Documentation

The stable version of this template (ie. what you should use) is {{cite book}}.

This template replaces the deprecated {{book reference}}. It is compatible with book reference but only allows lowercase fields (as is standard). Additionally, {{cite book}} provides seven new parameters: origdate, origyear, origmonth, language, accessdate, accessyear and accessmonth (see below for a description).

A development version of this template is User:gracefool/cite book.

Usage

All fields must be lowercase. Copy a blank version to use:

Full version

Most common fields

{{cite book
 | last = 
 | first = 
 | authorlink = 
 | coauthors = 
 | editor = 
 | others = 
 | title = '''REQUIRED'''
 | origdate = 
 | origyear = 
 | origmonth = 
 | url = 
 | format = 
 | accessdate = 
 | accessyear = 
 | accessmonth = 
 | edition = 
 | date = 
 | year = 
 | month = 
 | publisher = 
 | location = 
 | language = 
 | id = 
 | pages = 
 | chapter = 
 | chapterurl = 
}}

{{cite book
 | last = 
 | first = 
 | authorlink = 
 | coauthors = 
 | year = 
 | title = '''REQUIRED'''
 | publisher = 
 | location = 
 | id = 
}}

Fields

Wikilinks

Most fields can be wikilinked (ie. title = [[book article|book title]]), but should generally only be linked to an existing Wikipedia article. Any wikilinked field must not contain any brackets apart from normal round brackets () — don't use <>[]{}.

Description of fields

Syntax (for the technical-minded)

Nested fields either rely on their parent fields, or replace them:

parent
- child — may be used with parent (and is ignored if parent is not used)
- Template:Talt child2 — may be used instead of parent (and is ignored if parent is used)

Description

last: Surname of author. Don't wikilink (use authorlink instead).
- first: First name(s) of author, including title(s) (eg. Firstname Middlename or Firstname M. or Dr. Firstname M., Snr.). Don't wikilink (use authorlink instead).
- authorlink: Title of Wikipedia article about author. Article should already exist. Must not be wikilinked itself.
- coauthors: Full name of additional author or authors, surname last, separated by ", " (eg. Joe Bloggs, John F. Kennedy, H. R. Dent).
editor: No text is added, so labels such as "(ed.)" have to be supplied by the user.
others: For uses such as "illustrated by Smith" or "trans. Smith".
title: Title of book. This is the only required parameter. Can be wikilinked only to an existing Wikipedia article.
url: URL of an online book. Cannot be used if you wikilinked title.
- format: Format, i.e. PDF. HTTP implied if not specified.
- accessdate: Full date when item was accessed, in ISO 8601 YYYY-MM-DD format, eg. 2006-02-17. Required when url field is used. Must not be wikilinked.
  - Template:Talt accessyear: Year when item was accessed, and accessmonth: Month when item was accessed. If you also have the day, use accessdate instead. Must not be wikilinked.
edition: When the book has more than one edition. eg: "2nd edition".
origdate: Full date of publication of original edition, in ISO 8601 YYYY-MM-DD format, eg. 2004-06-27. Must not be wikilinked.
- Template:Talt origyear: Year of publication of original edition, and origmonth: Month of publication of original edition. If you also have the day, use date instead. Must not be wikilinked.
date: Full date of publication, in ISO 8601 YYYY-MM-DD format, eg. 2006-02-17. Must not be wikilinked.
- Template:Talt year: Year of publication, and month: Month of publication. If you also have the day, use date instead. Must not be wikilinked.
publisher: Publisher should not include corporate designation such is "Ltd" or "Inc".
- location: Place of publication.
language: The language the book is written in, if it is not english.
id: Identifier such as ISBN 1-111-22222-9 or {{LCC|Z253.U69}}. Remember, you must specify the kind of identifier, not just give a number.
pages: 1–2: first page, and optional last page.
chapter: Produces:"Chapter" ahead of title. Punctuation other than quotes should be included in the value passed to the parameter (e.g., chapter = Meet Dick and Jane.)
- chapterurl: URL of an individual chapter of online book. Should be at the same site as url, if any.

Deprecated

The following field is provided only for backward compatibility with {{book reference}}. Don't use it.

author: Full name of author, preferably surname first.

Examples

Just a title

Mysterious book.

Year and title

Mysterious book. 1901.

Basic usage

Joe, Bloggs (1974). Book of Bloggs. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |coauthors= (help)

Basic usage with url

Bloggs, Joe (1974). Book of Bloggs (1st Edition ed.). Retrieved 2006-02-17. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |month= (help)

Three authors, title with a piped wikilink, edition

Bloggs, Joe. 1000 Acres (2nd Edition ed.). {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

Date without day, wikilinked title and publisher, id

Cordell, Bruce R. (2001). Manual of the Planes. Wizards of the Coast. ISBN 0-7869-1850-8. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameters: |accessmonth=, |chapterURL=, and |accessyear= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

Date of first edition, other language, illustrator

Bloggs, Joe (1974) [1463]. Book of Bloggs (in German). illustrated by Smith (1st Edition ed.). Retrieved 2006-02-17. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help); Cite has empty unknown parameter: |month= (help)

Testing

See Template:cite book/regression tests.

Note

Note the extra full-stop when the last author ends with an initial, and there is no date:

Invisible, M. Mysterious book.

We don't know of a practical solution to this — unless there is a way to test the characters of a field?

Discussion

Backwards compatibility

We need backwards compatibility with book reference. Please do not make things like this before discussing it. I have thus reverted. --Adrian Buehlmann 15:27, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I was thinking as you converted you could also convert the field names. But I suppose that makes settting up AWB quite difficult. ··gracefool |☺ 20:33, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

We can convert parameter names while upgrading. That's not a problem at all. BTW you, anybody can do that too with WP:AWB (it's not such a big thing, just start slowly and check each diff carefully. I also check each diff - oh my eyes are hurting already after doing that cite journal migrate thing :-). It's just a little bit regex fiddleing (I will provide the AWB settings once I've started, so we can share it and learn from each other). What I argue is, do we really need to add more parameters for additional authors (which are currently put together in the coauthors param)? Is it really needed to abandon the nice short "first" "last" parameters? If we do not need to handle the additional authors separately, then there is no need to abandon "first" "last". Handling additional authors separately adds considerable complexity to the template. What do we gain by doing that? On the other hand, you are correct that this would be the right moment to do such a step. What I fear is that we pile up params here and they will not be used. Params once added are very hard to remove later, even when used seldom. --Adrian Buehlmann 22:21, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

See the new documentation. All first and last fields are eliminated, as they are unneccessary. Using author2, author3 etc. means the template controls all the punctuation, ie. the commas between each author, and the ampersand between the last authors. Note I've also eliminated the authorlink field, as well as any use of {{wikilink}} - these are also unneccessary (see Template talk:wikilink). I've been working on keeping backwards compatibility with deprecated fields, but do you think I can get rid of them now? ··gracefool |☺ 22:35, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm. I see you would like to deprecate (or even remove) first last parameters. When I was a book ref newbie, I once proposed that on the old book reference but SEWilco was against that and COGDEN also voiced for first last. SEWilco then added the coauthors parameter. See Template talk:Book reference/archive01#Eliminating variant First, Last. Question is: shall we revisit that decision taken then? The reasoning of SEWilco then for first last was a bit vague. But he might have had other reasons he didn't say explicitly. Does anybody know what the real striking argument(s) were that lead to that first, last thing? I think I might be a bit blinded by past consensus finding sessions. Gracefool seems to come to the same conclusion I once had. But I don't know what opinion I have now (!). I need to ruminate a bit more on this... --Adrian Buehlmann 23:22, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A possible argument for using first last I see is that on book references, the first author is written as

last, first

whereas all following authors are written as

first last, first last, ...

So the first author is treated somewhat special (See the multi author examples on {{book reference}}). --Adrian Buehlmann 23:36, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, however you could just specify the order in the documentation (as in the devel cite book). The only benefit I can think of (after reading that archive page) is for controlling formatting, and preventing user errors, which is good. However, to do it properly you also need an authortitle field, a authorseniority field, etc. That all increases server load, and decreases ease-of-use and developer maintainability. COGDEN also pointed out that not all cultures put the surname last normally, so in any case the field names need to change (eg. to surname and given). But I think it's best to remove them entirely, for those reasons. ··gracefool |☺ 23:58, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A benefit of first last for the #1 author is also that books are usually "addressed" by the last name of that author and the year of the book. So if book references might once get migrated to a database, we already have that info. We already have quite a number of book ref calls that actually use first, last. If we go back, this is a destruction of information on the calls. This is sometimes a good hint. BTW parameter first recieves everything of the name of the author that is not "last". So for example for "Robert Cecil Martin", first is "Robert Cecil" and last is "Martin". If he is the primary author of a book, then it is "Martin, Robert Cecil". Coauthors follow with reversed name parts. --Adrian Buehlmann 00:39, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

True that. I'll reinstate first and last, and deprecate author.

As for author1 to author5 - they are optional, since there's no way to stop people using coauthors instead. So it's not a problem for people who don't like them. Their code isn't complex (it's just repeated 4 times), and although you're right that they're not needed, they are nice and make for more consistency. ··gracefool |☺ 09:11, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with the deprecation of author in favor for first last. Per the author1 to author5 I'm still rather on the opposing end. It does make the template more complicate and it is not a complete solution (5 is just an arbitrary number). I'm also still quite a bit paranoid about the stability of qif (see User talk:Brion VIBBER#The future of qif). He doesn't like qif (he was even more explicit in PM) and he's the CTO of Wikipedia (and besides that a very hard working damned knowledgeable guy. After all he keeps our buts running here). It's still a bit a desaster, I know. Qif is the least ugliest thing we have for now. But if we can limit it's use, we should do so (but not at any cost of course, so to hell with the policy tag on WP:AUM). There are also some people that are strong opponents to using book ref (cite book) in articles because they feel it is needlessly complex (which I do not think so). The lesser we go over board with qif the better (or the lesser ugly?). If qif breaks before we have built in support I might throw in weeble code or hiddenStructure hack here as a stop gap measure (as we had to do here when pressure exploded from WP:AUM). The more complicate this here is, the smaller the chances are we would be able to do so. But at least I'm not comfortable with that qif too and I would love to have this darned beloved thing finally burned forever, but not until we have a proper built-in conditional. So I would petition to you to not go the road of author1 to author5 for now. But If you really really really insist on this, I would bite on my teeth and look away when you insert these ugly author1 to author5 in order to keep you on board. --Adrian Buehlmann 10:14, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I'll go with you. There's no point trying to be perfect, since it's just a stopgap measure anyway. I'll remove all author fields. That will leave us with a template which is nicer than {{book reference}} but uses less server resources. ··gracefool |☺ 12:41, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ok. Thanks for your patience. At least you got 4 new params in: link, accessdate, acessyear and accessmonth (these didn't exist on the old book ref). --Adrian Buehlmann 13:03, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Gracefool, on User:Gracefool/cite book you went up to 5 authors. What do you do if you have a book with more than 5 authors? I've seen monstrous author lists on cite journal calls (See Sleeping sickness, reported by Phil). --Adrian Buehlmann 23:29, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I went up to 6 authors, but wow. Ok, I've reinstated coauthors for cases where there are more than six authors. I expect that is very rare — do you know of any others?

Yeah. Sadly this is quite often on the journals. For books this happens not that often. But rare cases do not free us from tackling them as well. --Adrian Buehlmann 00:27, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ref

In case you didn't notice, I removed the undocumented ref field. It became the "id" HTML attribute for linking with footnote labels. Being undocumented, I'm pretty sure it has been used very little, and it is unnecessary when using the standard {{note}} or {{note label}} templates. I think this should be removed from all cite templates (see Template talk:Web reference/dev). ··gracefool |☺ 20:51, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Good idea. Thanks for pointing this out. The ref stuff seems to be a bit relic. I haven't seen where that's used. Someone else? User:SEWilco once said something about that on book reference (BTW, I have not heard anything from him recently, he was once very active on the citation templates). I agree to remove it and try going without. --Adrian Buehlmann 21:56, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It's probably only used in {{book reference}}. We'll check when we do the big merge to {{citation}} =) ··gracefool |☺ 22:35, 16 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Funny you should mention that parameter, I used it just this week for something. Anybody want to look through my recent contributions to find out why? (that's a joke BTW) Given that we are aiming to wrap these things in <ref> tags, etc, do we actually need to have anchors in them? —Phil | Talk 12:59, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

You mean the {{ref}} template? ··gracefool |☺ 09:11, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No. I think Phil talks about Ævar's citation tags. For an example how that's used in a top shot article see AIDS. --Adrian Buehlmann 09:36, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Migrating book reference to cite book

I've set up settings for WP:AWB to do the migration from book reference to cite book at User:Adrian Buehlmann/AWB/migrate to cite book. Use at your own risk. You might want to wait a bit using these settings until they have been used a bit. This is very fresh meat. --Adrian Buehlmann 14:19, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hiding author on own page

Would it be greatly disturbing if I were to investigate the possibility of hiding the author's name when on their article? I'm thinking of something like if authorlink = {{PAGENAME}} then hide author. Thoughts? —Phil | Talk 16:25, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If you do this in a sandbox: no :-). BTW, do we get an equivalent for {{booleq|A|B}} when having built-in conditionals? I assume you need an equality function for this. Please note that as soon as Brion breaks qif (don't ask me why he would), there is an incredible chance that booleq breaks. Please also note that I have no clue how to mimick booleq by using weeble code or hiddenStructure hack. So if shit should happen (qif breaks before we have built in conditionals), we will be lost on cite book if you use booleq. --Adrian Buehlmann 16:50, 17 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Can't qif do that? As for qif breaking, when it breaks it shouldn't be hard to port templates to the new conditional. ··gracefool |☺ 09:11, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think no. Key point is the string equality test (which depends on the default paramater function and a level of meta template, see {{booleq}}). {{qif}} can't do that (and this holds true until you prove me wrong. Burdon of proof on your side :-). Besides, there is a paranoid chance that qif breaks before we have built-in conditionals (but I cannot see why anyone would be so mean to do that). And some aspects of qif (conditional inclusion) will break near certainly (but we do not need conditional inclusion as we have seen here, provided cite book is kept sufficiently simple). The chance is very high that we get at least a built in conditional that provides the equivalent of Wikipedia:hiddenStructure (suppressing of text, dependant on the existence of a parameter, but without the accessability drawback)--Adrian Buehlmann 10:30, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Related pages need updating

If this template replaces {{book reference}}, someone should update WP:CITET. Alan Pascoe 13:46, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Done. --Adrian Buehlmann 17:04, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Usage section be more useful in template itself within noinclude block?

User:JonRoma asked in the edit summary of this edit: "shouldn't Usage section be more useful in template itself within 'noinclude block?"

I would propose to not do this because this here is intended as a rather high use template. The old book reference has more than 5'000 entries on the what links here. Adding the usage on the template page itself leads to more edits on the template. Edits should be done one the template only when really needed. At the moment it's not that bad, but once we have converted all inclusions of book reference to cite book, this will be more important. --Adrian Buehlmann 22:23, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Original publication date

Copied from Wikipedia_talk:Template_messages/Sources_of_articles/Generic_citations:

The format for citing books that had an original publication date different than the edition cited isn't supported. Wikipedia:Cite sources#Complete citations in a .22References.22 section suggests this:

Marx, Karl [1867] (1967) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. I. Edited by Frederick Engels. New York: International Publishers.

If you plugged this into the template it'd look like this:

Marx, Karl ([1867] 1967). Frederick Engels (ed.). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. I. New York: International Publishers. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)

or this.

Marx, Karl, [1867] ([1867] 1967). Frederick Engels (ed.). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. I. New York: International Publishers. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: year (link)

Neither is particularly appealing, especially with "authorlinks".

The reason I, and the other editor bring this up is that for Baha'i literature and other Baha'i articles, the original dates of the books are much older than the current publication of the books, and we would like to show when the book was originally authored. So is there a possibility of incorporating an original publication date in the template? -- Jeff3000 23:03, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds reasonable to look into this further. Oh well, smells like (yet) another parameter (origdate? origyear?). Any volunteer to hack up a proposal template code under her or his user space? Best with inclusion examples (I'm currently not enough bored for doing things like this ;-). --Adrian Buehlmann 23:59, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Speak of the devil! This is one thing that has bothered me about the citation templates. Often I need to cite a short story that has been republished in a new edition. When the publication year appears beside the author's name, it looks as if the original author was around to see republication of his or her work, which can be especially weird when the author is long-dead! Usually I do a work-around by putting the original publication date in brackets after the "first=name" parameter. However, this is a very awkward solution at best. I would definitely welcome an additional parameter to address this problem.
-,-~^R'lyehRising~-,- 01:03, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]
- I've added origdate, origyear and origmonth for this use. ··gracefool |☺ 03:35, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for looking into this and adding the new feature. -- Jeff3000 17:22, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is it actually useful to have the dates linked? Seems unnecessary to me. —Serein 17:49, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Editor and Translator

Is there a reason why the "editor" field does not append "Ed." to the name? Also there should be a field for a translator. -- Jeff3000 23:03, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

First question: I don't know (I haven't thought about that deeply enough yet). But we have the problem that the calls now do add this, as mandated by the doumentation. So we cannot add "Ed." on the template, as we would have this twice then.

Second question: There is a parameter "others" (see the doc) that may be used for this. We could add a translator parameter, but I would be happy if this is not needed. I generally prefer not to pile up parameters. We already have a lot. But if there is a very good reason to add a parameter, it should be done. --Adrian Buehlmann 23:48, 19 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If we don't add "Ed." after editor, the field is redundant, as the user may as well just use others. I really think we should break compatibility at some point and add "Ed." or "Edited by", fixing with WP:AWB. ··gracefool |☺ 03:03, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Uuuh! But I won't do this. So much work for such a small problem. BTW AWB is not almighty because you cannot do everything with regexes. And I'm still waiting for Media-Wiki built-in conditionals. --Adrian Buehlmann 08:48, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The reason the 'book reference' template had an editor parameter, I thought, was for when you referenced a chapter, i.e. Bloggs's "Chapter X", in Smith's "A Very Long Book". (This is why editor was next to title, not next to the author parameters.) If you're just referencing the book, then you treated the editor as if he were the usual main author, i.e. Smith, John (ed.), "A Very Long Book". And (separate issue) I used others for translators, same as illustrators, etc. —Serein 17:39, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Update from User:Gracefool/cite book

I've just updated the template and documentation. I probably was a bit bold, but the documentation is much improved, and the template doesn't break compatibility. It adds origdate, origyear, origmonth and language. Language is helpful when the book is not in English (there are cases where people have wanted this and have had to add a note after the template).

Note that one regression test is broken, but it was incorrect usage anyway (they manually linked the date). ··gracefool |☺ 03:40, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Ha! In use. See this (origyear). And this (language on last book). --Adrian Buehlmann 09:39, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I've fixed two regression tests: [1] and [2] (red date). Other ones still need updates too (blue year on manual expansions is missing). Additional test cases for the new features would also be good. --Adrian Buehlmann 09:51, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Updated WP:CITET: [3]. --Adrian Buehlmann 10:01, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It might be a good idea to check for wikilinking of dates when converting {{book reference}} with AWB. ··gracefool |☺ 12:29, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah. I'm doing this. It's a real pain though. Needs to be done manually as there are too complex cases like this (edited manually in the edit window of AWB). BTW you could boot up on the AWB camp too :-) (I hope you do have a Windows box somwehere). I think it will take a bit longer to convert to cite book now... --Adrian Buehlmann 13:10, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

On Binding of Isaac there was:

* {{Book reference
 | First=Flavius | Last=Josephus | Authorlink=Flavius Josephus
 | Title=Antiquities of the Jews
 | Publisher=Interhack Digital Library
 | Year=93-94 C.E.
 | ID=ISBN 1-58-827612-0
 | URL=http://www.interhack.net/projects/library/antiquities-jews/b1c13.html
 }}

I have converted that to:

* {{cite book
 | first=Flavius | last=Josephus | authorlink=Flavius Josephus
 | title=Antiquities of the Jews
 | publisher=Interhack Digital Library
 | id=ISBN 1-58-827612-0
 | url=http://www.interhack.net/projects/library/antiquities-jews/b1c13.html
 }} 93-94 C.E.

in order not to produce a redlink for the year parameter. The old book reference accepted that. The current cite book does not. --Adrian Buehlmann 16:16, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Surely this is less than helpful and should be fixed: we're losing information rather than preserving it :-( —Phil | Talk 16:48, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

NB this is also now incompatible with {{cite journal}} which requires manual linking of dates, just like {{book reference}} used to. I think we should return to the previous situation because this is just too much hassle. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 17:04, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Automatic wikilinking of dates

Sorry for bugging you guys once again; I know all the hard work you do to get this template to work right, and to be efficient at the same time. Regarding the wikilinking of dates, some times I don't think the wikilinking should be automatic. I bring about the Baha'i literature article again (and I know this is a minor problem, and usually is not a problem) in that the original publication dates may span years (as is the case with compilations of various tablets written in the 18th century and before), and thus the date fields look red. -- Jeff3000 17:45, 20 February 2006 (UTC)[reply]