This is an archive of past discussions about Help:Cite errors. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
One unresolved issue is that users with a language set to other than en see the default message in the selected language without the link to the help page. {{broken ref/sandbox}} now supports translations of "see the help page" for the top used languages per Wikipedia:Database reports/User preferences. The "see the help page" translations are in {{broken ref/lang}} and can be easily expanded. Translations were culled from the various language versions of MediaWiki:Newarticletext. Translations for the main message are already in place in each MediaWiki page. --— Gadget850 (Ed)talk13:43, 23 January 2013 (UTC)
{{broken ref/sandbox
|msg=Cite error: There are <code><ref></code> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a <code>{{Reflist}}</code> template or a <code><references /></code> tag
|lang=en
|help=Cite error refs without references
|cat=Pages with missing references list
}}
Cite error: There are <ref> tags on this page, but the references will not show without a {{Reflist}} template or a <references /> tag (see the help page).
{{broken ref/sandbox
|msg=Existen etiquetas <code><ref></code>, pero no se encontró una etiqueta <code><references /></code>
|lang=es
|help=Cite error refs without references
|cat=Pages with missing references list
}}
Existen etiquetas <ref>, pero no se encontró una etiqueta <references /> (consulta la página de ayuda).
False negatives
I don't know why there are so many false negatives appear here, i.e. articles that don't actually have any fault. I would estimate at least 50%. The only way I know to clear them is by null edit. There must be one or more background processes which plod through all the pages, occasionally picking on one to mark incorrectly – some of the pages have had no change for as long as a year. It's all very tedious.
There is no bot or other process that goes through periodically and tags articles. Whenever a reference is added, deleted or changed, the Cite software extension immediately checks for errors and calls the message. Articles can have stale messages, but you can usually fix that with a purge. If you point out a current issue I can take a look at it. --Gadget850 (Ed)talk11:04, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
I work through Category:Pages with missing references list. Yesterday it was cleared, twice. It usually gains two or three dozen a day. This morning it had more than 300 items in it. Even now it has 250-ish. At least 80% have no error, but need a null edit to clear them off the list. How/why do they get on the list? Most have not been changed in weeks. I think a reasonable solution would be to make getting on the list a two-step process - since null edit clears the spurious ones, make null edit a part of getting on the list, so that only the really wrong remain. John of Cromer in Philippines (talk) mytime= Sun 00:22, wikitime= 16:22, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
Paularo is an example. It is shown on the category page - even after I purge the category - but the category is not listed at the foot of the article. The article hasn't been edited for weeks, and I can't see any recent template or module edit that would account for it. -- John of Reading (talk) 16:41, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
Changes to the template, however, may not be reflected immediately on the category page. When you edit an article to add a category tag directly, the list of category members is updated immediately when the page is saved. When a category link is contained in a template, however, this does not happen immediately: instead, whenever a template is edited, all the pages that transclude it are put into the job queue to be recached during periods of low server load. This means that, in busy periods, it may take hours or even days before individual pages are recached and they start to appear in the category list. Performing a null edit to a page will allow it to jump the queue and be immediately recached.
I'm confused. Please have a look at the history of Pemara and of the few templates it uses. I can see no reason for that article to have been placed in the error category at any time in the last few weeks. The article has had one edit this year, unrelated to its referencing; and according to the list displayed below the edit box, only one relevant template has changed since 26 February, and that edit was unrelated to referencing. Yet Johnmperry states that the error category was clear yesterday. So how did the article get into the error category today? -- John of Reading (talk) 19:56, 6 April 2013 (UTC)
An article is queued for re-assessment whenever there is an edit to any template or LUA module that it uses. Recently there have been many edits to much-used citation and other templates as part of the switch to LUA. It is therefore quite likely that the queues are long, so that the article is re-assessed at a random time some hours or days after the last template edit. But, as the bug report says, that doesn't explain why the articles are dropping into the error category. -- John of Reading (talk) 11:11, 7 April 2013 (UTC)
BTW, to answer a question above, the probable reason Pemara was re-assesed for categories (A RefreshLinksJob was run in tech speak) was most likely this edit to template:Hesperiinae. (That is of course a guess though). Its impossible to know if a change on a template will affect references (or categories), so any change causes the entire page to be reparsed. Bawolff (talk) 22:12, 10 April 2013 (UTC)
Talk namespace restriction not true anymore?
WT:Criteria for speedy deletion is currently showing "Cite error: <ref> tags exist, but no <references/> tag was found". (I am not asking for help fixing that particular problem; doing so would probably violate comment etiquette anyway.) Is this behavior intentional, or is it a reportable bug? Has this been discussed somewhere else that I haven't noticed? --SoledadKabocha (talk) 19:55, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
I updated the English interface pages, removed "Cite error:" from all of them and deleted MediaWiki:Cite error so it is at default. I can remember why it was deleted, but it seemed more logical to keep the prefix centralized. --Gadget850talk17:02, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
That has created the situation I described for en-ca: Cite errors for users with normal English now display "Cite error:" in all namespaces, but nothing after that if the following message is suppressed in the namespace. If we do it like this then MediaWiki:Cite error should be created and use the same namespace suppression as the following message. Do all cite error messages use the same namespace suppression? PrimeHunter (talk) 21:42, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
I don't know if this is a red herring, or true, or relevant, but when I visit Category:Pages with missing references list it is empty apart from the 5 permanent members. That happens, but not when I wake up. Unless someone has been working on it I would expect there to be about 10 true members (and the false ones have been stopped by the bug fix). Just saying. John of Cromer in Philippines (talk) mytime= Sun 06:39, wikitime= 22:39, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
The standard English and Spanish pages have been updated. British and Canadian English pages have been redirected. {{Broken ref}} now has a list of all supported language interface pages with an edit link. --Gadget850talk01:01, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
Trying to use mixed footnotes and shortened footnotes without luck
I tried maybe a half-dozen variations, saving one just for reference [3]. I'm not sure how they are linked in the implementation, so not sure what to change to get it to work. --Ronz (talk) 00:10, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
This error is (um, very) vague, and attempts to find out what it means just go round in circles. I ended up at Help:Cite_errors/Cite_error which claims to offer help, but does not. Perhaps this is an internal error or something -- surely it should be possible to give some sort of indication? Imaginatorium (talk) 14:24, 11 May 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for your response... I have fixed the page (Trolley problem, but I believe it was on this older version: [5] (sorry, don't know how to make a 'smart' link). But now a real meaningful version of the message is there...
So the error message itself is perhaps not a big problem -- but it would really help if the help page said something like "internal/temporary error". Somewhere I saw a suggestion that a "purge" would help, but I couldn't face another Google roundtrip to try to find out what a purge is. Imaginatorium (talk)
Someone vandalized {{broken ref/lang}} a while back, which resulted in only the message prefix showing. I reverted and protected that template. The page just needed a purge to resolve this. --Gadget850talk18:25, 11 May 2013 (UTC)
{{Singlechart}} is not intended for this purpose. It creates a table row, so it needs to be included in a table. It also creates a reference, so you are essentially nesting <ref> tags, which does not work. Please read the {{Singlechart}} documentation or use another method to include these references. --Gadget850talk15:07, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
A note that I've grabbed the standard links and used them as standard references. If you work out how to do it in the more conventional single charts manner, then feel free to redo it. :) Lukeno94(tell Luke off here)11:54, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
Fixing reference errors
There is a new feature in, showing Cite error: A list-defined reference is not used in the content (see the help page). instead of Cite error: <ref> tag with name "abc" defined in <references> is not used in prior text (see the help page). Now it is impossible to find out which list defined reference is not used. What can we do to let us show the old version, when the names were given? Thanks a lot. --Frze (talk) 08:00, 7 July 2013 (UTC) examples: Psilocybin mushroom, Here's to Never Growing Up
My fault: the name got lost somehow on my last update. Fixed:
which determines if the category is empty or not. He also uses ARA, a script that he developed, to help fix citation errors. He hasn't used WikiBlame before. — JJJ(say hello) 16:01, 10 October 2013 (UTC) Copied from my talk page --Frze> talk 17:38, 11 October 2013 (UTC)
I wanted to cite a blog post titled "Commandant's Column: Envisioning USAWC 2020" [6] (archive) for which "2020" seemed like a reasonable name...denied! —rybec21:58, 27 November 2013 (UTC)
I know what Cite_croak means. That isn't what is being proposed. What I'm asking is for the existing suggestion from Template:Broken_ref#Examples to be applied, in order to allow the Help pages to avoid being incorrectly included in inappropriate maintenance categories. Please re-consider. 63.251.123.2 (talk) 21:39, 3 December 2013 (UTC)
I see the problem, yes. It would work for the pages that don't include examples (like Help:Cite errors/Cite croak) but you are right, we'd need to figure out another solution for excluding the subpages of Help:Cite_errors that deliberately include errors. A simple solution would be to exclude the whole of the Help namespace (as is already done for the Talk namespace), but I'm not sure if that is actually a good idea. Suggestions? 63.251.123.2 (talk) 23:13, 3 December 2013 (UTC)
I added 'nocat' on December 27, 2013. This only works when you directly translude one of the MediaWiki pages but not when cite.php triggers an error. See the doc page. --Gadget850talk01:02, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
Namespaces and Template:Broken ref
I noticed that Template:Broken ref works differently in the various namespaces. Actually, I remember that, because I took part in the original discussion regarding this:
In article, help, category, template and file namespaces: adds message and error category.
In user namespace: adds message but not error category.
In other namespaces: the message is suppressed by an invisible span and no error category.
This is pretty logical:
Both the message and the error category in article, help, and template namespaces: because we want this to be fixed, right away or later by editors who work through the error category..
Only the message in user namespace: because we don't care to fix other people's userspace, but we still want the user himself to fix it.
I have two suggestions:
Move category and file namespaces from the first to the second group. They are not an article, not a template which is transcluded in articles, and not a helppage, which is supposed to help so should itself be error-free. So basically, we don't care that much.
I would like categories and files to remain in the error categories. It's a way to spot some vandalism and misguided edits that would otherwise be missed. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:55, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
I see your point. You are saying that categories and files are more heavily edited than other namespaces, so you want to keep a check on them. I don't really agree with you, but it is probably a judgment call.
My second-step proposal would be that since the number of pages in the error category is low (used to be hundreds and thousands, and is now tens), we should, after giving people a month or so to see the error messages in other non-talk namespaces, add all of them to the error category, to fix them all. Debresser (talk) 08:41, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
