There is a supermajority in this thread opposed to that interpretation, and I'm sure there would be an overwhelming backlash should anyone try to implement that idea in practice. -- Beland (talk) 06:02, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think the original intent here was similar to that of MOS:BIOEXCEPT, human names in exceptional styles like danah boyd and k.d. lang, or MOS:TMRULES when a name is almost never written except in a particular stylized form. Thus, clearer wording would be In some cases, the names of cited works intentionally use an exceptional typographic style or nonstandard characters such as emoji. When such name is almost never written except in a particular stylized form, these should be retained. For example, the album notes from Hurts 2B Human should not be cited as being from the album Hurts to be Human, or an X (formerly Twitter) user named "i😍dogs" should not be cited as "i[love]dogs". This covers intentional stylistic decisions without requiring editors to copy text exactly as they find it in the other 99% of cases. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 18:59, 23 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Revert of revised update

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@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)[reply]

Instead, I suggest you move citation-specific bullet points to this guideline and remove them from MOS:CONFORMTITLE. Jc3s5h (talk) 01:35, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This bullet point is not specific to citations; it applies to both citations and article prose. -- Beland (talk) 02:12, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I maintain it only applies to ar unless your edit is restored. It is not appropriate in citations because, when citing legal cases, some citation styles write case names in
  1. plain upright roman type, for a full citation: United States v. Christmas, 222 F.3d 141, 145 (4th Cir. 2000)
  2. italics for a short citation: Christmas, 222 F.3d at 145.
Neither of these agree with the bullet point in MOS:CONFORMTITLE which would write the case name as "Christmas" or "United States v. Christmas".
The examples are taken from The Chicago Manual of Style 18th ed. ¶ 14.177. CMoS follows Bluebook which is widely used in the United States. Jc3s5h (talk) 14:53, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The text says it applies to citation templates, and the page is marked as a guideline editors should follow. On what grounds could it possibly not be in effect? "It's on the wrong guideline page" is not a reason I've ever seen given and certainly not enforced, if that's what you're arguing. You could propose a change to make such a rule, but that is not current practice. If you feel the guideline itself needs changing, you can start a discussion, but not linking to it from Wikipedia:Citing sources does not prevent it from being in effect; it just makes it more obscure to some editors. -- Beland (talk) 19:43, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Clarifying which MOS guidelines apply to citations

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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:

  1. Change MOS:CONFORM from "including in titles of cited sources." to "including in titles of cited sources, in article prose, citation footnotes, and elsewhere on the page."
  2. On WP:CITESTYLE, extend the quoted sentence to read "Wikipedia does not have a single house style, though citations within any given article should follow a consistent style, and applicable Wikipedia style guidelines should be followed."
  3. Move the existing "avoid all-numeric date formats" bullet point to MOS:DATEUNIFY so all the date-related rules for citations are in one place. That page explains the "nearly" in "Although nearly any consistent style may be used", which would be dropped in favor of just explaining which formats are acceptable.
  4. Add a list of applicable Wikipedia style guidelines to WP:CITESTYLE, replacing the second and third paragraphs:

Applicable Wikipedia style guidelines include:

Additional citation guidelines for specific topics include:

-- Beland (talk) 03:04, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Replying point-by-point
  1. The phrase proposed to be changed, "including in titles of cited sources", is in a footnote. That's a non-starter because it's far too obscure.
  2. The wording should make it clear that only the MOS guidelines specified in the WP:CITESTYLE section apply to citations, rather than leaving open the idea that anything in MOS can be argued to apply.
  3. MOS:DATEUNIFY is the wrong place because it's about consistency within an article, not about what date formats are allowed and disallowed.
  4. Adding a list of rules from MOS that apply to citations a reasonable approach, but the list will need to be scrubbed. For example, the line about people's names is likely to require changes by either eliminating some of the guidelines, or modifying some of the mentioned guidelines to account for citations.
Jc3s5h (talk) 15:14, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  1. What text would you propose for 1?
  2. 2 would be a major change to the way guidelines work. If you want to make such a change, you can start an RFC, but the proposed edit is only for clarifying the current guidelines.
  3. OK, we can keep "avoid all-numeric date formats" on this page if you prefer.
  4. The MOS guidelines linked already take account of citations, reflecting the consensus of the editors who wrote them. The proposed change is to clarify what guidelines already exist, not to change them. If you want to change the guidelines that apply to names in citations, you can start a discussion on that.
-- Beland (talk) 19:51, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
For 1, if we look at printed style guides such as CMos or APA Style, and look at the highest level heading in the table of contents, we see there are separate chapters or parts for citations versus other topics. Similarly, a top-level section should be created, "Citatons", which explains that, usually, the "Manual of Style" does not apply to citations, that different styles of citation are acceptable as long as consistent within an article, and that some selected sections of the "Manual of Style" are named in "Citing sources" and do apply to citations.
For 2, having separate guidelines (or chapters, parts, whatever) is the only way a manual of style can work and it is folly to think two different guidelines can control citations.
For 3, Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Dates, months, and years already purports to control dates in citations, and already contains this list item:
  • the format expected in the citation style being used (but all-numeric date formats other than yyyy-mm-dd must still be avoided).
So I would just name Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Dates, months, and years as one of the parts of "Manual of Style" that applies to citations.
As for 4, in some cases, that's just wrong. For example, use the name "Tolkien", not "John R. R. Tolkien", in a citation because "John R. R. Tolkien" already appears in the body of an article, and the name is supposed to be given in full only on first appearance? Nope. the guideline about names (Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Biography) does have provisions about citations, but they are scattered and not given any distinctive typographic treatment, so they will not stand out to an editor interested in writing citations. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:47, 20 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think that producing a definitive list of MOS pages/sections that apply to citations is feasible.
For example, research shows almost nobody reads the refs, so I want to put them in a very small font. This violates MOS:SMALL.
Fine, so we add MOS:SMALL to the list.
I think the titles are too hard to spot, so I put them in all caps.
You add MOS:ALLCAPS to the list.
I decide to make the refs a lovely shade of pale lavender.
You add MOS:COLOR to the list.
I'd like to visually set the refs off as a separate thing, so I add a colored box.
You add MOS:DECOR to the list.
I do a good job finding sources from a variety of countries, and I decide to show that off by adding a tiny flag to each citation, so readers can see which country the source is from at a glance.
You roll your eyes and put MOS:FLAG in the list.
But now I think: I'm writing an article that has a lot of ties to France. Wouldn't it be fun to write parts of the citations in French? Today's "20 avril 2025", and the source was published in Espagne, not Spain.
Okay, so you add MOS:DATENUM to the list, and ...um, there actually doesn't seem to be a MOS page that says we have to write in English. So maybe I get to keep the French place names?
I think that we'd end up adding any part of the MOS that could conceivably be relevant, and it would not actually be practical or helpful at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:57, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I found that pretty convincing. In that case, I guess only 1 and 2 would be helpful. -- Beland (talk) 05:48, 21 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There have been sincere discussions about a few points that resemble what WhatamIdoing listed.For example, {{reflist}} by default reduces the font size to 90% for most browsers. The markup usually used before reflist was introduced was <references> which did not reduce the font size, and there was discussion about whether that was a good idea. There have been discussions about making reference sections collapsed by default. MOS:COLLAPSE addresses this issue for the article body, but not for citations. This issue is more-or-less addressed by WP:ASL, part of "Citing sources".
There is inconsistency about where citation guidance is located because it has never been clearly stated where it belongs. If a clear statement is created, at least those sections in MOS and its subpages that explicitly mention citations will, over time, be cross-referenced at "Citing sources". As for things that are just A Bad Idea, those will pretty quickly get reverted whether there's guidance against them in "Citing sources" or not. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:14, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It seems there are more editors who oppose a centralized listing of every rule that applies to citations than support it, so if you see problems with readability, I think it's time to find other ways to address them.
MOS:COLLAPSE actually does explicitly say it applies to footnotes, and links to Wikipedia:Citing sources##Footnotes, which says the same thing. I don't see anything there which is unclear or hard to find.
According to Template:Reflist/doc, the styling for {{reflist}} and <references/> are now identical. This does not need to be mentioned in the MOS, so it seems there is nothing to fix there, either. -- Beland (talk) 03:57, 29 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal to clarify which MOS guidelines apply to citations

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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.

Jc3s5h (talk) 13:12, 22 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Despite earlier discussions there is still nothing in the guideline about citing ebooks

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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)[reply]

What difficulties do you have citing ebooks? {{cite book}} works perfectly fine for such cases, as far as I've used it. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 18:27, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Looking at it I'm still not sure what to do, and in any case I use, agh, never can recall what it is. In any case it offers a drop down menu with templates for web, news, books, and journals. It's easy and quick to use, eg I can just drop an url into it. But it asks for page numbers. Doug Weller talk 18:59, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Generally whenever I cite an ebook I use exactly the same format as a print book. They have ISBNs, OCLC numbers in WorldCat, etc. just like regular books. For page numbers, yes free-flowing ebooks in formats like EPUB lack pagination, so feel free to leave that blank. At Template:Citation Style documentation/pages, it notes you have the option of |at= for sources where a page number is inappropriate or insufficient. You could use that field to enter "ch. 6" or something similar if you think that'd help narrow down your citation to a chapter, etc. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 19:26, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Chapter can certainly help, I've done that at times I'm sure, I'd forgotten. Doug Weller talk 07:41, 25 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Doug Weller, it's at WP:EBOOK, second paragraph. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:39, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks., Doug Weller talk 07:39, 25 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Press releases

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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.

In the case I have dealt with, I had excised comment on visitor numbers from Vasa (ship) with [8]. I have since seen statistics on museum visits in Sweden collated by a government agency ([9], table 23 in the spreadsheet). But the simplest "headline figure" that seems to encapsulate the number of visitors to the ship since her salvage is a Vasamuseet press release [10] giving a figure of 45 million to date. (Added with [11]) To my mind, this figure from the museum is validated by them having to report these numbers to a government agency. Simple arithmetic from the government agency report makes the 45 million entirely believable. For myself, I find the cited source totally sufficient. Clearly other press releases by other organisations may be different. In my specific example I have chosen not to contextualise the visitor numbers as "Scandinavia's most visited museum" which, I understand, is in their marketing material. I don't see marketing material as an RS, whilst a press release may well be.

I am wondering to what extent my decision-making is supportable by guidance on RSs. ThoughtIdRetired TIR 19:57, 25 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A museum's press release wouldn't confer notability under WP:SIRS, but for confirming uncontroversial statistics like visitor numbers, there's no real reason to expect or need an independent source. The relevant section is WP:SELFSOURCE, where organizations' statements about themselves are acceptable in some cases. Your citation seems perfectly fine (although if you went with "most-visited museum" you might run afoul of the rule against unduly self-serving); after all, we have {{cite press release}} for this reason. Dan Leonard (talk • contribs) 19:17, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Press releases are always Wikipedia:Self-published sources. They are almost always Wikipedia:Primary sources. They are usually not Wikipedia:Independent sources.
But: That doesn't mean they're WP:NOTGOODSOURCE. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:29, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Citing a US trademark registration

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I used the Template:Cite web for a 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))[reply]

How to cite a direct quotation?

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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:

In 1916, Abramson designed the Home of the Daughters of Jacob on 167th Street between Findlay and Teller Avenues in the Bronx. The building consists of eight wings arranged radially around a central core, and has been described as "novel in design, being in the form of a wheel".[1] The property consists of 36 lots which were previously part of Gouverneur Morris's estate; at the time of purchase by the Daughters of Jacob, it was still occupied by Morris's 1812 house which was torn down to make room for the new building.[1]

where I put a citation directly after the "novel in design, being in the form of a wheel" quote, even though the exact same reference appears at the end of the paragraph. This has always seemed silly to me.

Looking at WP:INTEXT, I see it says In-text attribution may need to be used with direct speech ... An inline citation should follow the attribution, usually at the end of the sentence or paragraph in question which sure sounds to me like the extra citation immediately after the quote is not actually needed. Am I just mis-reading this? Can I condense duplicate citations like this into a single one at the end of the paragraph?

References

  1. ^ a b "Lay Stone for New Home". New York Times. October 30, 1916. p. 8. Retrieved November 11, 2024.

RoySmith (talk) 22:19, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe I've been doing it wrong? But I put the cite at the end of the content it supports, even if there's a direct quote in there. Schazjmd (talk) 22:25, 3 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

RFC on preferring templates in citations

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Should the text of Wikipedia:Citing sources be changed to prefer templates over hand-formatted citations, while welcoming contributions from editors who continue to format manually? 23:53, 6 May 2025 (UTC)

Specific changes proposed:

  1. Change "(Note that templates should not be added without consensus to an article that already uses a consistent referencing style.)" to "(Templates are preferred, but contributions with manually-formatted citations are welcome.)"
  2. Add "change citations from manually formatted to templates, without admonishing of contributors" to "Generally considered helpful"
  3. Change the line starting "adding citation templates to an article that already uses a consistent system without templates" in "To be avoided" to "removing citation templates that are used correctly"
  4. Change the first paragraph of WP:CITECONSENSUS to: "Citation templates are preferred in situations where they exist and can be used as designed. They keep citations formatted in a consistent way and are more machine-readable for a variety of purposes. Contributions of manually-formatted citations from editors unfamiliar with or who simply do not care to use templates are welcome, and may be reformatted into templates by other editors without notification beyond a polite edit summary."
  5. Add to "Generally considered helpful" the line: "Adding or enhancing templates and modules for recurring situations where citations would be otherwise left manually-formatted due to lack of support"

Discussion: RFC on preferring templates in citations

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  • Proposer rationale: This proposal would still allow any citation format to be used consistently throughout an article, but would allow interested editors to move from hand-formatted to template-formatted citations for the following reasons:
    • Much more consistently formatted output, tolerating variation in human-written input, resulting in a more professional and trustworthy appearance for articles.
    • Automatic output of COinS metadata for browser plugins and web spiders that power data aggregators.
    • Automatic detection of errors, such as dangling references, incomplete or vague citations, putting the wrong information in the wrong place, or using disfavored formats (such as for dates).
    • Automatic improvement by bots (e.g. adding archive URLs, adding missing data and links to full text).
    • Much easier to make future changes site-wide to formatting if consensus changes.
    • Much easier to change an article's citation format (if consensus finds the wrong one was chosen) simply by substituting templates or (with module support) simply adding a "mode" declaration to the page. This also makes it easier to move citations between articles that have different citation formats. (We can already set "mode=cs1" or "mode=cs2".)
    • Inexperienced editors (or those who simply prefer them) can use graphical tools like VisualEditor to add and edit citations without having to know wiki syntax or the formatting details of the specific citation style used by an article. Editors who use the source editor will still be under no obligation to use templates in new citations if they dislike them.
    • Manual formatting of citations should not be used as a workaround to avoid mangling by a bot. An explicit bot exclusion is a better way to handle this because it alerts future editors to the bug and prevents them from stumbling into it again. This also facilitates research into bot improvements.
According to the previous discussion, about 80% of articles already use citation templates, so the result of this guideline change is not much different than simply implementing our existing rule that articles should use a consistent format. Upgrading citations also provides an opportunity to eyeball neglected articles and passages and remove any obvious garbage. -- Beland (talk) 23:53, 6 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose major change to WP:CITEVAR allowing the imposition of a new citation style at the whim of gnomes and encouraging gnomes to perform this imposition, regardless of whether the citations are already in a consistent format. Inconsistently formatted manual citations do not need this change; a consistent style can be chosen for them regardless. The only actual point of these changes is to impose machine-friendly human-unfriendly rigid templated metadata on citations.
—David Eppstein (talk) 00:42, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. In addition to the points made by David Eppstein and Airship, allowing manually formatted citations makes it much easier to copy them from external sources, and much easier to incorporate subject-matter experts into the community. Templates don't magically make citations look professional nor address vague or misplaced citations. And forbidding manual formatting of citations as a workaround to known problems is a non-starter. See also the thousands of words here explaining some of the issues with the concept of this proposal. Nikkimaria (talk) 01:20, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Editors would still be allowed to copy already-formatted citations from other web sites. What problems are you seeing that require manual formatting as a workaround? -- Beland (talk) 03:23, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Saying that others can clean up after them is not a good solution to something that's not a problem to begin with. As to workarounds, there seem to be several examples of issues provided in the discussion above. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:54, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I looked into the situations mentioned in the previous discussion, and it seems they can all be dealt with by putting an HTML comment in the citation template that instructs the problematic bot not to edit it. That seems better than laying a trap for someone who later comes along and changes the citation to use a template for whatever reason, and it gets tread on by the bot again. -- Beland (talk) 04:14, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Strongly oppose – allowing style variations at authors' discretion and leaving decision to local consensus is one of the best ways Wikipedia avoids pointless conflict and churn. There's not much benefit for every page to be perfectly consistent in every aspect of style, and the potential harms of changing this are dramatic. Aside: every editor should at least read and consider User:Jorge Stolfi § Please do not use {{cite}} templates.–jacobolus (t) 01:53, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    If you want to render citations e.g. "issue 10" instead of "(10)", I agree that would be an improvement. It could be done across millions of citations in a single edit because they use templates and not manual formatting. We could also allow articles to easily choose to do this or not by adding a mode selector. -- Beland (talk) 03:21, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Implementing a mode selector to "easily choose to do this or not" would require people to (a) notice a change in the template's behaviour, (b) figure out how to create the option to override it in the template, (c) get that template change implemented, and then (d) change the article. That's not a particularly easy process compared to just formatting refs manually. Nikkimaria (talk) 03:54, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    It's much easier than going through every single manually formatted citation and manually re-formatting them. -- Beland (talk) 04:09, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    No, it's really not. First off, if someone has already manually formatted a citation in a way that they feel is appropriate, no reformatting is required regardless of what changes in the template. If there is a desire to change the format, either way you'd have to go through every single citation - but the template approach adds a bunch of extra work to do that, because first you'd have to change the template and then change the citations in the article. Nikkimaria (talk) 05:00, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Sure, I guess there are some scenarios where there is more upfront cost. If an article is already consistently formatted manually and wants to change to a different format, it will need to have all the citations re-formatted either way, and if it's done the template way and that style is not already supported, template upgrades will also have to happen. But compared to the number of articles (millions) the number of citation styles is quite small (less than ten?) so templates will seldom need to be upgraded to support new styles. The benefit of that investment in this scenario is only realized if there is a second style change where the entire page can be flipped with a mode setting.
    Maybe that happens with mature articles scoring high assessment grades, but I work on a lot of articles with detected typos, and I often see a mix of clashing citation styles on the same page. For those, most of the citations are going to have to be reformatted regardless of the chosen destination style. My thought is, why not make that destination style a template, so that we never have to do another mass-reformat no matter what changes about the preferred citation style? Also, a common way to fix poorly formatted citations is to use a script like reFill, which outputs templates. If we chose a non-template style, we'd have to do a lot of work to make up for the lack of automation, and then even more work after that to make up for the lack of automation finding archival URLs. -- Beland (talk) 07:10, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    There are literally thousands of citation styles that exist. I grant you that most are part of a long tail, but that's still a heck of a lot of template changes. Archival URLs are already automatically added on articles without templates, so that's not a benefit of mandating templates.
    If you're encountering an article with clashing citation styles, you're already allowed to make that consistent, using templates if that's what you prefer to do. Your proposal doesn't change anything about that use-case; it instead targets articles that already have a consistent style that just happens to not be template-based.Nikkimaria (talk) 22:04, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    It does prevent people from changing inconsistent articles to manually formatted citations, which is work that would have to be undone later if in the long term we are moving in the direction of using templates universally. And if that's the direction we're going, we might as well start on the manually formatted articles, too.
    I can't imagine people creating thousands of style templates for tiny variations; it would be a lot less work just to use templates for a popular style very close to one's preferred style. That also seems like a crummy experience for readers, looking at a thousand different styles and either having to learn to interpret a bunch of different conventions (extra difficult for those who are not native English speakers) or just being annoyed at what looks like sloppiness.
    I don't know of any bots that can operate on manual citations to validate date formats, find dangling references, create markup for COinS, fill in missing authors, or connect citations to databases like DOI. -- Beland (talk) 23:34, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    But we shouldn't be preventing people from improving citations, even if we might sometime eventually want to change how they've done that.
    I agree with you re: I can't imagine people creating thousands of style templates for tiny variations - that's why I don't think your proposal about template upgrades and mode settings is at all workable. What is more likely to happen is (a) users try to shoehorn their preferred formatting into citation templates and get into edit-wars with well-intentioned bots or gnomes (as already happens!), or (b) users manually format citations to get their preferred formatting, and then get into edit-wars as a result of your proposal. As to crummy experience for readers, I don't see any evidence that CS1 is a better experience for readers than APA, MLA, or any other format you could name - the page jacobulus linked has already suggested some ways in which a non-CS1 format might easier to interpret.
    Bots aren't the panacea you suggest - see Jc's comments. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:42, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    If an article has two citations, and one of them is manually formatted and the other uses a citation template (assuming reasonably equivalent contents: they both have the source's title, a URL, etc.), is removing the citation template actually a case of "improving citations"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:52, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    All else being equal, as much as adding one. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:00, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Maybe not?
    Because I think that eventually – maybe after I die, but some day in the future – citation templates will grow from "merely" 80% of articles having some to basically all articles using them for everything, and that means that the process will be:
    • Start with a 50–50 mix.
    • Switch to templates.
    • Done.
    vs
    • Start with a 50–50 mix.
    • Switch to manual formatting.
    • Eventually switch back to templates.
    • Finally done.
    And therefore I think that putting a finger very lightly on the scale in favor of citation templates will save time, net, in the end. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:27, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    All else is not equal; templated citations are more useful for browser plugins, data aggregation, and more easily changed en masse. Which is why this proposal would define one direction as an improvement.
    I think it would be reasonable to call a truce among say, the top 5 or so most popular citation styles and support those with templates, for compatibility with various academic fields and major published style guides and what people learned to use at school. It's reasonable to ask people to pick one of those and not to force our readers to learn citation style #534 which they came up with one day while filling a complaint with the local dog catcher. There are hundreds of style rules; generally the way they reduce edit wars is by providing unambiguous answers to arbitrary questions. -- Beland (talk) 02:50, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    That sounds very complicated and controversial, likely to waste vast amounts of effort and attention on style nitpicks. This discussion itself is already doing significant harm, insofar as the participants might otherwise be making productive content contributions. –jacobolus (t) 05:20, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I accept your opinion that content is more important than style. As a community of editors, though, it seems we have decided that style is important enough to worry about that we do have a Manual of Style instead of willy-nilly formatting, and we have decided that it should be consensus-driven rather than saving a lot of time by handing it over to a benevolent dictator or style committee. I can't think of a way to reconcile those choices with the idea that we can't have this type of discussion because it burns time we should be spending on content. It's a valid concern, though I'm not sure we're spending "significant" resources on it given how many thousands of edits are being committed while we're having this discussion. Also keep in mind that not everyone who enjoys wikignoming also enjoys working on content. Part of the reason I do a lot of wikignoming fixing spelling and style errors is so that other editors can focus more on their area of expertise and interest and don't need to be distracted fixing small things that I could fix more quickly en masse. And some days I'm too tired or stressed to wrangle a lot of prose and I just need to relax by fixing a bunch of malformed punctuation or unconverted units of measure. -- Beland (talk) 07:31, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per David Eppstein and AirshipJungleman29. We want people to leave citations that support the information they add. That is far more important than putting people off by insisting on using a cumbersome or alien format that they do not understand. And what to do with people who can’t work in templates? Are we going to punish them for adding what may be good content with a good source if they do it the old fashioned way? It’s unworkable and unnecessary. - SchroCat (talk) 03:46, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree with your concerns. The language is meant to explicitly to welcome non-template contributions and advise against "punishing" contributors who do that. Specifically: "Contributions of manually-formatted citations from editors unfamiliar with or who simply do not care to use templates are welcome, and may be reformatted into templates by other editors without notification beyond a polite edit summary." and "contributions with manually-formatted citations are welcome". Is there some other language that would make that more clear? -- Beland (talk) 04:12, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I get that you want this to happen, but there’s no need to bludgeon every comment that is made. - SchroCat (talk) 04:20, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm trying not to bludgeon (and was actually hoping to just ignore this RFC for a few days); I'm answering the questions you asked. It was honestly unclear to me if you had read the proposed text which is supposed to solve exactly the problem you raised and upon thinking it through still came to the same conclusion, or if you were mostly just reacting to the title of the RFC? Maybe I'm missing something; do you think editors will feel that manually formatted contributions will be unwelcome when they read that templates are preferred, even though it also explicitly says those contributions are welcome? Do you think editors won't follow the guideline telling them not to complain about those contributions? Do you think just arriving at a page and seeing all the citations already using templates will put off potential contributors?
    I'm fine with this not happening - though I think it would be tidier and easier to maintain, I realize a lot of people have a lot of strong opinions about formatting. Hanyangprofessor2's questioning of the current guideline generated several comments favoring either encouraging templates or going even further and having a single citation style for all of Wikipedia. Seemed to me like it was time to check in and see if consensus on this has changed, but if it hasn't, there's plenty of work to be done cleaning up citations under the existing style rules. -- Beland (talk) 06:58, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    You really are bludgeoning this, despite saying you're not. Your name is already appearing far too frequently contradicting those !voting against this So far, I think nine people have commented in this thread and you've made nine comments throughout the thread, all to those who oppose it. Please just let please comment without interference. - SchroCat (talk) 07:48, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    This is supposed to be not merely a tallying up of opinions, but a discussion with the possibility of improvement and compromise. But if you are uninterested in exploring mitigation of whatever problem you are foreseeing and just want let your opinion stand, that's fine; I will sit in confusion given that we seem to be in agreement and disagreement simultaneously. -- Beland (talk) 08:59, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I am NOT tallying up opinions - that's a complete mischaracterisation of what I have written, which is clear to anyone reading it. I was pointing out that nine people have made comments in this thread (that's tallying contributors, not opinions) and you have now made ten comments. To quote from the guideline: "If your comments take up one-third of the total text or you have replied to half the people who disagree with you, you are likely bludgeoning the process". - SchroCat (talk) 09:31, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • @AirshipJungleman29, @David Eppstein, @Jacobolus, @Nikkimaria, @SchroCat: I wonder what you would think about a short, simple factual statement, like "While citation templates are the most popular choice, using them is not actually required". (If anyone's curious, we ran the numbers: about 80% of articles contain at least one CS1|2 citation template.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:28, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think the proposal is not just a solution in search of a problem, but a positive backwards stop that will inhibit editors, particularly the less experienced from adding citations. I am a huge fan and use them in 95 per cent of the material I add, but we should not be creating artificial hurdles that stop people from adding sources. That's only going to damage us. - SchroCat (talk) 07:48, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Based on the discussion above, I don't think that the OP has any interest in "creating artificial hurdles that stop people from adding sources". I think the goal is more like "if you put [https://www.example.com/source.html|Title of source] in ref tags, then let's have an official rule saying I can quietly turn that into {{cite web}} for you".
    Because, in practice, that's what happens. The manually formatted citations are almost never beautifully formatted examples of any style guide, they almost never form a "consistent" citation style, and they regularly do get converted to citation templates. We just sort of pretend in WP:CITEVAR that everything's equal, when it's really not equal. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:29, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Unfortunately (as I think you've found elsewhere!) once the language is added it really doesn't matter what the OP's intentions were. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:42, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    True, and I'm not wild about the proposed language. (For one thing, there's a lot of it.) But given the apparent intention, I think it might be possible to find language that meets the goal without making people think that it's a bot free-for-all. (Yes, that's an odd conclusion for text that doesn't mention bots at all, but I've had discussions in which I've told editors that if we moved one section of text out of a {{policy}} to another page, with no changes to the text and with its own copy of the {{policy}} tag on the new policy page, it would still be a policy, and they still thought it would result in the new policy page not being a policy. That's a plural they, by the way: two editors had difficulty with the concept. Wikipedia is one of the few sites on the internet that really does (and values) close reading, but we don't always pay attention.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:24, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose after reading through above. I'm a big fan of the templates, they help me input without much thought, and they help me understand what each piece of information is in others' sources. However, at its core, "This page in a nutshell: Cite reliable sources." It's gratifying when an IP editor adds a bare url, and if they want to manually add more information in plain text, this page should takes pains not to discourage this. Past a certain point of relevant information being included, the marginal benefit of encouraging gnoming to change manual sources into template sources seems limited. CMD (talk) 05:31, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Tentatively Support. As far as I can tell, this is how we operate by default in WP:MED, and I feel that the consistency of citation formatting is a big part of why medical articles tend to be easy to verify and to conduct further reading on. It also is pretty much immediately apparent when there's an "ugly duck" citation that is almost certainly subpar. I understand that not all of Wikipedia can or should be held to the standards of medicine, but at the same time, I think our pages are broadly a good demonstration of why this proposal has merit. That being said, I would like to hear what @Boghog has to say about this, and may well change my mind depending on what the medical citation master says. Just-a-can-of-beans (talk) 06:37, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. We need to be rigid about verifiability but not about how to write references. See the top of my user page which starts with a large quote symbol and Don't worry about formatting references; just get all the information in there. Effective editors work in different ways and it is a mistake to try to dictate what they should do when it does not affect the reading of articles. I happen to love reference templates, but the hard task is to teach new editors why references are important and how to find the right kind of sources. Lets focus on that. StarryGrandma (talk) 14:34, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose Per Nikkimaria, CMD, and StarryGrandma. Ealdgyth (talk) 14:41, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose implementation by bots, weak oppose in general. Previous discussion is full of complaints about what a bad job bots do of creating templates. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:05, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose, per most of the comments above, particularly StarryGrandma. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:31, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Mixed
    I don't see any wording encouraging people to use bots. Are you referring to "They keep citations formatted in a consistent way and are more machine-readable for a variety of purposes."? Would you like to have that sentence dropped? -- Beland (talk) 22:56, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    It isn't sufficient to not mention bots. The proposal should include language that strongly discourages bots. I'll add more on machine readability below. Jc3s5h (talk) 23:06, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Isn't the bot approval process the right place to make that sort of decision? Normally that's done on a per-bot basis rather than a blanket rule, to take into account different pros and cons. -- Beland (talk) 23:37, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The bot approval group is very pro-bot, and will be thrilled to approve citation-related bots with an error rate that many of us think is far too high. When is the last time a bot author was told "fix every mistake your bot made and do nothing else on Wikipedia until you're finished, on pain of a community band"? The prohibition must be in the guideline. Jc3s5h (talk) 23:52, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Are you talking about unsupervised bots or those with many human operators who are supposed to verify the output? I used to operate an unsupervised bot and administrators did not hesitate to block the bot if it made mistakes which I then had to clean up or explain as not mistakes. -- Beland (talk) 02:10, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    From what I've seen, users who invoke supposedly supervised bots don't do an effective job of making sure the output is correct. A bot that tries to automatically change an article from free-form citations to citation templates would produce a mass of changes all mixed together, and the human thinking process just isn't good at checking that kind of change. Jc3s5h (talk) 02:16, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Nothing in this proposal suggests writing a bot to change citations from manually-formatted to template. The whole idea is that bots have an easier time after the conversion, because the humans have done the hard part of segmenting strings into appropriate semantic fields. -- Beland (talk) 06:59, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    The current rule of not allowing changes from consistent non-templated to templates serves as a restriction against doing this with bots. So it does encourage the use of bots, even though it doesn't mention bots. Jc3s5h (talk) 09:41, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support, the technical benefits are overwhelming. But oppose bots; understanding is still needed to avoid errors. Ifly6 (talk) 16:54, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - a one-size-fits-all diktat is not helpful. As long as citations are clearly and accurately presented to our readers it does not matter a rap whether templates are or are not used. Tim riley talk 17:18, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose - what matters is that sufficient information is given to allow readers and editors to know what the source is and to find the information. Enforcing citation templates (which this proposal will effectively mean even if it isn't wording that strongly or meant by the proposers) won't help this and will inevitably break some references as data is unthinkingly rammed into fields just to get it into the template - whether correct or not. In addition forcing some "One True Wikipedia Reference Style" will drive some editors away, because it isn't the style that the editors are used to / is standard in that field, and this is just the sort of annoying little thing that gets some people angry enough to quit.Nigel Ish (talk) 17:54, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • support - "use whatever is easiest for you, and let someone else worry about reformatting it to get the many benefits of structured syntax" doesshould not be controversial (which isn't to say I'm surprised it is - I've opposed a lot of style standardization proposals in the past myself). I'm just having trouble finding a persuasive objection in the opposes as to why we should not have better archive links, why we should get in the way of the many tools that improve accessibility and verifiability, why we should make it harder for users of visual editor to work on citations, etc. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 22:44, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • "They keep citations formatted in a consistent way and are more machine-readable for a variety of purposes." I've seen too much sentiment that being machine-readable and bot-friendly comes first, and the ability of the editor to write a cite for any source the editor has access to comes second. The book in the editor's hand doesn't have an ISBN? Let bots add an ISBN for a similar book. Source has a publication date that's not supported by templates, such as Michaelmas term, 2001? Issue an error message. The guideline should very strongly discourage changing a manual citation into a template if there isn't a citation template that fully supports the source, and if the editor who wants to make the change can't prove the correctness of the revised citation because the templatephile doesn't have the source in hand. Jc3s5h (talk) 00:03, 8 May 2025 (UTC) (fixed in light of comments)[reply]
    One boldtext vote per person please. FWIW I agree any act of implementing a template must retain all of the information in the citation. I cannot imagine that would be controversial, though. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 00:54, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Regardless of templates we cannot violate the MOS. Any instance in violation of MOS:DATE needs to be changed whether we use a template for it or not. PARAKANYAA (talk) 00:58, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per Rhododendrites, Chatul, Ifly6. The proposal doesn't call for the abolition of handcrafted citations or the use of bots to convert those. Some free-form citations are not well-"crafted" and need improving. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 00:44, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. I am surprised people have so many issues with the bots, I have never seen them change anything besides doi/hdl and curly quotes and archive urls. But even then, if the bots are the problem that isn't the fault of the template that's the fault of the bots. Reverting people for having a wrong format in their content additions is already prohibited in the policy, so that wouldn't change. The templates have a lot of benefit and inconsistency is a negative. PARAKANYAA (talk) 00:57, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    They do sometimes make a mistake. One example of such a mistake is this edit. The bot added a URL pointing at a book review (whose title is exactly the same as the book) instead of the book itself. That bot can be triggered by any editor, who is supposed to then check the output (the instructions for that bot say "Editors who activate this bot should carefully check the results to make sure that they are as expected"), but not everyone does, and even if they do, we can't guarantee that they'd notice a problem like this every single time. (The editor who failed to catch it has been blocked.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:18, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Has a similar kind of thing happened with the CS1 templates, not {{Citation}}? I see why the universal one would have that problem because it thinks all documents are the same thing. PARAKANYAA (talk) 02:25, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Humans make careless mistakes no matter whether they are editing on full manual or semi automated. Given how many IP edits are vandalism, uncited rumors, heavily biased, ungrammatical, and so on, I would expect editors using semi-automated tools are reverted at a much lower rate than rando humans. -- Beland (talk) 03:07, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Parakanyaa, you can test it in a sandbox. Just copy that {{citation}} to a template, switch it to {{cite book}}, and trigger the bot for the sandbox page. If the bot makes the same mistake, you'll know that the problem isn't unique to the CS2 template. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:14, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Citation bot mixes up the cs1 templates all the time, converting one to the other, often getting it wrong, and even when it gets it right doing a partial conversion that makes the converted template erroneous. And in many cases, the human editors before the bot also choose the wrong cs1 template Having multiple citation types is just one more thing for humans and the bot to get wrong; I don't think it provides much useful bot guidance. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:28, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Humans also mess up citations all the time when they type things in, leaving off critical information, misspelling names, mangling the formatting, and leaving a lot of dangling references as pages get edited.
    Whether semi-automation makes humans more or less accurate and whether any mistakes are worth the massive productivity gains seem like questions for the bot approval process. The answer depends a lot on the bot. If you think Citation bot, for example, is doing more harm than good, then request to have its bot approval partially or completely revoked. Someone could easily write a more conservative bot that makes fewer mistakes for humans to stumble over, but which leaves more work undone. I don't hear anyone complaining that InternetArchiveBot, for example, makes mistakes. I wouldn't want to throw the IABot baby out with the Citation bot bathwater with an indiscriminate rejection of automation.
    I also can't imagine bots operating on manually formatted text are going to make fewer mistakes than bots operating on machine-readable templates. If we mandate supporting non-template citations forever, sooner or later every bot task that currently only looks at template citations is going to be attempted for non-template citations. -- Beland (talk) 06:56, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support per Beland's proposer rationale, Just-a-can-of-beans, Ifly6, PARAKANYAA and others. Changing manually written citations to some template format is an improvement and should not be discouraged. Gawaon (talk) 07:24, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose as written. Don't mess with people's citation styles. There are not many articles where this proposal would have a large effect (only those with consistent non-templated citations) but on those articles we should respect the WP:CITEVAR choices of the authors. —Kusma (talk) 09:55, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. Citations should be clear and complete. The template formats are often rigid and unhelpful. MOS:CITEVAR gets it right: If an article uses a clear and consistent format, it is a gigantic waste of time for people to come by and change it to their preferred template and start an argument about whether they even did that correctly. And, as others have noted, templates may discourage some users from contributing at all if they feel that they will have trouble using them. -- Ssilvers (talk) 15:05, 8 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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