Template talk:Page cite

Notes (2018)

Can we not add the "pages/s" text to this template. It looks terrible and makes the resulting citations difficult to read. Also please don't add unnecessary spaces into these templates. It messes up every page to which they are attached.

- Tjoneslo (talk) 06:27, 6 June 2018 (EDT)

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Thank you for your advice.

- Maksim-Smelchak (talk) 07:32, 6 June 2018 (EDT)

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I'm glad my advice is so valued. I'm going to remove the "page/s" test and make the return the citations to their former, pristine state.

- Tjoneslo (talk) 08:11, 6 June 2018 (EDT)

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Very much noted. No need for further edits.

- Maksim-Smelchak (talk) 00:38, 7 June 2018 (EDT)

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Seriously, why are we adding this?

- Tjoneslo (talk) 06:37, 7 June 2018 (EDT)

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Because it was requested by our customer base. Seriously.

- Maksim-Smelchak (talk) 17:40, 7 June 2018 (EDT)

More parameters (2019)

Although the current short list of parameters (citeName, name, page, article, version, edition) is adequate for most citations, particularly given how infrequently inline citations are used, it would be convenient to supply more parameters for citations when they're available.

For example, I'm currently importing some material from the [Traveller] Integrated Timeline, which cites publication, publisher, year, and page. Thus I propose adding "publisher" and "date" parameters, with documentation recommending either the unambiguous YYYY-MM-DD (ISO) format or spelling out months.

Additionally, there are a lot more parameters to citation templates on Wikipedia. Most are so unlikely to be used here that they'd be clutter, but a few are common enough that they'd add value.

1. "author" would make sense to give credit to authors.
2. "quote" would be useful for sources where it makes sense to quote the original source, but not in the main flow of the wiki article.
3. "URL" would be useful for web link sources, with "access-date" as a related parameter.

Since "page" and "author" can be plural, there could be a "pages" parameter (which works the same way as "page", except displaying "pp" instead of "p") and an "authors" parameter (which would be a synonym for "author" that one was assumed to use only for citations with multiple authors).

― Steve98052 (talk) 04:03, 11 September 2019 (EDT)

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Sounds great.

• How do you suggest doing it?

- Maksim-Smelchak (talk) 04:12, 11 September 2019 (EDT)

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I don't know how to edit a template, but I suppose I could study the code and see what happens if I change it. (My understanding is that one shouldn't do that except in the sandbox, to avoid breaking lots of pages at once.) Looking at the vastly more complicated Wikipedia template for guidance is probably a recipe for madness unless it's easier to read than I would expect – though that is possible; Wikipedia editors tend to be pretty conscientious about its most visible pieces).

To keep the template from getting too complicated (and save work), I don't think I'd do much in the way of rules testing. If someone mistakenly includes both "page" and "pages" in a page cite, it might expand to [Author]. [Title] ([Publisher], [Date]), p. [Page], pp. [Pages]. But that's the kind of mistake that's likely to get fixed by the person who makes the mistakes, or easily-enough fixed up by someone else.

I see that my proposed "publisher" and "date" parameters might be unnecessary, since it looks like the template already looks those up from I-don't-know-where.

― Steve98052 (talk) 04:30, 11 September 2019 (EDT)

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This template simply passes the parameters to Template:Ludography cite, which queries the data from the underlying RPGBooks cargo table. The output is formatted according the the Chicago style page citation style. This makes it consistent with the Template:Ludography ref template. The Chicago style (and this template) wants page(s) to be stated as a single number (e.g. 5), a comma separated list (e.g. 3,7) or a range (e.g. 19-32). The rest of the data is captured in the Template:InfoboxBook2 and stored in the RPGBook table.

This template isn't supposed to be the Wikipedia template. Those are generally way too complex to simply copy here. There is an Template:Unpublished cite for simply noting the author for information included here.. If you are really interested in citing URLs, we should probably have a Template: Web cite / Template: Web ref to include the URL and last visited parameters.

Tjoneslo (talk) 06:53, 11 September 2019 (EDT)