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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:
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.)"
Add "change citations from manually formatted to templates, without admonishing of contributors" to "Generally considered helpful"
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"
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."
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
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)
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.
Oppose addressing rationale: #1, #5 and #6 are disingenuous, don't care about #2, #3 and #4 are hopelessly naive, #7 is no different from present, and #8 is nonsensical. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 01:12, 7 May 2025 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
All else being equal, as much as adding one. Nikkimaria (talk) 02:00, 8 May 2025 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
@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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Oppose Per Nikkimaria, CMD, and StarryGrandma. Ealdgyth (talk) 14:41, 7 May 2025 (UTC)
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)
Oppose, per most of the comments above, particularly StarryGrandma. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 16:31, 7 May 2025 (UTC)
Mixed
Support Encouraging use of templates and adding missing facilities. Use of templates makes changes in style easier.
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
I suppose that's true, but only on the ~20% of pages (plus or minus those that use only one or two templates that violate an otherwise consistent style) that don't already use at least some templates. On most pages, bots could theoretically change citations from hand-formatted to template-formatted in order to achieve consistency or get rid of a style that violates the other rules of the MOS (like using all caps). Assuming that bot could get bot approval and be smart enough to actually do that. So it seems like that should already be a huge problem if it was something actually likely to happen. -- Beland (talk) 00:18, 9 May 2025 (UTC)
Support, the technical benefits are overwhelming. But oppose bots; understanding is still needed to avoid errors. Ifly6 (talk) 16:54, 7 May 2025 (UTC)
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)
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)
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. — Rhododendritestalk \\ 22:44, 7 May 2025 (UTC)
"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)
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. — Rhododendritestalk \\ 00:54, 8 May 2025 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Oppose The citation templates are too fiddly and fussy and focussed on formatting. What matters most for the reader is not the format but the legitimacy of the citation. A relevant quotation from the source and a URL to link to it are the best value for verification but the citation templates tend to obscure this with bibliographic clutter. Andrew🐉(talk) 21:21, 8 May 2025 (UTC)
I suggest the opposite is true. The formatting of a properly constructed manual citation requires special knowledge; filling in parameters of a template doesn't and results in proper and consistent formatting. Many sources don't have URLs and require other identification means – that's not "bibliographic clutter". Even for online sources, a mere URL is clearly not enough, and quotations are rarely required. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 01:04, 9 May 2025 (UTC)
The purpose of a citation is purely functional – to verify a stated fact. My impression is that editors such as Michael regard formatting of citations as an end in itself – an elegant craft like calligraphy or concrete poetry. But form should follow function and the current templates don't assist the function. A functional template would contain semantic features such as AI verification and a specification of the claim being made. Anyway, it seems apparent that we disagree and so consensus is lacking. Andrew🐉(talk) 22:04, 9 May 2025 (UTC)
Current templates do perform some validation which manual formatting does not, for example with date formats or if some parts of the author seem to be missing or incorrect, or if a web page is being cited but no URL is given. They highlight these errors in categories other editors can find, to help minimize the number of readers who try to use a broken citation. If we had AI capable of reading a web page and determining whether or not the content there supports the cited sentence, we probably wouldn't need templates because we could just have AI fix all the formatting errors and inconsistencies that humans leave. -- Beland (talk) 04:09, 10 May 2025 (UTC)
My impression is that current AI technology is just about capable of confirming that a citation supports what an article says. And it might go further to assess whether other, uncited sources are in general agreement with the cited source. Automating the fact-checking of our articles would be better than providing selected citations and expecting each reader to repeat the fact-checking themself. Andrew🐉(talk) 16:23, 10 May 2025 (UTC)
I'm an AI engineer; that's nowhere near true. -- Beland (talk) 18:00, 10 May 2025 (UTC)
My impression is based on use of Gemini Deep Research which does a web search and then analyses the results. That seems somewhat different from a LLM and more relevant to validation of citations. Andrew🐉(talk) 09:22, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
From what I can tell, Gemini Deep Research is simply a framework that organizes repeated LLM runs against a larger set of web pages than vanilla Gemini. -- Beland (talk) 22:19, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
You could try testing 100 or so statements for yourself, but I expect high false positive and false negative results would make such a system not useful for a variety of reasons. 1.) LLMs aren't reliable even for comparing literal statements. That's compounded when the article is summarizing at a higher level than the sources, using very different words. 2.) If multiple sources are cited for the same sentence, it's difficult to know which parts of the sentence are supported by each source, and if all parts of the sentence are supported by at least one. 3.) Segmentation in general is difficult. Is a citation at the end of a paragraph for the whole paragraph or just for one sentence? If there is a citation in the middle of the sentence and one at the end, which words are covered by the first cite? We don't need AI to point out unreferenced paragraphs or sentences, and we already have a backlog of hundreds of thousands of manual tags for that. 4.) I don't know of any way to ensure that the AI hasn't been trained on Wikipedia content or web pages that reuse Wikipedia content; it could easily report all facts in Wikipedia are true simply because they appear in Wikipedia.
There's also the practical considerations of cost and execution time. It currently takes over a day just to run a spell check of Wikipedia with a donated server. I haven't yet solved the engineering problem of running a full grammar check in less than a year of calculation time. It might be feasible to run an AI fact checker on a single page, but even that would require a large number of queries and someone would need to pay for a subscription beefy enough to handle that. We would need infrastructure to track which articles and statements had been checked, and I haven't even gotten that built for spell check yet. -- Beland (talk) 00:11, 12 May 2025 (UTC)
I just asked Gemini Deep Research "Please fact-check the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wendt" as this is an article that I worked on today. Its action plan was quite sensible
Identify the main factual assertions within the article, including but not limited to: (a) Biographical information (e.g., birth date, place of birth, education). (b) Key career achievements and timelines (e.g., notable roles, particularly in "Cheers", filmography, theatre work). (c) Awards, nominations, and recognitions. (d) Significant personal life details mentioned (e.g., family, marriage).
For each significant factual assertion identified, conduct targeted web searches using multiple reputable and independent sources (e.g., established news organizations, biographical databases, academic publications, official entertainment industry resources) to find corroborating or contradictory information.
Compare the information found from external sources with the claims made in the Wikipedia article, noting any discrepancies, inconsistencies, or unsupported statements.
Investigate any conflicting information by consulting additional reliable sources to ascertain the most accurate and widely accepted facts.
Evaluate the neutrality of the Wikipedia article's content, looking for any potential bias, unsourced opinions presented as facts, or overly promotional/critical language.
Examine the references and citations provided in the Wikipedia article. Assess their quality, reliability, and whether they directly support the specific claims they are attributed to.
Synthesize the findings to provide an overall assessment of the Wikipedia article's factual accuracy, highlighting specific claims that are well-supported, those that are inaccurate or misleading, and areas that lack sufficient credible sourcing.
Analyze Results
Create Report
Ready in a few mins
The results took about 5 mins and were quite voluminous -- pages of output. The details and analysis seemed consistently rational and to the point. I was especially interested in its comments on a passage that I had added myself. "Wendt, playing the character Norm, made a prominent entrance to the Cheers bar in every episode. He would be greeted by a cheer of "Norm!" and make a wisecrack as he walked to his barstool. This regular bit of business was a highlight of the show. Disparaging references to the character's wife, Vera, and the wretched state of his life were other running gags." I'd written this as a paragraph with a citation at the end. Another editor had subsequently merged this paragraph with others to make a wall of text. And another editor had cited a YouTube video in the middle of my paragraph which caused confusion.
The issue in this case is that Wikipedia citations don't clearly specify what they are citing. The reader has to make assumptions from the proximity of the citation and the surrounding text and it's easy for this to become unhinged as the text and citations are moved around. A citation should capture the text that is being cited when it is added so that any subsequent drift can be understood.
The overall level and quality of the AI analysis was debatable but seemed comparable with what one would get from an average Wikipedia editor. The advantage of the AI is that it can do it all mechanically and doesn't tire. There is clearly big potential here for such a tool to make systematic checks and highlight issues for investigation. This would be comparable with WP:EARWIG which is routinely used to check for copyvio.
Without access to the results of this automated evaluation, I can't say whether it was accurate or inaccurate. For example, you didn't quote what it said about the paragraph on Norm's entrances.
It seems like many pages of textual output is not helpful in automating fact-checking, especially if it contains mistakes that can only be detected by human fact-checking. What would be helpful is having the system flag which sentences are and are not verified by the given sources. Having it go off and consult web pages which are not cited and thus have no bearing on the question being asked seems like a lot of wasted work, which may cause the human interpreting the results to have to do more work to sift through that. -- Beland (talk) 02:11, 22 May 2025 (UTC)
The details are not important as it was a proof of concept. Running this tool is not as difficult or expensive as you seem to suppose so I encourage you to try it yourself.
The point is that the current system of citations is quite weak as a form of verification. Whether they use templates or not, the burden is currently on each reader to read and make sense of the cited works. A system of verification and fact-checking which was performed for the reader -- either on-demand or as an offline process would be better.
I would argue the details are what make such a system feasible vs. infeasible. You only ran the AI on one article, but there are almost seven million articles, and it would by no means be feasible to do that if the goal is for editors to know what changes articles need to become 100% accurate.
If the goal is for readers to fact-check a single Wikipedia article they are interested in, that's a different problem of a different scale. Readers cannot trust the output of an AI like the one you ran to be accurate or to detect errors in Wikipedia articles, especially since the AI may have been trained on bogus websites or erroneous Wikipedia articles. They would have to fact-check that output by checking its sources. For establishing truth there is no way around applying the traditional techniques of critical thinking, tracing citations, and evaluating the reliability of sources.
Readers who want to do this anyway can already do it just like you did, and I don't see how their ability to do that has anything to do with whether or not our citations use templates. -- Beland (talk) 23:04, 22 May 2025 (UTC)
Support. Metadata is useful; that's pretty much all there is to it. One day we should just use AIs to convert all citations we have into one uniform style, and do it dynamically. --Piotrus at Hanyang| reply here 05:42, 9 May 2025 (UTC)
If we have metadata, we should not use it to convert all citations into a uniform style, we should use it like a BibTeX database and allow displaying of the citations in any suitable style. There are massive differences in citation styles and practices between different academic disciplines and one size does not fit all there. —Kusma (talk) 07:38, 9 May 2025 (UTC)
Oppose. Wikipedia needs to remain accessible. The majority of contributors don't use citations at all. The most important thing for increasing Wikipedia's reliability is to go from no-citations to relevant citations-of-any-format, not to format citations we already have perfectly. Doing this requires the barrier of adding a citation to be as low as possible - someone dropping off plaintext, simple citations needs to be encouraged. I use the citation templates myself usually, but the plain text ones are still fine and not a problem - the value add of microformats is way too small to outweigh scaring off contributors who want to use plain text and would find having their citations forcibly turned into the templates off-putting. (For the scenario where an editor would explicitly like some passing help in formatting their citations with the templates but isn't sure how, no problem with having some noticeboard to drop such requests off, as long as there is some "I am a major contributor" checkbox to avoid passing editors from dropping every single article with plaintext refs in there.) SnowFire (talk) 14:00, 12 May 2025 (UTC)
Why not provide tools that make it easier to add citations in a standard format than to manually type in wikitext? There would be no need to say that they have to use the tools, just say that they might save the editor some time. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 15:27, 12 May 2025 (UTC)
These tools already exist. Have you ever been to an edit-a-thon aimed at new editors? One of the words of wisdom is to run away from these citation tools as fast as you can and say "yeah if you become an expert you can come back and worry about this later." About the best case scenarios are tools which are "drop a raw URL in, get a formatted citation" but anything more complex than that is asking for trouble. If we make it a "mistake" to stop at a plaintext citation, some people will react by not adding citations, which is far worse a loss than the exceptionally minor gain of the auto-formatting. SnowFire (talk) 16:06, 12 May 2025 (UTC)
Oppose as per various points mention above. In addition (citation) templates imho are often a pain for editors working across several language wikipedias, as each wikipedia tends to have its own non-standardized template zoo.--Kmhkmh (talk) 16:31, 12 May 2025 (UTC)
Support. I've been using computers to edit and format text longer than most folks here. The idea that people want to hand-format references just blows my mind. Bibliographic citations are structured data and should be managed in ways which preserve that structure for all the reasons described above. On wiki, that means {{cite}} templates. And yes, I'm one of those "inexperienced" users who prefers the Visual Editor. The citation tools built into VE are infuriatingly clumsy, but still better than hand-formatting citations. RoySmith(talk) 13:21, 14 May 2025 (UTC)
The idea that people want to hand-format references just blows my mind. The idea that people want to hand-format anything just blows my mind. I refer to the usual GUI software as What You See Is All You Get[a] (WYSIAYG) and strongly prefer markup languages such as SCRIPT and LaTeX that allow automating complicated layouts. Will a GUI makes simple tasks easier, unless it provides a mechanism to expose and edit markup, it makes more complicated tasks inordinately more complicated. I believe that the best short term strategy is for VE to create the initial template but make it easy to edit the underlying wikitext. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 18:24, 14 May 2025 (UTC)
There's two distinct things being conflated here: GUI (i.e. Visual Editor) vs source editing, and using citation templates vs hand-formatting citations. Those are orthogonal issues. Anyway, I'll see your LaTeX and raise you "bib | tbl | eqn | troff" :-) RoySmith(talk) 19:21, 14 May 2025 (UTC)
Some editors prefer source editing and others prefer VisualEditor. Either type of editor might be the first to make a citation, so the other system always needs to be able to cope with the result, whether or not templates are used. -- Beland (talk) 19:51, 14 May 2025 (UTC)
Oppose as one of the most zealous CS lovers on Earth. Of all the times I've migrated a mixed-CITEVAR article or mostly debilitated manual CITEVAR article to templates, I've never had real pushback, because no one actually cares in articles they didn't personally contribute to and moreover polish considerably. That makes it obvious to me there's no reason to enshrine a thumb on the scale within site policy. If I ever for whatever reason preferred manual citations for an article, this is a potential headache it is simply needless to conjure. Remsense ‥ 论 16:07, 14 May 2025 (UTC)
I think the desire for a rule is because some editors agree with you that badly formatted refs should usually be migrated to citation templates, but feel less bold than you. They're looking for written permission, in a model that Everything that is not permitted is forbidden. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:00, 14 May 2025 (UTC)
Support per @WhatamIdoing, @Just-a-can-of-beans, @Chatul, @Ifly6 and @Michael Bednarek. I feel like a lot of opposers are conflating "use of citation templates" with "imposing one particular citation style", when this doesn't have to be the case. Just because there aren't currently (to my limited knowledge, at least) widely-used non-CS1 citation templates, doesn't mean that non-CS1 templates could never exist.[b]Aside from the issue of citation styles, I would be hesitant to risk patronising new editors by suggesting citation templates are too difficult for them to grasp. The most commonly-used citation templates (cite web, cite news, cite book, cite journal) are already available by default in the editing toolbar via a form interface with prompts for clearly-labelled parameters that, in my opinion, can be easily understood, even by brand new editors.It's also worth noting that, per WP:CIRNOT, it's okay for new editors to make good-faith, constructive edits that don't 100% conform to the MOS; Articles can be improved in small steps, rather than being made perfect in one fell swoop. Small improvements are our bread and butter. So, if the MOS was updated to prefer templates (which is what this RfC is suggesting, not that we mandate templates and "punish" users for citing manually), that would just give future editors the ability to standardise these citations using templates while retaining the information added manually by the original editor. If anything, such a guideline might reduce edit warring, because it would reduce ambiguity, especially for articles where no citation style has previously been established.Apologies, this turned into a bit of an essay. If I've got anything blatantly wrong, I'm very open to corrections! Pineapple Storage (talk) 13:27, 15 May 2025 (UTC)
@Pineapple Storage: Well, since you offered... you phrased the matter as "patronising new editors by suggesting citation templates are too difficult." Now, there will always be dedicated people who love to grapple with this, but I'm sorry, this is just a factual issue. Please read https://xkcd.com/2501/ . I write this as someone who's been to edit-a-thons attended by smart, dedicated, interested people with college degrees and the like, and I can assure you that yes, messing with writing out citations is just factually difficult for many people. A problem with UI design is that it doesn't matter how much your 20% of power users reassure you that everything is fine, the 80% of quiet occasional users are hard to poll and much worse at handling your app / website / etc. than you think. Citation templates are not trivial. It would be an acceptable price to pay if the matter was very very important, but is it here? I really don't think so. SnowFire (talk) 21:39, 16 May 2025 (UTC)
Auto-citing a source using VisualEditor, small
Yes, but it's not hard to use a citation filler, and that's what most new editors do. Most edit-a-thons start by telling people to use the visual editor (older version of which is what's blinking at you here), but there's a citation filler in the 2010 wikitext editor, too. Even a newbie can paste a URL into a dialog box.
And the question here isn't "Shall we tell people on their first edit that they should do this thing?" but much closer to "Do I really need to have a full-blown CITEVAR discussion on the talk page before I quietly re-format the citations?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:44, 16 May 2025 (UTC)
WhatamIdoing: Did you read https://xkcd.com/2501/ ? Please do so. Wishes are not reality. Yes, it is hard, no matter how much we can tell ourselves it's easy. We are geochemists talking among each other about how it's actually easy to understand the nature of ionic bonds involving Calcium all day, and among the people already in the group, yes, it very well may be easy. But that doesn't mean it's true of the least-skilled-with-templates/wikitext 20% of Wikipedia editors (who are still a very useful and positive resource to have!), and certainly not true of the misty potential Wikipedia contributor who isn't great at the tech side but might be convinced to join up, if it doesn't seem like there's an insurmountable barrier of policies telling them that they're in error for everything they add. SnowFire (talk) 21:51, 16 May 2025 (UTC)
Imagine a world in which nobody says anything as incomprehensible as "Please use this thing we've called a citation template". Imagine instead that there's a "Cite" button in the toolbar, and when you click it, it has a little box for you to paste your URL in. And then it magically turns your URL into something that looks very nice, and all you have to to is click the blue button to insert it. You never see the "template" and don't have to even know what it is.
@SnowFire I totally understand where you're coming from, and I think the xkcd comic is good and probably does apply to some more obscure/backend WP mechanisms, but I really don't think it applies here. I write this as someone who was a brand new editor less than three years ago, and my eleventh ever contribution was creating a page with 8 template-formatted citations. What spurred me to start editing was (if I remember rightly) seeing a typo on a page and thinking "Hmm, I wonder whether I could correct that...", so I clicked Learn to edit in the left-hand menu and went through the introduction. Help:Introduction to referencing with Wiki Markup/2 says To add a new reference, just copy and modify an existing one. and that was exactly how I started adding references to my sandbox draft. If anything, the fact that citation templates are so readily available made it far easier for me to start referencing, because I could just copy and paste {{Cite web |date=1 January 2001 |last=Smith |first=Jane |url=https://www.example.com/example_page |title=Example page |website=Example}} and replace the values with my own, without having to figure out how to format the citation myself: Smith, Jane (2001)."[https://www.example.com/example_page Example page]". ''Wikipedia''. 1 January. (Just typing that out was exhausting, let alone having to look up an entry in Harvard MOS etc.) I understand that there will always be new editors who don't want to spend any time reading through tutorials etc, and that's fine; this RfC is just proposing that, if they choose a manual citation format (for instance, one that doesn't comply with any formal citation style, which, in my experience, manual citations often don't) then other editors can come along and standardise them using templates later, without anyone jumping done their throat about WP:CITEVAR. Pineapple Storage (talk) 23:49, 16 May 2025 (UTC)
Re "there aren't currently (to my limited knowledge, at least) widely-used non-CS1 citation templates", I much prefer the CS2 template {{citation}}. The CS1 templates of {{cite conference}}, {{cite magazine}}, {{cite podcast}}, etc. seem absurdly baroque and confusing. I use the {{citation}} template as a simpler and more universal option. I'm surprised that there hasn't been more pressure to standardise on this. There's a similar issue with infoboxes and there's a lot of pressure to merge and consolidate those. Andrew🐉(talk) 11:57, 22 May 2025 (UTC)
(de-indent, re WhatamIdoing) Correct, I don't like VE that much, other than messing with large tables. But yes, I have used it anyway when interacting with new editors. And yes, I've even shown off the "transform a URL into a citation" option before! But the very fact we're talking about the toolbar at all says a lot. Again, I'm not making this up, many new editors have trouble with the absolute basics of editing. Telling them "if you switch to VE and find the right button there's a tool that automatically generates well-formatted citations, which are useful because, er, microformats and machine readability" is a lot when someone is learning the basics. And again, there's a lot that newbies need to learn, but why insist on this one in particular? I don't know what to say other than that I'm talking about the 20% least skilled in wikitext contributors + the current non-editors but potential future contributors who are scared off by assuming that editing Wikipedia is very complex. I have multiple talented, smart, educated friends who just ask me to make simple text edits on their behalf, the kind that don't require knowledge of citations at all. Sure, maybe some would never edit WP and thus are irrelevant, but it is hard to overstate how imposing the very basics of editing are on Wikipedia. The people who have trouble with this are not going to find this discussion, but we should keep them in mind regardless and advocate on their behalf. SnowFire (talk) 23:14, 16 May 2025 (UTC)
Why insist on this one? Because:
Nobody says the newbie has to do any of this. I know this has been repeated multiple times, but let's be clear: The goal is not to make the newbie figure out how to format any citations through any method at all. If the newbie can get a URL somewhere in the vicinity of the edit, even if it's just in an edit summary or a note on a talk page, the wikignomes will do their best to fix it. It happens that clicking a button in the toolbar (something most ordinary people don't find difficult?) will produce a satisfactory result in both the wikitext and visual editors, but in the visual editor, the newbie will have no idea that there's a template being used, and therefore cannot experience any of the disadvantages of citation templates. (For example, there's no "visual clutter" in the wikitext when you don't see the wikitext at all.)
The goal is for an experienced Wikipedia:WikiGnome to know whether, when faced with a mishmashed mess in an article, whether the community (a) would prefer the mess cleared up using citation templates or (b) would prefer the mess cleared up without using citation templates or (c) still feels that it's necessary to keep pretending that we're all 'neutral' about citation templates and that this stated neutrality will have any practical effect other than the wikignomes "randomly" choosing to use citation templates "on a case-by-case basis". Anyone who's been watching for the last dozen years knows that 'neutral' means citation templates in practice, but sometimes we have social/political reasons to say one thing while doing another.
Oppose I'm a zealous supporter of templated cites as they are much, much less susceptible to data rot than the text based alternative. I would support a preferred status for templates, a light finger on the scale for their use, but I don't support the current wording - it goes to far. Currently if you find an article you believe would be improved by citation templates you only have to get consensus on the talk page for doing so. These nothing in CITEVAR that says it can't be changed, only that there has to be consensus for it. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«@» °∆t° 23:53, 16 May 2025 (UTC)
I would be worried that certain WP:OWNers will fight to the ends of the earth on that. Ifly6 (talk) 19:57, 17 May 2025 (UTC)
If one editor tries to own an article, it just takes two others to form a consensus for change. Styles are not set in stone, they are as open to changing consensus as much as any other article content. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«@» °∆t° 13:00, 19 May 2025 (UTC)
A majority of 2 users against 1 is not "consensus". Requiring local consensus is a way to make global consensus impossible to implement. Nemo 12:52, 22 May 2025 (UTC)
My comment was about a single article, not a global consensus. Local consensus about article content is quite normal. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested«@» °∆t° 18:03, 22 May 2025 (UTC)
I wouldn't describe a consensus formed on a talk page, affecting a single article, as "local consensus". That's "ordinary consensus". WP:LOCALCON is about Alice and Bob deciding that all of "their" articles are exempt from relevant policies and guidelines. It's not about three editors making an ordinary decision on a talk page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:59, 22 May 2025 (UTC)
Oppose per jacobolus among others. Not everything needs to be filed away into templates. Plain text can be easier to format. Cremastra (u — c) 18:08, 17 May 2025 (UTC)
Oppose, and I say this as a huge fan of citation templates who uses them almost exclusively. This seems like WP:CREEP to me and does not have any measurable benefit other than allowing scripts and bots to read metadata. It should be sufficient that citations are consistent within an article. Mandating that people use citation templates brings up various problems, not the least of which is that changing citation formats is a waste of editor time when citations are already consistent in that article. The main purpose of a citation is to verify text, not to be visually appealing. Epicgenius (talk) 14:42, 20 May 2025 (UTC)
Allowing scripts and bots to read metadata sounds like a good enough reason to me. RoySmith(talk) 14:47, 20 May 2025 (UTC)
@RoySmith, I agree, and if this were a smaller wiki that already used citation templates predominantly, I would support this without reservation. The problem is that mandating this on millions upon millions of articles seems to be very cumbersome, especially if existing hand-crafted citations seem to work fine. To be fair, I could still support this if the wording were toned down. However, as currently written, it effectively gives editors free rein to indiscriminately convert manual citations to cite templates—which could result either in a waste of editor time (due to the amount of time that is required to do this carefully) or sloppy automated conversion of citations (if they use a tool like VisualEditor or reFill). Epicgenius (talk) 19:09, 21 May 2025 (UTC)
Support There’s a lot to read here (can’t claim to have read all of it), but I don’t see anything about the encyclopaedia reader. It is a lot easier to find where article content comes from with short references if templates are used (mouse over etc). Shouldn’t we be focusing on the reader experience? ThoughtIdRetiredTIR 19:53, 22 May 2025 (UTC)
Notes
^In the sense that you can't tell what references and white space are fortuitous and what will persist across edits.
^I'm certain there would be template editors/coders out there who would be willing to put together Template:Cite APA, Template:Cite CMOS, or similar. (These could have, for instance, some kind of |medium= parameter to allow different citation formats for book, web, etc. Additionally, there could be mode parameters for expanding abbreviated formats like volume/issue/page, as discussed in User:Jorge Stolfi § Please do not use {{cite}} templates mentioned by @jacobolus above). This would allow different disciplines to retain their preferred citation style, while also allowing for easier standardisation, data tracking, and other benefits of templates. This could be accompanied by another set of templates, similar to Template:Use DMY dates/Template:Use MDY dates, which would indicate to editors the citation style to use in the given article (these could be Template:Use CS1, Template:Use APA style, etc). Eventually, like with the date format templates, citations could be inputted using any citation template, and then the parameters could be formatted automatically based on the "Use X style" template at the top of the page. But I think I'm getting ahead of myself.
As has been mentioned, DMY and MDY are currently on equal footing in Wikipedia, and under a technical reading of policy, it is true that the only primarily-English-speaking country the Pope has ties to is the US, even though he obviously has much stronger ties to the Vatican and arguably also Peru. I'm a supporter of using DMY for consistency with previous pope articles and general common sense, but it is true that there is a technical policy-based argument for MDY based on the current wording of policy.
If the wording of the policy is at odds with common sense, is it time to revisit the policy, and consider making DMY the primary system with MDY only used for articles where the subject is primarily linked to the US, to result in a similar policy to MOS:UNIT? It would avoid any issues like this happening in the future. Chessrat(talk, contributions) 16:17, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
No. WP:DATETIES is more comparable to WP:ENGVAR than to MOS:UNIT because just as it's easy for an American to read a work written in British English, and vice versa, it's easy for an American to read a date in DMY format, and vice versa. This differs from units, where encountering a statement that two towns are 25 miles apart causes a noticeable mental clash for those who don't speak English as their first language. Trying to solve a physics problem, expressed in US customary units, on a professional licensing exam sends engineers with a four-year degree running for cover. Jc3s5h (talk) 16:29, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
I've seen it said a couple of times now on this RfC that DMY and MDY are "on an equal footing" on Wikipedia... This might be a silly question, but what do you actually mean by this? My understanding is that they would definitely be "on equal footing" for articles with ties to an English-speaking country or territory that uses both (ie. Kenya, Canada, Ghana, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cayman Islands and maybe Greenland, where English is a recognised language). Aside from these, is it true that for articles related to any non-English-speaking country, DMY and MDY are "on equal footing"?
I think it's definitely worth asking the question as to whether MOS:DATETIES should be reworked to address location-specific date formats for articles associated with non-English-speaking countries. The one possible difficulty that I can see with this is that several countries and territories use YMD in prose text (2025 May 11), not just in computing/shortened form (2025/05/11). (According to List of date formats by country#Usage map, these are China, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, Taiwan, Hungary, Mongolia, Lithuania and Bhutan.) To my knowledge, there are no English-speaking countries that routinely use YMD in prose, so English-speaking readers on English Wikipedia might struggle with readability if YMD were introduced to the prose of articles related to countries where this was the norm. How would we deal with this? Supporters of MDY would probably object if DMY were imposed on articles associated with exclusively-YMD countries. I'd be interested to hear what others think about this. Pineapple Storage (talk) 16:48, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
'Is it true that for articles related to any non-English-speaking country, DMY and MDY are "on equal footing"?' Yes, that's precisely what DATETIES says, referring to MOS:DATERET for such cases. Gawaon (talk) 16:57, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
Yes, apologies, the wording of the question was a bit vague. I meant, are DMY and MDY on equal footing in that authors creating articles about a non-English speaking country can pick whichever they prefer, regardless of which format that country uses? I understand there are sometimes considerations about geographical proximity, but these seem to be inconsistently applied. Pineapple Storage (talk) 17:04, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
In "Formats" section of WP:MOSNUM, all the formats listed in the table "Acceptable date formats" are equally acceptable in appropriate spots within the article, provided a consistent "family" is used, and unless there is an exception. A "family" that could be in one article might be "2 September 2001", "8 Oct", and "2020-11-30". Another acceptable family suitable for a different article would be "May 9, 1775", "Jul 20", and "1789-07-14". There is no exception for the article being closely related to a non-English speaking country. Jc3s5h (talk) 17:20, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
I agree that There is no exception for the article being closely related to a non-English speaking country in the current MOS guideline regarding date ties. I think what @Chessrat was asking (and what I was addressing in my previous comment) was whether it's time to consider changing the MOS to include this type of "exception" for non-English-speaking regional ties. Pineapple Storage (talk) 17:47, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
Indeed- I think it's worth considering changing the MOS to make DMY the default format, with MDY relegated in status to being an acceptable alternative format to be used in articles primarily tied to the US. It would make more sense given DMY is by far the most common format globally. Chessrat(talk, contributions) 18:15, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
What is your justification for stopping at WP:DATETIES and not extending the idea to WP:ENGVAR – make British English the default absent a tie to a country that predominantly uses a different variety of English? Jc3s5h (talk) 18:27, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
I don't know about @Chessrat, but my immediate answer to this would be because the majority of English speakers don't use British English. The same can't be said about DMY. Pineapple Storage (talk) 18:37, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
The majority of English speakers also don't use American English. The English language is a lot more diverse than date formats! :) Pineapple Storage (talk) 18:41, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
Date format and ENGVAR are separate by design. You can have an article written in American English that uses the DMY date format. Horse.staple (talk) 22:24, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
If we're discussing changing/implementing a default date format, can I throw [ISO 8601] into the ring?/sHorse.staple (talk) 20:08, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
That would reduce the maintenance of the pope articles a great deal. We wouldn't be able to write any dates before October 15, 1582, so we would delete all the pope articles before Pope Gregory XIII. Jc3s5h (talk) 21:00, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
The post by Pineapple Storage fails to address topics that have nothing to do with any country. For example, if Pineapple Storage had been the editor to create "Pole of inaccessibility", I wonder what date format they would have chosen. Jc3s5h (talk) 16:58, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
Personally, for articles without a specific regional tie, or that are globally applicable, I would be inclined to choose the most widely-used format (ie DMY). Regardless, it's my understanding that MOS:DATETIES definitely doesn't apply to articles that have no connection to any particular country or territory, so altering the wording/content of the MOS section on date ties wouldn't have any affect on topics that have nothing to do with any country. This is why I didn't address it in my comment above, which was specifically about the question of reworking Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Strong national ties to a topic. Pineapple Storage (talk) 17:12, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
It isn't clear to me that DMY is the most widely used English format. Do you count countries? Or maybe add the total populations of countries that are predominantly English speaking? What about adding the total number of people who speak English as their first language? Maybe the total amount of daily text in the English language, grouped by which date format the work uses. Jc3s5h (talk) 17:26, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
Again, a bit of imprecise wording from me—apologies! By "widely-used" I meant globally widely-used, not just in English-speaking countries (although I know MOS:DATETIES currently only considers English-speaking countries and territories); you had asked about which format I personally would choose for a global/broad article. I agree that determining "most used" format amongst all English speakers globally would be very difficult. It's a lot easier to identify which format is used by the most English-speaking countries and territories; cross-referencing the table at List of date formats by country#Usage map with the list of countries and territories where English is an official language, it's clear that a majority of English-speaking countries and territories use DMY. However, as we've said, introducing a weighted consideration for number of English speakers would be a lot more complicated. Pineapple Storage (talk) 17:42, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
If you wish to change the MOS, the place to do it is WT:MOSNUM, FWIW. Kahastoktalk 19:29, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
For sure. This RfC has shown that enough people have strong feelings about MOS:DATETIES that it likely warrants an RfC of its own. Pineapple Storage (talk) 19:38, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
MOS is not a policy, it is a guideline. As stated by WP:NUMBERS, ‘This guideline is a part of the English Wikipedia's Manual of Style. Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply.’ Edl-irishboy (talk) 18:48, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
So, the question comes back again. What is it about this article specifically - that does not apply in the general case - that would lead us to make an exception for it? That's the core question that DMY-preferrers need to answer and far too many have not even tried. We've got loads of people above making irrelevant arguments like easier to work with in citations and increasingly standard in Wikipedia, even in American English articles or The vast majority of the world uses DMY, and so does Italy and the Vatican. Even if both those arguments have some merit, they are rejected by the MOS in the general case, and the comments make no attempt to argue why this article should be different from the general case. Kahastoktalk 19:29, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
One other point that has been raised is consistency among papacy-related articles. What are your thoughts on this argument? Pineapple Storage (talk) 19:40, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
Given that the lead of Pope Benedict XVI has the word criticised but the lead of Pope Francis spells it criticized, I don't think it's a very good argument. These articles are already inconsistent, and insofar as this creates an inconsistency I think it's so minor as to not be worth worrying about. But it is at least an argument. Kahastoktalk 20:28, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
Pope Benedict XVI's page uses Oxford spelling and Pope Francis' page uses American English, so it is correct regarding criticised and criticized, just like the current Pope Leo's page. The discussion is not about the type of English used. Edl-irishboy (talk) 20:47, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
Oxford spelling actually uses -ize. I've corrected the lead of Pope Benedict XVI accordingly. Graham (talk) 04:19, 22 May 2025 (UTC)
Not for nothing, but date format is independent of WP:ENGVAR. It is possible to have an article written in American English that uses DMY. Horse.staple (talk) 20:48, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
If they can be inconsistent in terms of WP:ENGVAR, why can they not be inconsistent in terms of date format? Kahastoktalk 20:57, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
Because date format is independent from ENGVAR by design. You ask why this American is so notable to merit an exception to DATETIES. I counter why is this Pope notable enough to break the consistency of every other papal article?
The writing style of the article was probably made for a mix of subject focus and editor consideration, but it is ultimately irrelevant because this is a discussion on date format, where it is notable that there is a consistency that readers may expect. Horse.staple (talk) 21:09, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
Why think about this as an exception to a policy in the first place? Most of Wikipedia’s policies, WP:DATETIES included, are not meant to be carved in stone and taken as word of law. The question of whether Leo’s status as the Pope is a significant enough change to the date format.
DATETIES says: " Articles on topics with strong ties to a particular English-speaking country should generally use the date format most commonly used in that country." If we Ignore the English-speaking part we can see that the Pope now has strong ties to both the Vatican and the United States, leaving the question of which tie is strongest. Horse.staple (talk) 19:56, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
Why think of it as an exception? Because it is an exception. The rule explicitly does not allow the logic you are trying to argue. Yes, if the MOS didn't say "English-speaking country", it would be different - but that would also mean that articles with strong national ties to China would give today's date as 2025年5月11日. But that's a debate for WT:MOSNUM. Kahastoktalk 20:28, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
It's only an exception if we think of DATETIES as an absolutely binding rule. I maintain that we should ignore all rules to get beyond what the policy says and to the core of this dispute.
I reject your reasoning that ignoring the rule in this exceptional case (exceptional in the sense that there has never been a case like this before) will lead to some slippery slope that creates date chaos anywhere a national tie does not match the ENGVAR otherwise used on the article. Your conclusion just doesn’t follow. Horse.staple (talk) 20:34, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
One option would be 2025 May 11, but this isn't ideal in terms of readability for English-speaking readers unfamiliar with YMD in prose. See my comment re YMD-exclusive regional ties above. Pineapple Storage (talk) 20:43, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
The question has already been answered: this article is different because the Pope’s role as a global religious leader makes it distinct from a typical American biography. While he was born in the US, his influence is international and the article focuses on his position as Pope, not his American birthplace. He has spent much of his life in DMY-using countries like Italy and Peru and the Vatican itself uses DMY. Given that the majority of the world uses DMY and this article is for a global audience, adopting DMY is the logical choice for clarity and clear consistency. Consistency with other papal biographies further supports this. All other articles about Popes use DMY and following this convention ensures uniformity and again clear consistency across Wikipedia. The Pope's role is global, not tied to the US, justifying the use of DMY. We also need to apply WP:COMMONSENSE and WP:BEBOLD in this situation. Wikipedia’s guidelines are not rigid but are meant to evolve based on context. The Five Pillars of Wikipedia emphasise that it is a living project and that exceptions can be made for clarity and improvement. In this case, the Pope’s global significance justifies an exception to the usual formatting. Insisting on MDY, despite the clear arguments for DMY, disregards the broader international context in which the Pope operates. WP:BEBOLD encourages us to make changes that improve the article’s clarity and accessibility. Edl-irishboy (talk) 20:42, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
And the point that that misses is that May 11, 2025 is not so US-centric as to make it completely incompatible with articles not about the United States. That's why we allow it, equally with 11 May 2025. You've just made an argument that could apply to any article on Wikipedia without strong national ties to the United States, but the project-wide consensus as it stands is that that isn't good enough. Project-wide consensus is that DMY is not to be favoured (or disfavoured) for global or worldwide topics, or topics with strong national ties to non-English speaking countries. Rather, DMY and MDY are equal per WP:DATERET. If you want to change that, change the project-wide consensus at WT:MOSNUM.
It's argued that there has never been a case like this before. But the circumstances you're arguing apply to thousands if not millions of articles across Wikipedia, on this point of style and others. That's why we have a project-wide consensus expressed by the MOS. Now, if you want to ignore the MOS that's fine - if there is good reason in the specific circumstances we're dealing with here. But, if the only reason is Italy and the Vatican uses DMY, a claim that the MOS specifically and deliberately makes irrelevant, then that's not a good reason. Kahastoktalk 20:55, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
No one is arguing that MDY is prohibited on international topics. The argument is that DMY is more contextually appropriate in this specific case. The idea that “DMY and MDY are equal per WP:DATERET” is correct in the abstract but only applies when there is no compelling contextual reason to prefer one. In this case, there clearly is. WP:DATERET doesn't demand absolute parity regardless of context. It calls for stability unless there's good reason to change. Here, there is: the Vatican, again, the institutional and geographic context of the papacy, is a non-English-speaking European sovereign state. The Pope, regardless of nationality, assumes a role embedded in the liturgical, administrative and cultural framework of that institution. Vatican sources, documents and media use DMY in English translations. The entire apparatus of the papacy uses DMY, making it both natural and stylistically consistent to reflect that in the article. The claim that this reasoning could apply to “millions of articles” is a red herring. We’re not arguing a broad rule, we’re arguing a specific case. This is an edge case where an individual (American) holds a role (Pope) that is rooted in a very different cultural and institutional context (the Vatican, Italy, Catholicism). The final claim, that Vatican/Italy ties are irrelevant because the MOS "deliberately makes them irrelevant", is not accurate. MOSNUM simply says we don’t favour DMY just because a topic is global. That’s not what’s happening here. We’re favouring DMY because the entirety of the subject’s public life in this role is shaped by, expressed through, and documented using European formatting. That’s not favouritism, that’s editorial coherence. Edl-irishboy (talk) 21:11, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
I'm afraid you kinda are arguing that MDY is - or should be - prohibited on non-US topics. Certainly on non-English-speaking European topics. Because you keep on saying that DMY is more "contextually appropriate", but your reasoning could be equally valid on just about any other non-US topic.
You seem to be arguing that DMY is somehow deeply rooted in Catholicism, and this may be the problem, because I don't believe for one moment that it is. Perhaps it would help if could cite some Catholic religious doctrine or papal bull of some kind that demonstrated that DMY is the only valid way of describing dates according to Catholic theology? Kahastoktalk 18:47, 12 May 2025 (UTC)
I’m not arguing that MDY is or should be prohibited on non-US or non-English-speaking European topics. I’ve consistently said that in this specific case, DMY is more contextually appropriate. That’s not a universal rule, and I’m not applying it universally. I’m applying editorial judgment to a unique situation. This isn’t just any other non-US topic. This is the papacy a long-standing, well-documented tradition of using DMY in all its official English-language output. I don’t need to cite a papal bull to prove that. I can point to literally any Vatican press release, liturgical calendar or document published by the Holy See. [1][2][3][4][5] The idea that I need theological justification to support a basic formatting decision is absurd and frankly unserious. I’m not arguing for a blanket rule. I’m arguing that in this edge case where an American now serves as Pope, the article should reflect the formatting style of the role he now holds, not the country he happened to be born in. That’s what I mean by “contextually appropriate.” It’s about accuracy, consistency across papal articles and reflecting the institutional norms of the subject’s office. That’s not nationalism and it’s not favouritism. It’s basic editorial coherence. Edl-irishboy (talk) 17:59, 13 May 2025 (UTC)
So that this section doesn't end with the above assertion of a flatly false statement (a long-standing, well-documented tradition of using DMY in all its official English-language output), here's the Vatican News Office:
Pope Francis died on Easter Monday, April 21, 2025[6]
The funeral Mass for Pope Francis will begin at 10:00 AM on Saturday, April 26[7]
Inauguration Mass of Pope Leo XIV to be held on May 18[8]
I have to dismiss your reply to my comment as "flatly false". If you read the whole RFC, I have touched on this multiple times. "The Vatican News uses both DMY and MDY. The official Holy See website uses DMY. Here’s my earlier comment regarding this: Just to correct that it is not just his biography that includes mdy dates. The Vatican News uses both dmy and mdy as shown here: [12], [13] uses mdy, while [14], [15] uses dmy."
It is important to note that all articles published in the Vatican News includes DMY dates at the end of the page, as shown here: 25 April 2025, 14:00
As you say, shall I go on? It is to my understanding that the Vatican News uses both DMY and MDY dates. However, as I have said already, the official Vatican Holy See website https://www.vatican.va/content/vatican/en.html uses DMY dates. So to bring back my original comment, the Vatican does have a long-standing, well-documented tradition of using DMY in its official English-language output. Edl-irishboy (talk) 19:19, 23 May 2025 (UTC)
User:Pineapple Storage/Discussions/Requests for comment
