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I know pdfs automatically generate the PDF symbol e.g.

• "An IIMSAM PDF file" (PDF). IISAM. 1 December 2008. Retrieved 16 October 2009.

I was wondering if it is possible to code the format parameter to perform a similar function for XLS, DOC, etc. I have tried coded this manually before e.g.

• "Complete list of nominees" (XLS), Television Critics Association. Retrieved on July 17, 2008.

This gets very close except the URL link diagonal arrow is present.

• Currently there isn't a work around within cite web

Putting everything in |format=, for example, {{cite web|url=http://www.tvcriticsassociation.com/tca/files/July2007/TCA%20complete%20NOMINEES%20list.xls|title=Complete list of nominees|format={{XLSlink}} [[Microsoft Excel|XLS]]|work=[[Television Critics Association]]|accessdate=July 17, 2008}} gives a bracketed icon

• "Complete list of nominees" ( XLS). Television Critics Association. Retrieved July 17, 2008.

Trying to append it to |title=, for example, {{cite web|url=http://www.tvcriticsassociation.com/tca/files/July2007/TCA%20complete%20NOMINEES%20list.xls|title=Complete list of nominees|format={{XLSlink}} [[Microsoft Excel|XLS]]|work=[[Television Critics Association]]|accessdate=July 17, 2008}} gives a stray link sign and end of quote

• "Complete list of nominees [[Image:Page white excel.png|16px|link=]]" (XLS). Television Critics Association. Retrieved July 17, 2008. {{cite web}}: URL–wikilink conflict (help)

Any suggestions? Rambo's Revenge (talk) 12:02, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The PDF icon is not produced by setting |format=PDF, nor is it generated by this template (or the underlying {{citation/core}}). It's generated at low level, possibly as deep as the MediaWiki software itself, and occurs whenever a URL ending ".pdf" is encountered. This can be demonstrated by using a URL such as http://www.example.pdf outside all templates. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:21, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe it's just me thinking outloud but my point is it is a very informative way of making a user aware that they are about to access a page that might take some time to download. I think maybe we should extend this to other xls, doc formats. I'll try and see if it can be done at source but, if not, should we not have some sort of workaround? Rambo's Revenge (talk) 13:25, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Active content such as XLS and DOC files is commonly regarded as hazardous, and so is blocked by many firewalls. Some users also object to the promotion of proprietary closed formats. Offering the same content rendered as a basic PDF would be a helpful alternative for some of us. Perhaps a discussion at wp:VPT would be warranted.LeadSongDog come howl! 14:51, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Taken to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#External link icons proposal. Rambo's Revenge (talk) 15:20, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Replied there. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 16:14, 30 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I need help with using cite web template in named references. If I use cite web template and named references more than once, then result is only one quotation listed in reflist section. Is there a way to use cite web template and to have both named references and listed quotations in reference subtitle?--Antidiskriminator (talk) 07:48, 22 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If the two citations have different |quote= values then they're different citations, so use different reference names. Rjwilmsi 08:05, 22 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Should I use different reference names if it is the same web site and same web page that I quote?--Antidiskriminator (talk) 08:29, 22 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, maybe I slightly misunderstood your first question. If you are citing a website to source fact 1, and then later fact 2, then use the same reference name (it's the same citation even if you are refering to different information). If you are citing a website but using different parameters like |page= or |quote=, the use different reference names (the citations are defined as different). Rjwilmsi 08:53, 22 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. --Antidiskriminator (talk) 08:55, 22 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Assuming that your problem page is User:Antidiskriminator/Drafts of articles/Nationalization of history, I see that there are two refs named "Laboratory", identical apart from the quote; and five named "Hopkins", again, identical apart from the quote. The problem does not lie with the {{cite web}} template, but with how you've used the <ref></ref> construct. If the ref is unnamed, it's used as it stands. But if it's named, the reference processing checks through a list to see if the ref name has previously been used. If it hasn't, the ref is used as it stands, just as if it was unnamed; and then the name is noted in the list. If a ref name is used a second time, the whole of the content of the reuse of that ref is discarded and the ref is linked back to the first use of the name. So, if the following is encountered:

First statement.<ref name="MyName">ref content version 1</ref>

Second statement.<ref name="MyName">ref content version 2</ref>

it is exactly the same as putting this:

First statement.<ref name="MyName">ref content version 1</ref>

Second statement.<ref name="MyName" />

I notice that in each case the quote given is quite lengthy: is it necessary to have all this? I'm thinking mainly of copyright issues. If you can eliminate the quotes entirely, then you can condense the refs like this:

First statement.<ref name="Hopkins">{{Cite web

| url = http://www.scribd.com/doc/2557562/History-of-Globalization

| title = The History of Globalization - and the Globalization of History

| accessdate = October 20, 2010

| author = A. G. Hopkins

| authorlink = A. G. Hopkins

| language = english

}}</ref>

Second statement.<ref name="Hopkins" />

Third statement.<ref name="Hopkins" />

etc.

If you do need to show the different quotes, you must first remove all the names from the <ref> tags. It would be a good idea to add page numbers too; the Hopkins doc has those, in the bar at the bottom, and they would go in the |page= parameter. You can then leave your article as it now stands; or you can reduce the space a bit like this:

First statement.<ref>{{Cite web

| url = http://www.scribd.com/doc/2557562/History-of-Globalization

| title = The History of Globalization - and the Globalization of History

| accessdate = October 20, 2010

| author = A. G. Hopkins

| authorlink = A. G. Hopkins

| language = english

| page = 4

| quote = Short quote relevant to the preceding statement }}</ref>

Second statement.<ref>Hopkins, p. 6 "Another short quote".</ref>

Third statement.<ref>Hopkins, p. 11 "A third short quote".</ref>

Note that for the second and subsequent cases, {{cite web}} is not used. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:51, 22 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much for detailed explanation. I prefer to have short quotes written in the article if possible, and therefore, I would choose last case that you proposed. --Antidiskriminator (talk) 14:21, 22 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Currently when Cite web displays it has periods (full stops for my English speakers on the other side of the pond) after every parameter which frequently makes the reference string look clunky. I would like to propose that we remove some of the periods but doing that may require shifting the order of things or adding different punctuation. Does anyone have an opinion on that? If we do the following I think it would flow better and be easier to read and understand.

1. Remove the period after |author=
2. Switch the order of display for |work= and |url=/|title= with a : as a separator. Using the example from this templates documentation it would look like Encyclopedia of Things: "My Favorite Things, Part II"
3. Replace the . preceding |publisher= with published by. --Kumioko (talk) 19:28, 24 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

{{cite web}} uses {{citation/core}}, so this proposal would affect several other templates such as {{cite book}}. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:55, 24 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oh well that makes sense I guess. Not sure that it would be a negative affect on the others either but thats good to know. --Kumioko (talk) 20:03, 24 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

While trying to find a source for the birth year of Professor Boyd Hilton, I found a web page:

http://library.willamette.edu/hlc/staff/dmg/reports/Q22010/notifications/NAME.CHG1.HTM

that is over 5 MB in length, and minimally formatted for viewing. I was using a old computer at the time, and a relatively slow Internet connection, so when I clicked on it, it took quite a while for my browser to download and render the page. I am adding that link as a reference for the professor's age (I was unable to find a smaller web page of similar authority) and think it would be handy to have a way to tell people that at the time I accessed the page it was 5.9MB in length. {{Cite web}} has no specific parameter for that purpose, and Category:Inline templates has no obvious option either. Any comments or suggestions? Thanks. 72.244.206.140 (talk) 13:28, 1 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

One can always add it as <ref>{{cite web|blahblahblah}} (5.9MB file)</ref>. However, in this case you might prefer to use this source which is much smaller and just as authoritative, if not more.LeadSongDog come howl! 20:43, 1 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Good find. Thanks. 72.244.204.98 (talk) 11:45, 2 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Can someone put the ref tags in the template descriptions? Or is there some reason that they arent allowed... It would make it a lot easier to just copy the whole thing to where its needed.--Metallurgist (talk) 04:55, 14 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The {{cite web}} template, and the related templates such as {{cite book}}, do not necessarily occur within <ref></ref> tags; they are also used in bulleted lists, particularly when shortened footnotes are used. Shortened footnotes need not be limited to refs in books, but can also be used for web references: see, for example, the ref to "Wilson 1945" here. Incidentally, although that article has 17 entries under "Notes", only one of these was produced using <ref></ref> tags - all the others are produced by {{sfn}}, which uses {{#tag:ref }} internally, instead of <ref></ref>. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:33, 14 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

<ref></ref> and {{#tag:ref }} access the same underlying code, the only difference is that they are processed at different points in the parser. Happy‑melon 11:02, 18 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If the web address I use includes [ or ], how can I avoid making a mess of the template? - Theornamentalist (talk) 22:11, 14 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Common question, detailed answers are in the archives; but in brief, use %5B for [ and %5D for ]. See Percent-encoding for encodings of other characters. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:52, 14 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. - Theornamentalist (talk) 22:53, 14 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I have come across a couple of references where "editor" would be appropriate. It seems that such cases would be fairly common on the web. I think that adding an editor field to this template would be useful. Bcharles (talk) 21:43, 19 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Examples? The template supports the same editor parameters as {{cite book}}. This is undocumented, as it would probably be more appropriate to use {{cite news}} or {{cite journal}}. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 22:23, 19 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

There are a total of twelve different fields available for up to four editors; all but three have synonyms.

• |editor-last= (synonyms |editor-surname=, |editor1-last=, |editor1-surname=, |editor1=, |editor=, |editors=) is for the surname of the first or only editor
• |editor-first= (synonyms |editor-given=, |editor1-first=, |editor1-given=) is for the first name(s) of the first or only editor
• |editor-link= (synonym |editor1-link=) is for the name of the Wikipedia article carrying the biography of the first or only editor
• |editor2-last= (synonyms |editor2-surname=, |editor2=) is for the surname of the second editor
• |editor2-first= (synonym |editor2-given=) is for the first name(s) of the second editor
• |editor2-link= is for the name of the Wikipedia article carrying the biography of the second editor

For the third and fourth editors, use fields as per the second editor but change "2" to "3" or "4" as appropriate, ie |editor3-last= etc. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:45, 19 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but why do you need editor for a website? If it is a website for a journal, magazine or the like, then other templates should be used. Odds are very high that a follow on editor will update the template. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 02:47, 20 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Many websites do not show authors of individual pages. Some have a note of the form "This site maintained by John Doe", either at the foot of a page, on the home page, or a "contacts" or "about us" page. It's unreasonable to expect that Doe wrote every single page, so he should not be credited as author. The editor fields are ideal for this purpose.

If the website is neither book nor journal, {{cite book}}/{{cite journal}} should not be used. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:19, 20 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Cables from the United States diplomatic cables leak are being widely used by mainstream media, academics, politicians, international governmental organisations, and alternative media as a source of knowledge about the World, i.e. encyclopedic knowledge. The more notable usages of the first 1% of these cables are now being quite extensively referenced here in the English-language Wikipedia, both indirectly to get NOR opinions on what is notable, and directly since they are secondary/tertiary sources about sociopolitical events (or primary sources of e.g. ambassadors' opinions). For comments about the citation of these sources, please see Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Use_of_classified_documents. i'm not trying to redo that debate here, and i'm not claiming to make an NPOV summary of the comments on that page!

IMHO it's now obvious that we should think of adding a parameter for easier meta-analysis. The cables all have very standard ID's, e.g. 08ASHGABAT1399 for http://www.wikileaks.ch/cable/2008/10/08ASHGABAT1399.html, of which the first and second parts are semantically obvious (year and city name), and the full ID is written in the "original" (WikiLeaks) version, or can be guessed from e.g. Guardian-published versions by removing 0's in front of the number like 001399.

Proposal: Add a parameter, e.g. "cable ", so the above example would require adding |cable = 08ASHGABAT1399 to the cite web citation template (and also the general Template:citation?). Various possibilities for the parameter name include (please add short arguments for/against within the list, longer discussion below):

• cable
  • for: short Boud (talk) 02:27, 1 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • against: ambiguous? US diplomatic cables have been published prior to Cablegate, and probably will be post-Cablegate, and other countries' embassies also send diplomatic cables, etc. Boud (talk) 02:27, 1 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• cablegate
  • for: unambiguous, official name by WikiLeaks Boud (talk) 02:27, 1 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • against: POV, because doesn't include USG (US government) POV? original authorship is not by WikiLeaks, and the authors may not see their cables as being similar to Watergate Boud (talk) 02:27, 1 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• cable_id
  • against: all the template parameters are ID of some sort Boud (talk) 02:27, 1 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]
• cablegate_id
• cable_ref_id
• cablegate_ref_id

i have almost no experience in editing templates, so someone else will have to implement this if there's consensus. Boud (talk) 02:27, 1 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

These are documents, regardless of the host, so {{cite document}} which was merged to {{cite journal}} would probably be more appropriate than cite web. Regardless, the templates in question have an |id= parameter for just this purpose. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 02:38, 1 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Nice point about cite document, and you're right that the ID parameter is included for cite document or the generic citation. (i had tried it for web cite, but it didn't print any info visible to the reader.) i've added Template:Cablegate so that people can use {{cite document | ... |id={{cablegate|01CITYNAME1234}} | ... }}. Since it's a template, people can discuss what should be the "obvious" URI over at that template or a cablegate-related page and then update the template. Thanks for the fast response! Boud (talk) 23:04, 1 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Any clue why ref #13 in Hugo Boss (Jewish Virtual Library) and ref #2 in Hassan Musa (Sudplanete) do not give the expected result? Thanks, Racconish ^Tk 08:08, 3 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

For both articles, the problem was a line break in the middle of the citation. See my diffs: [1] [2] to see where the problems were. — Huntster (t @ c) 08:40, 3 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the quick - and useful - answer. Racconish ^Tk 08:48, 3 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Cite web fails to handle titles containing square brackets correctly __"[Introduction=>__"]. displays where => stands for the linking icon and __ for the extent of underlining. This leaves the close quote incorrectly placed (prior to the square bracket). The underlining and link icon is also incorrectly placed. ie: "[Example]". Fifelfoo (talk) 01:18, 18 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

For how to handle this, see this answer and this edit. Debresser (talk) 07:36, 18 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Its a work around, not a solution, and it breaks a fundamental wikimarkup convention that single instances of special characters don't need escaping. Thanks for pointing to it, but the template maintainers need to add this to the bug list. Fifelfoo (talk) 07:42, 18 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. Debresser (talk) 07:59, 18 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There is no "funamental wikimarkup convention" of that nature; this has nothing to do with {{cite web}}, it's a feature of the MediaWiki parser. The link [408113262=1&ids[407943528]=1] (a RevDel link for a couple of main page revisions) has exactly the same issue, and the solution is the same: the first right square bracket encountered is treated as the complement to the initial bracket and closes the link, so to avoid that happening, you need to escape any brackets you don't want to be thus considered. Happy‑melon 10:49, 18 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

If you take Fifelfoo's original example, and subst: it right out, then eliminate non-display stuff (like the Coins metadata), you find that the last template to be fed title and URL separately is {{Citation/make link}}, which is given the following:

{{Citation/make link
| 1=http://www.google.com/
| 2="[Example]"
}}

which turns that into

[http://www.google.com/ "[Example]"]

which displays as

"[Example"]

so as Happy-melon states, it's the MediaWiki parser - no simple template modification will change this behaviour.

Questions like this have come up several times before, not just here but on the talk pages of {{citation}}, {{cite journal}}, etc. so I think we need a stock answer in the form of an FAQ list. We have another problem: the best advice to offer. The problem of square brackets has several solutionsworkarounds, and not all are universal for both URLs and titles - some work in one but not the other. For instance, Debresser provides two links, but these give two different workarounds, the first of which (percent-encoding) is a well-known guaranteed fix for URLs, but doesn't work at all in titles:

{{cite web |title=%5bExample%5d |url=http://www.google.com/}}

"%5bExample%5d".

His second suggestion (numeric character encoding) works in both URLs and titles:

{{cite web |title=[Example] |url=http://www.google.com/}}

"[Example]".

Finding out/remembering these character codes can be tiresome, and they are not intuitive to those who may encounter them later on. There is another way (which works in titles but not in URLs) - type the square brackets, but hide the right-hand one inside <nowiki></nowiki> tags:

{{cite web |title=[Example<nowiki>]</nowiki> |url=http://www.google.com/}}

"[Example]".

--Redrose64 (talk) 13:06, 18 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

One thing we can do: update Help:URL. Move this issue to the top of the page and add a list of encodings, ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 16:12, 25 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The doc page has recently been altered to put spaces after the pipes and before the equal signs in the copy&paste examples. That is, instead of this:

All parameters, horizontal layout

{{cite web |url= |title= |first= |last= |author= |authorlink= |coauthors= |date= |month= |year= |work= |publisher= |location= |page= |pages= |at= |language= |trans_title= |format= |doi= |archiveurl= |archivedate= |accessdate= |quote= |ref= |separator= |postscript=}}

we now have this:

All parameters, horizontal layout

{{cite web | url = | title = | first = | last = | author = | authorlink = |coauthors = | date = | month = | year = | work = | publisher = | location = | page = | pages = | at = | language = | trans_title = | format = | doi = | archiveurl = | archivedate = | accessdate = | quote = | ref = | separator = | postscript = }}

Is this something that we want? I, for one, do not like the change at all. --Redrose64 (talk) 15:47, 25 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Don't like it. I use an external script to cleanup citations and removing extra spaces like this is one of the features. I know of other who do similar cleanup. Yes to a space before the pipe (it especially helps with long urls), but no to the rest. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 16:10, 25 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. Why is there a need for spaces? Albacore (talk) 17:34, 29 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I checked the other template documentation— none use whitespace in this manner. Reverted. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 20:08, 29 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you --Redrose64 (talk) 20:22, 29 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Ideally, each newly introduced reference that uses a template like 'Cite web' gets an archiveurl and archivedate parameter, e.g. by WebCiteBOT. Unfortunately, the latter appears defunct and even if ever repaired it will have a tremendous backlog to handle. So we are stuck with a number of references that do not allow to find an archived page (or to know whether that even exists).
Finding a dead link (be it signalled by the {{dead link|date=.. ....... ....}} template or not) entices to find out where the web page may have been moved to. When found, it is reasonable to replace the dead url in the url= parameter with the live one. The problem however, is that one cannot compare the old url's page with the newly found: it may have changed and not (as well) represent the text it had originally referenced; it could make the originally introducing editor look stupid. I therefore suggest to keep the original url and the original accessdate in separate fields: The updating editor might simply rename '|url=' to '|introductionurl=' and '|accessdate=' to '|introductionaccessdate=' (content for simpler parameter names like oldurl and oldaccesdate might become replaced when a web page got moved a second time), and add his/her found '|url=' and '|accessdate='. It would maintain a trace that might allow another editor who is capable of finding the archive of the original url upon his/her suspecting it to have said something else, and then restore while filling in the archiveurl and archivedate fields.
Programs that handle templates are not supposed to malfuntion in case a parameter name is not recognized. I need to repair a few links as described here above, and will apply '|introductionurl=' and '|introductionaccessdate='; at least the necessary info is then retained and the reference will function.​▲ SomeHuman 2011-02-04 06:26 (UTC)
In fact, the field '|introductionaccessdate=' might be inserted with its date copied from '|accessdate' upon creation of a reference (automatically by a bot): it warrants simply finding back the article version that became referenced, even if the url and (or only) the (last) accessdate become updated by an editor. This can facilitate maintenance of an article for detectig unsourced material having replaced or been inserted into properly sourced text, without ever having been noticed. It would just as well facilitate finding the originally introduced url from the relevant old version. Hence, whether an often very lengthy '|introductionurl=' would best go into the template call (upon the need arising as above described), may be a matter of opinion with respect to technical capabilities.​▲ SomeHuman 2011-02-04 07:09 (UTC)