Help talk:Formatting Citations and Footnotes

Any thoughts on how to format tweets and tumblrs? How about citing a comment to somebody else's LJ post? What other examples are missing from these guidelines?--æþel 03:55, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

I found a useful guide for MLA/APA/Chicago style citations of social media sites. Most of Fanlore's citation style seems to be more like APA, so using that example as a base and tweaking it to match the other ones we already have it'd go like

Tumblr username. Title/first several words of Tumblr post, posted to Tumblr on 1 January 2012. (Accessed 1 January 2012.)

For reblogs/comments: username. Reply to "Tumblr post," posted to Tumblr on 1 January 2012. (Accessed 1 January 2012.)

What do y'all think? --doctorsidrat (talk) 03:08, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

Dates format?

Is the correct way to format citation dates on Fanlore DAY Month Year? Month DAY year? Something else? (Does it matter?) There's multiple versions on the help page and I'd like to make sure I'm doing my citations as correctly as possible to make it easier for others who come editing pages after me. :D --doctorsidrat (talk) 03:14, 11 September 2019 (UTC)

Is it just me or footnote links are not working?

When I click one of the footenote links ([1], [2], [3],...) I expect to be redirected to the right position in the footnote section with the right footnote number. That does not seem to be happening for me on any page.

For example, clicking the [1] in "... the way the character of Rita Skeeter is written[1]" in the lead section of J.K. Rowling and Transphobia sends me to nowhere in the references section, although I see nothing wrong in the source.

If it's a temporary glitch or something, that's fine, but if it's happening for an extended period of time (and I think it is judging by https://archive.md/Lm6Le), you might want to have a note somewhere in this help page for confused users like me. --Potpotkettle (talk) 03:42, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

Links to references are indeed not working; it's a known software issue. All I know about it is, it's on someone's agenda to get fixed. --Elf (talk) 03:57, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

Is that mentioned somewhere, perhaps in another help page? Saying it's under maintenance or something would go a long way. (I initially wondered I might have broken something when I noticed footnote links were not working.) Potpotkettle (talk) 11:45, 14 December 2021 (UTC)

Possible solution

I looked into the problem more closely and I'm pretty sure I know what's wrong. It's probably "$4" in MediaWiki:Cite_references_link_many and MediaWiki:Cite_references_link_one . This "$4" variable is a new functionality that the Fanlore instance of MediaWiki, a fairly old version I believe, does not support. [1] (In fact, I installed MediaWiki 1.26 on my Linux PC and added $4 into the two system message - the problem was reproduced.)

If I'm guessing things correctly, here is a quick way to resolve the problem:

1. Remove "$4" from MediaWiki:Cite_references_link_many and MediaWiki:Cite_references_link_one. ("$4" is not visible on the page but is in the source text.)
2. Purge or null-edit a normal page containing references and see if the links start working.

Could anyone try this? If I completely misunderstand the situation (which is possible), you can simply revert the changes in 1 and continue investigating. No harm will be done. Potpotkettle (talk) 12:43, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

I haven't tried this solution, but like a previous editor on this page said, this is a known issue which is expected to be fixed very soon. There's an update coming that should fully resolve this issue. --Auntags (talk) 21:11, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

It sounds like there is a planned upgrade of MediaWiki, which is great and will probably render the fix above moot. However, I still think that, even if the upgrade is done next week, the fix above is so easy and quick (at least I believe so) that there is no reason not to try. One fewer day with broken links might be a small win but is still a win. --Potpotkettle (talk) 13:08, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Hi Potpotkettle, many thanks for looking into this and for suggesting a fix. I've implemented it on both templates and you are correct, that seems to have solved our bug ♥ The contribution is much appreciated.

If you are ever interested in getting involved with Fanlore behind the scenes as a volunteer, please feel free to drop me a line as I'd be happy to chat. However if you'd prefer to stay as a casual editor, that's fine too! Either way, we are grateful for the help! --enchantedsleeper (talk) 15:22, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

I'm glad that it worked, and thank you for the invitation. I'll think about it. In the meantime, thank you for what you are doing behind the scenes. --Potpotkettle (talk) 10:10, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

@enchantedsleeper: In light of the MediaWiki upgrade last month, I think it's now safe to remove these workarounds. (By which I mean, it should be fine to either revert the changes [2][3] or perhaps reset to the default by deleting the pages.) Potpotkettle (talk) 11:10, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

notes vs. citations?

I think the notes grouping is overused, and examples on when to use it should be added. On some pages I've seen citations I added get moved into the notes group only because, as far as I could see, they also contained a quote and not just a link to the source. When citing I often include a quote so that it's clear what exactly I was citing--the quote itself might not be interesting enough to include in the main text, but discussion threads can get long (and disappear). I also use examples as citations; if I add a claim that something happened/was said a lot, I might grab several examples and include quotes, but adding the quotes to the main text would interrupt the flow. Fanlore is sometimes really the first time a piece of fanhistory is getting documented, so instead of citing another fan historian (who didn't exist) or my own memory (I wasn't there), I summarize the results of my Google/LiveJournal/Twitter explorations and cite as much as possible so people know how I arrived at the conclusions I did.--aethel (talk) 02:25, 14 July 2022 (UTC)