Template talk:Cite news

Usage

 * title is required, rest is optional.
 * author: Author
 * last works with first to produce
 * coauthors allows additional authors
 * publisher: Publisher, if any.
 * date: date of publication. ISO 8601 YYYY-MM-DD format recommended.
 * accessdate: Date when item was accessed. ISO 8601 YYYY-MM-DD format recommended.
 * work: If this item is part of a larger work, name of that work.
 * pages overrides page

Origin
This template was originally created in April 2006 by User:LrdChaos through a copy from the then extant Wikipedia template.

The version of code introduced in edit version 235112 (2006-06-07) corresponds to Wikipedia template version 56229170 (2006-05-31). This was brought over intact with little modification. The 'Usage' and 'Examples' sections below have also been updated, in these cases from Wikipedia template talk version 56511873 (2006-06-02). Ceyockey 23:26, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Wikilinkage of access date for the URL parameter
This is a debated feature in Wikipedia. At present, the access date is not wikilinked in the Wikiquote version. Ceyockey 23:33, 7 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I've restored the wiki linkage. We've now established the 366 articles that permit use to have useful date formatting, so are moving toward preference-based date formatting, not away from it. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 17:45, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
 * The one thing I still don't like about moving toward pref-based date formatting here is that we don't have pages for years, and so they all appear as red links. It's really another topic for another place, since it affects all manner of things, not just this template. &mdash;LrdChaos 18:34, 21 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, we are starting to get year pages now, but my preference is for the access date to remain unlinked, for one simple reason: it clutters the "what links here" listings for year pages with completely irrelevant articles. God forbid someone should want to search for Wikiquote articles which are actually related to a particular year.  121a0012 15:53, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Linking accessdate
Okay, it looks like we have a content dispute on this template, which has a significant impact on many articles whichever way it goes. I would rather have it display a redlink for the year in the accessdate parameter than unlink it and show the reader-unfriendly YYYY-MM-DD. LrdChaos and Ceyockey prefer the other way around.

My position is this: Wikiquote should follow Wikipedia practice in presenting dates in the format most comfortable to each reader, which requires accessdate to be linked. I recently spent a full month creating a meaningful collection of "Month date" articles as the first and most important step in making this possible, and I fully intend to complete the job by establishing year articles, as soon as we can figure out what their content should be. Meanwhile, not linking accessdate subtly undermines the effort to get this important source parameter included, as it can confuse WP editors who are used to it being linked. For those who do add the date, they may put it in any number of forms, with or without links, because the lack of the one-method link markup borrowed from WP will discourage folks from fixing any malformatting.

The only downside I see is that it displays a redlink for now, but there vastly more redlinks for inappropriate articles (like obscure names; links to phrases too specific for WQ articles because the text was copied from Wikipedia, links and all; etc.) than there are for the relatively paltry number of sources with access dates that we have. I'm betting that I'll get the year articles done long before we put even a noticeable dent in that cleanup effort. Furthermore, as I tend to get things done most quickly when a problem arises, if people start creating year articles by following these redlinks before I get to it, I'll probably move that up in the schedule. (And you can stop that train of thought, folks — this is not a suggestion. &#9786;)

How does everyone else feel about this? Are we that worried about these redlinks? Do we have anyone else who wants to participate in fleshing out the year articles? Do we have editors who have concerns about date formatting? I invite discussion. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 18:48, 23 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Well, as far as YYYY-MM-DD being reader-unfriendly, it's actually how I prefer to look at the date (having conditioned myself to use that for a lot of things), though a recent change to Mediawiki that replaced the seperation between date and time in that format with "T" is almost enough to get me to change my display prefs back.


 * I personally dislike the redlinks, as is obvious from me having unlinked the accessdate again. Particularly next to the blue links of month and day, the red link of the year is visually very jarring (less so when surrounded by "normal" black text). And, quite frankly, I'm not sure that we'll ever have reason to create meaningful articles for years, just because there are so many of them, and so many quotes are undated, so there would be large gaps. Maybe we could just create dummy pages for years instead of actually taking on the huge task of trying to fill and maintain them; with a bot or semi-bot process, and then following up by protecting the pages (or perhaps not, for cases when a film or show has a solely-numeric name) we could have this done in a rather short time. &mdash;LrdChaos 19:26, 23 August 2006 (UTC)


 * I'm not crazy about dummy articles, but I haven't seen any compelling solutions yet, so I guess it's worth considering. I suppose we could create redirect pages to Wikipedia's year articles, which will not redirect automatically (at least in any foreseen version of MediaWiki), but would give a link for readers to follow to something meaningful. It seems a bit ugly, though. It would also artificially inflate our article count, which I'm not too crazy about, either.

Since the above debate, we have established year articles for most if not all of the years for which we might expect to cite news articles, with a commitment from various editors to fill in gaps as we come across them with standard-format placeholder articles. I believe this eliminates the reason for removing the links for the accessdate parameter. On this basis, I have been bold and restored the link. If there remain plausible objections that haven't been raised here, I invite everyone to raise theme here. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 16:34, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Template needs an update
The Wikipedia template: Template:Cite news has a lot of more parameters. Could someone please update this template here? thanks! --Matt57 01:38, 3 December 2009 (UTC)