Help talk:Citation Style 1

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citeseerx links are ALL dead

It seems that the 10.***** citeseerx links seems to no longer work. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 13:06, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

Looks like citeseerx changed something and broke ~17,000 articles using |citeseerx= and ~930 articles using the base url that cs1|2 uses. No doubt, there are broken links at other-language wikis as well because many other-language wikis copy articles with their citations from us...

It will not be me, but someone should tell citeseerx that they have done a bad thing...

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:42, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

And if you do a "view source" on the new pages, the 10.* number is NOT there. "I felt a great disturbance in the Wiki, as if millions of Unique IDs suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened." AManWithNoPlan (talk) 14:20, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

I have submitted an e-mail through their Contact Us page, FWIW. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:06, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

API worked on 2022-10-12, but failed on 2022-10-17. Very recent. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 21:29, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Template:Reply to any word? AManWithNoPlan (talk) 13:10, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

No response. I even checked my spam folder. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:25, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

This is certainly a fine-how-do-you-do. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 14:39, 9 November 2022 (UTC)

Compare these URLs and what they are and you will notice something https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/30e2498e8104724e200f1f0b507cad9cfb9ddca7 and https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/doc_view/pid/30e2498e8104724e200f1f0b507cad9cfb9ddca7 AManWithNoPlan (talk) 14:55, 9 November 2022 (UTC)

Template:Reply to: This to me seems to point to CiteSeerX being effectively useless. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 22:29, 9 November 2022 (UTC)

Template:Ping: That's a great discovery about the IDs (SHA-1, actually) of Semantic Scholar matching. I found a solution to fix the links which could be automated (bot) as long as we know the DOI (or arxiv id, or PubMed ID) from the citation template.

1. Fetch https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1/paper/{paper_id} (see API doc)
   • https://api.semanticscholar.org/graph/v1/paper/DOI:10.1257/aer.90.4.1005
2. The response looks like this:
   • {"paperId": "eb8c5efb4e4b19eeda991e473fc163905c5d8d9a", "title": "Losing Sleep at the Market: The Daylight Saving Anomaly: Reply"}
3. Extract that hexadecimal ID and put it in a CiteSeerX URL. So it becomes:
   • https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/doc_view/pid/eb8c5efb4e4b19eeda991e473fc163905c5d8d9a — web page, or
   • https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=eb8c5efb4e4b19eeda991e473fc163905c5d8d9a — direct PDF link. (doi= does not actually take a DOI.)

That's annoying of course. It doesn't make use of the (former?) CiteSeerX ID at all. Moreover, in the random example I chose (from Daylight saving time) the result is wrong! 10.1257/aer.90.4.1005 is actually the paper "Losing Sleep at the Market: The Daylight Saving Anomaly", but what SS returned was "Losing Sleep at the Market:The Daylight Saving Anomaly: Reply".

One last note, which you may have already noticed. The hexadecimal ID is actually the SHA-1 sum of the PDF. Really. I can't think of this being useful to us, though, since we generally don't already have the exact PDF to take a checksum of to build the URL. Micler (talk) 02:48, 10 November 2022 (UTC)

It certainly broke. All citeseerx hits on Google are broken. I've been checking to see if anyone on the internet had noted this (or if it was just me), and so far this post is the only notice I've found. Micler (talk) 14:21, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

These folks noticed, but they had only 25 links to fix, so they looked them up and edited them manually. That's not really possible here. I tried just now to send an e-mail to the person listed as the head of the project. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:08, 9 November 2022 (UTC)

Their internal search results are crap, so this is a hard task. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 00:30, 10 November 2022 (UTC)

Template:Reply to Would that be Lee Giles who you emailed? I notice on their People -> Team page, if you hover over each person, it gives a sentence about what they do. It seems like breaking 18,000 citations on Wikipedia pages is pretty awful, and they should be told about it emphatically, so they can reconsider if this change was intentional. If you don't get a response, I'll be happy to start emailing each of them, making the case until we get a response. Micler (talk) 02:48, 10 November 2022 (UTC)

Template:Ping I found the jackpot, of sorts. A data dump that relates the old CiteSeerX ID to the SHA1. https://archive.org/download/citeseerx-csx_citegraph.2017-03-31/citeseerx_checksums.tsv.gz (expands to 624 MB) contains over 10 million entries of simply (SHA,ID). So if I have 10.1.1.676.1062, I can search the file and I find dc6437569a8a2ddd1c22ef623f8fdd6e74a1b535. Voilà, now I can access the new CiteSeerX website: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/doc_view/pid/dc6437569a8a2ddd1c22ef623f8fdd6e74a1b535 . (It takes a while to ctrl-f or grep through that many lines. Loading this file into a database would probably help.) A bot could totally do this to fix citations. Unforunately, the data only covers up to early 2017. Micler (talk) 03:31, 10 November 2022 (UTC)

Any thoughts on what to do long-term? AManWithNoPlan (talk) 12:16, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

I suppose that a bot or awb task might mark the ~200 articles using the base url (not necessarily in cs1|2 templates) with {{dead link}}. Perhaps IABot or some other might be able to find archives of the now broken urls. Something is happening with those because when this discussion started, there were ~930 articles using the base url.

For the ~17,000 articles with cs1|2 templates that use |citeseerx=, if there is another identifier (|doi= and the like) or |url= has a value, a bot or awb task can remove |citeseerx= and its assigned value on the presumption that |citeseerx= is redundant. If no other identifiers an no |url= make a url and mark the template with {{dead link}}.

For the ~50 articles that use {{cite citeseerx}}, we might mark that template as deprecated and at the same time tweak Module:Citation/CS1 to emit a deprecated-template error message. Or, instead of the error message, a bot or awb script might convert {{cite citeseerx}} to {{cite web}} and mark the new template with {{dead link}} so that IABot or some other might be able to find archives.

I don't know what to do about the ~45 articles that use {{CiteSeerX}}.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 14:34, 23 November 2022 (UTC)

I wouldn't say |citeseerx= is redundant, likely it is an un-paywalled link whereas the DOI is not.

Short-term I think converting using the database to hashes will fix the links and long-term the hashes will probably be fairly stable, unless they break the indexing scheme again. Mathnerd314159 (talk) 22:45, 28 November 2022 (UTC)

Long term, could we not display the 44-character value as the link item, but maybe _link_ or whatever. Also there are only a few Cite Citeseerx article usages left. RDBrown (talk) 01:02, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors

Template:Mdt —Trappist the monk (talk) 14:19, 18 November 2022 (UTC)

Not a volume, so what?

Can I suggest that series-number is added to the list of accessible parameters for {{Cite book}}? On a number of occasions recently, I've come across a book which is part of a numbered series, but is described as a number, not a volume in that series (a situation often found with monographs, for instance). However, unless there's a workaround I'm not aware of, the volume parameter can't used here because it prefixes the number with "Vol." when displayed as a reference. So then, what to do? If one state the series name alone it can looks slightly odd, but ideally one doesn't want to omit that information altogether.

See here for an example of what I'm talking about.

(Edwin of Northumbria (talk) 02:37, 19 November 2022 (UTC))

In your example, this is not a numbered series, it is named ("Publications of the Association... etc."). The volumes are numbered. But even if the series was numbered (e.g. "2nd Series") semantically there would no difference between "volume 6", "number 6", or "volume number 6". These templates report the value as a volume ("Vol."), with the implicit understanding that other expressions are equivalent, even when they are disallowed for the sake of simplicity and efficiency. 23.246.74.210 (talk) 04:17, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

I'm slightly puzzled. The only example of a series given on the {{Cite book}} page is "History of the Second World War, United Kingdom Military Series". This doesn't seem to me to be any different to "Publications of the Association...", which isn't regarded as being part of the title of the book in question on either the WorldCat or British Library website (indeed on the latter it is explicitly referred to as the series name). Anyway, for the sake of argument, let's assume that the book is the 6th in that series. It is of course correct that volume and series-number would then be semantically equivalent, but that wasn't the point I was making. For whatever reason, the publishers chose not to use the term "volume", therefore it would be preferable to have the capacity to reflect this (an alternative means of doing so would be to use the volume parameter in conjunction with a switch that could be used to suppress the "Vol." prefix).

(Edwin of Northumbria (talk) 07:14, 19 November 2022 (UTC))

Respectfully, I object. Will readers be confused by the presence of "Vol."? I don't think so. Suppressing the label would require additional logic in the module. The added routines would presumably be conditional, so this would require discussion on what exactly these conditions would be. But such conditions may introduce novel concepts to CS1/2, such as the concept of monograph. Then these concepts must be accommodated and justified within the system. This is enough to keep everybody here busy for months on end. The other option is to accept that this maybe a specialized case, and forms (templates) satisfy mostly generalized cases, as a rule. 69.203.140.37 (talk) 14:59, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

I too don't understand the confusion. What's wrong with citing the 6th volume of that series as Publications of the Association of Ancient Historians, Vol. 6? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:12, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

Reference Tooltips and author-mask

The Reference Tooltips gadget displays a popup of the full reference when one mouses over a short reference (from {{harv}}, {{sfn}}, etc). When the full reference contains |author-mask=, typically used in the full reference list for subsequent works by the same author, it is displayed with dashes for the author name. That is easy to interpret in the context of the full reference list, but because the gadget presents the full reference in isolation, the gadget user does not get the author's name (though the short citation will have the surname).

This is the best the gadget can do at present, because the dashes are all there is in the rendering of the full reference. Might it be possible to include both, with varying display? Kanguole 18:41, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

If this is possible, I don't know if it is, I suspect that changes to both Module:Citation/CS1 and MediaWiki:Gadget-ReferenceTooltips.js will be required. Perhaps cs1|2 could render masked names and their masks in <span>...</span> tags with appropriate class names where both the mask and the name are rendered in the html. Only the mask displays on the page and only the name displays in the tooltip:

{{cite book |title=Title |author=EB Green |author-mask=2}}

<cite id="CITEREFEB_Green" class="citation book cs1"><span class="mask">&mdash;&mdash;</span><span class="masked">EB Green</span>. ''Title''.</cite>

where:

.mask {}

is empty (or non-existent) and where

.masked {display:none}

hides the 'name'. Such a citation would render like this on the page:

——EB Green. Title. – Template:Small

Presumably – I know squat about what .js can do – the gadget might then rename the classes in the html when it renders a tool tip so that the mask is hidden and the name is displayed:

——EB Green. Title. – Template:Small

I would not be surprised to learn that there is a better way of doing this.

Obviously, it will be necessary to get a buy-in from whomever it is who maintains mw:Reference Tooltips.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 20:34, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

The other thing that could be done that requires no change on our part on our wiki at least is to pull the information from the Coins. Izno (talk) 21:30, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

I thought that at first but for the .js coder, would be more work, and for the cases where the name is an editor's name, the name is not available in the metadata because COinS doesn't support editor names. For contributor/author names, the first author name if written in the template using |first=/|last= is put into &rft.aufirst and &rft.aulast. Subsequent enumerated |first=/|last= pairs are put into the metadata as &rft.au=Last, First; |author= also goes into the metadata as &rft.au=Author. The .js would have to assemble the first author name and maintain some sort of internal counting to get the other masked names from the metadata. So, I thought it would be simpler for the .js coder to simply rename the mask and masked classes and be done. This (I think) is relatively easily done with a simple regex replace...

—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:11, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

This has been requested before. Probably using html spans is a good starting point of discussion for the CS1 module edits; {{tooltip}} is based on this tag. Its use of the id tag is interesting, as there is a unique citeref id already available to short citations, and could be used to pull the masked name from the appropriate full citation. This could be doable since citerefs are hierarchical, ordered (per name) according to the second concatenated element, normally a date element. 64.18.11.71 (talk) 01:46, 21 November 2022 (UTC)

CS1 maint: ref duplicates default: wrong maintenance message?

In my current sandbox, I am trying to use the {{cite NDB}} template that calls {{citation}}. If I use

*{{cite NDB|20|502|504|Planta||last1=Deplazes-Haefliger|first1=Anna-Maria|last2=Brunold|first2=Ursus|121979652|mode=cs1|ref={{sfnref|Deplazes-Haefliger|Brunold|2001}}}} I get a "CS1 maint: ref duplicates default" maintenance message but {{sfn|Deplazes-Haefliger|Brunold|2001}} works correctly. If I remove the ref= bit, the {{sfn}} no longer works (although the maintenance message says that my handwritten ref is the same as the default). Apparently the maintenance message is wrong in this case? Or am I doing something else wrong? Or does the {{cite NDB}} template need to be changed? —Kusma (talk) 16:11, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

This is being discussed at Help talk:Citation Style 1 § Notes.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:54, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

Magazine with volume, number and issue

The magazine Commodore Microcomputers has a volume number, a number and an issue number (Vol. 5, No. 5, no. 32.) Currently this shows as an error, but the issue does have these numbers. Usually, the number and issue are the same, but not here. Not sure what to do. [from Cite magazine] Auric talk 14:59, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

The magazine numbered issues two ways: per volume (vol. 5, number 5) and serially, per issue (overall number 32). A confusing but not rare practice. It was a bi-monthly. I assume that one or more volumes had more than 6 issues (specials? double issues?), so the serial number is 32 rather than 29. In the contents page the listing uses 3 variants: "Volume 5, Number 5, Issue 32 November/December 1984". The date variant for the issue is also used on the front page. I would use the first scheme, as ordered: Volume 5, Number/Issue 5. 50.75.226.250 (talk) 17:14, 26 November 2022 (UTC)

Must translation parameters use the translations in the text?

When a text is published with a translation, must |trans-quote= and similar parameters use the translation in the text, or may an editor substitute a translation that she believes to be more accurate? This question is prompted by https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hillel_the_Elder&curid=313892&diff=1125022169&oldid=1124176915, which I believe to be WP:OR. Either way, it would be helpful if the documentation of, e.g., |trans-title=, specified whether editors must respect the translations in the text. Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 14:50, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Yes, use the text, Quotes should be verbatim. Editor interpolations are allowed only for context, for example when substituting a generic "he" in the quote with the actual name of the person/character. The translated title is part of the work's publication data and the citation's retrieval data. Should be entered as is at all times. 50.75.226.250 (talk) 16:05, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

i18n editor-name / editor-annotation separator

Editor حبيشان has (correctly) tweaked the sandbox. When the citation has an editor name list and a publication date but does not have an author name list, the separator used to separate the last editor name from the editor annotation is a hard-coded <comma><space> pair. After the tweak, the module uses the value specified by name_sep in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration/sandbox (for en.wiki this is also a <comma><space> pair). Template:Cite compare Template:Cite compare —Trappist the monk (talk) 23:39, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

S2CID limit reached

Per Category:CS1 errors: S2CID, I would like to raise the currently configured limit of 254000000 due to new publications going beyond that number. For example, [1]https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Taxonomic-study-of-the-genus-Cyprideis-JONES%2C-1857-Sousa-Ramos/070b5685c32091ba9625901a4115943b5ca94548 Aithus (talk) 06:28, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

Dates for published editions of manuscripts.

When citing a published version of a manuscript, is there any reason to not require the |date= in the {{cite book}}, etc., to be the date published, with the date of the original manuscript relegated to the |orig-date= parameter? In particular, if the published version includes a translation, isn't the date of the translation what is importanat in the citation? Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 18:48, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

It all depends on what the editor read. If the editor read the published version of the manuscript, the date parameter should be set to the publication date of the published version, and the orig-date parameter could be used for the date of the manuscript. Whether the translation is more important than the original words depends on what the Wikipedia editor is writing about the source. Jc3s5h (talk) 18:56, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

I assumed that the editor read the version that he cited, and that he would have cited the original manuscript had he read it. Of course, he might have read both, but then I would expect a citation of both, as appropriate. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 19:08, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

The term "manuscript" may mean several different things. Can you be more specific? Is this about historical manuscripts predating print? Is it an author manuscript that was eventually published? Are they originals? Fascimiles? Tranlations that are manuscripts themselves? Normally, citation templates are not a good fit for citing stand-alone, original manuscripts, and there may also be availability issues. Perhaps a free-form citation is better for what you have in mind. Generally, formal citations cite works that are published (i.e. made more or less publicly available) and as stated above, the publication date is what is needed. 50.75.226.250 (talk) 21:35, 7 December 2022 (UTC)

For context, I noticed a change to

Template:Tq

and thought that the same considerations might be more relevant to more recent manuscripts, whatever the interpretation of the word in the help page. One example that comes to mind is the Babylonian Talmud, whose compilation continued into the 6th century CE.

I would expect a citation of, e.g., Ethics of the Fathers, to cite the date of publication rather than c.190 - c.230 CE. A secondary question is what to do when the publisher lists the editor as the author; in this case the original was wrottrn by Hillel the Elder, but Koren lists Rabbi Dr. Marc D. Angel as the author, presumably because he added notes and similar content, and in Judaic circles it is understood that the original text is Hillel's.. --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 00:12, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

I would suggest that as a rule, it is better to think of citations as discovery aids (of sources), not as bibliographic records or exact representations of a source's provenance. The emphasis is on finding things, and citations should be structured to represent the way sources are classified by their providers, so readers of the citation can easily discover the source. Some ready examples:

• Amazon
• WorldCat
• Library catalog of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America

So first, it is not a manuscript that is cited, but a later published translation with commentaries and annotations. Obviously the creators of that work are the primary contributors and the ones a reader would look for. That doesn't mean that you should not add the original date and author somewhere (perhaps in |orig-date=, perhaps in a note after the citation). The correct edition citation-wise seems to be |edition=1st Hebrew-English, even when the title identifies it as the "Neuwirth edition". This is mentioned in bibliographic "Notes", a field not normally indexed. 65.88.88.201 (talk) 20:27, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

Which ISBN?

I'm adding details to a citation, and the publisher shows

• ISBN-10: Template:ISBN
• ISBN-13: Template:ISBN

The documentation doesn't show |isbn-10= and |isbn-13= parameters. Which ISBN goes in the |isbn= parameter? Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 16:39, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

See ISBN documentation.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:53, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

When the 13 digit one is actually printed, use it over the 10 please. — xaosflux ^Talk 17:27, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

Cite book - separate introduction author

I am trying to cite the Introduction to the Oxford World's Classics version of The Varieties of Religious Experience. The author is William James, but the OWC version is edited by Matthew Bradley, who also wrote the introduction. I want my citation to look something like this:

Bradley, Matthew (2012). "Introduction". In James, William; Bradley, Matthew (ed.). The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. x

My problem is that if I list James as the author, then he is listed as the author of the introduction, which I do not want. But I also do not want to list him as an editor, because that is incorrect. And if I list them both as authors, it will cite them as joint authors, which is also wrong. At present I have:

{{cite book |editor-last=Bradley |editor-first=Matthew |author-first=James |author-last=William |title=The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature |date=2012 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=Oxford |page=x |chapter=Introduction}}

But that's not quite right because it implies that James wrote the introduction, when it was written by Bradley. Is there any way to get what I want with the cite book template? WJ94 (talk) 13:46, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

Maybe |contributor= / |contribution= may help:
Matthew Bradley (2012). Introduction. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. By William, James. Bradley, Matthew (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. x.
-- Michael Bednarek (talk) 13:55, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

Perfect, thank you! WJ94 (talk) 14:13, 9 December 2022 (UTC)

Add "admin" to generic names

Found at Earlimart pesticide poisoning * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 00:05, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Error in CS1 on clean mediawiki install; Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1 at line 2561: attempt to call field 'hyphen_to_dash' (a nil value)

Hi, the current version of CS1 causes the following error on a clean mediawiki install:

Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1 at line 2561: attempt to call field 'hyphen_to_dash' (a nil value).

Reverting this edit fixes it locally: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Module%3ACitation%2FCS1&type=revision&diff=1017669505&oldid=1017041380

This is the line in question:

if not utilities.in_array (config.CitationClass, cfg.templates_not_using_page) then
Page = A['Page'];
Pages = utilities.hyphen_to_dash (A['Pages']);
At = A['At'];

Mvolz (talk) 11:20, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Clearly this Template:Tq (which I understand to be an installation on a MediaWiki site that has never had the cs1|2 module) did not happen at en:Module:Citation/CS1 so where did it happen?

The diff you gave fixes an issue with utilities.has_accept_as_written(). That function returns two values (a string and a boolean). return utilities.has_accept_as_written (str) will return both which, if both are not required or handled by the calling function cause confusion. For the avoidance of confusion, the fix shown in the diff assigns the string returned by utilities.has_accept_as_written() to temp_str and then returns temp_str.

The Template:Color error message suggests that wherever this Template:Tq is, it doesn't have the current version of Module:Citation/CS1/Utilities. The has_accept_as_written() function is at line 121. If your Template:Tq does not have has_accept_as_written() in its Module:Citation/CS1/Utilities then the ~/Utilities module is the wrong version.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 14:24, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

Please update broken mr= link address

{{MR}} has used urls of the form https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr=1470715 since October 2017, and these currently work. The citation templates, for the |mr= parameter, instead currently use urls of the form https://www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr=1470715, and these currently give a 404 error. Can we fix the links to match {{MR}}, please? —David Eppstein (talk) 05:36, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Both work here. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:59, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Policy for wikilinking

What is the policy for adding internal wikilinks to the website= parameter for example? Should only the first reference from that website be linked? Or none or alle of them? PhotographyEdits (talk) 15:03, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

I believe the answer you'll get is that there isn't a policy. Some editors will only include a wikilink on a first reference, some will include it on every reference, and some will not include one at all. Imzadi 1979 → 16:49, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

@Imzadi1979 Ah, the reason I asked is that I wanted to write a bot that will link all of them automatically. If I'm going through Wikipedia as a whole, that means I'm creating a de facto policy. PhotographyEdits (talk) 17:08, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

I personally would oppose such a bot, and were it to edit on an article I've been maintaining, I'd revert such an edit. I think of the reference section similar to how I think about the rest of the article. I minimize the number of extra links in that section to push readers toward clicking the important links, which in that case are the external links to the specific sources. Extra links dilute the importance of the links that are there.

I do see some merit in wikilinking publishers and publication names, so that's why I keep to just first mentions as a balance when I do include them. Imzadi 1979 → 17:36, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

@Imzadi1979 So what about a bot that would wikilink the first occurrence of every publisher used in the references of an article? That sounds like what you're doing right now. If you'd oppose that, why? PhotographyEdits (talk) 19:11, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

I still think a bot is a bad idea, even for that. Bots follow consensus, and yours would attempt to create it as a fait accompli. I'm sure it would be considered disruptive, either because some editors think that lots of wikilinks in references are better, or that no wikilinks in references are better. So there are two camps of editors that would be potentially upset if a bot came and made changes to articles on their watchlists.

Now some sort of user script that could do the same thing may be helpful so editors can restore such a convention after a period of expansion or editing. Imzadi 1979 → 19:41, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Such a bot would likely not achieve consensus. There are other thing you should spend your time on. Bots don't get to make their own consensus, they implement a user-created one. Izno (talk) 17:46, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

@Izno If there currently isn't a consensus, then such a bot would not go against a consensus as well right? PhotographyEdits (talk) 19:33, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Bots need to be approved before they're allowed to operate widely. That approval requires consensus for the desired activity. This isn't a case where you'd get to ask for forgiveness instead of permission. Imzadi 1979 → 19:42, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

^. Please read WP:BOTPOL. Izno (talk) 19:46, 14 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! PhotographyEdits (talk) 19:51, 14 December 2022 (UTC)