Category:Harv and Sfn template errors

This category holds articles that use any of the short-cite templates ({{harv}} and {{sfn}} template families, and {{harvc}}) where one or more of those short-cite templates do not properly link to a full citation, the target, or where multiple full cites can be the target of a single short-cite template.

Due to technical limitations, Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors‎ contains many articles with false-positive errors. No-target error messages are hidden by default. Articles with multiple-target errors are listed in Category:Harv and Sfn multiple-target errors. Multiple-target errors are not susceptible to false-positive errors so those errors are not suppressed. Several options to view error messages are detailed below, as well as possible ways to resolve errors.

– Errors only

User:Svick/HarvErrors.js

– Errors + Warnings about potential errors when short footnote templates are used. This has substantially fewer pointless warnings than Ucucha's old script.

User:Trappist the monk/HarvErrors.js

Currently, two user scripts relatively reliably detect errors

as well as a third experimental method based on customizing a .css page. The three methods are

adding a missing full citation. When short citations are copied from one article to another without a full citation, you can sometimes find the full citation in a related article using Wikipedia's search feature.

correcting the author and/or editor names in either the short or full citation so that they match each other

correcting or adding dates in either the short or full citation so that they match each other; remember that date ranges are separated with an ndash character (–)

converting a plain-text full citation into a templated citation using one of the cs1|2 families of templates (e.g. {{}}) or one of the Vcite family of templates (e.g. {{vcite book}})

Cite book

change cs1|2 template redirect names that do not begin with cite or cita to the target of the redirect (e.g. change {{}} to {{cite encyclopedia}})

encyclopedia

create and use {{cite ...}} redirects for citation wrapper templates: {{<whatever>}} → {{cite <whatever>}}. Consider renaming the wrapper template so that its canonical name is {{cite <whatever>}} because there are automated processes out there that rename redirects to their canonical names; once renamed by these drones, false-positive error messaging may reappear.

wrapping a plain-text citation inside {{}} and setting |ref= or |id= as appropriate to match the value expected by the short-cite template

wikicite

placing {{}} adjacent to the plain-text citation; set the {{anchor}} parameter value to the value expected by the short-cite template

anchor

set the short-cite parameter |ref=none to suppress anchor ID link creation

Ways of resolving legitimate no target errors include:

Ways of resolving false positive no target errors include:

Ways of resolving multiple targets errors include:

No advice is given for resolving false-positive errors.

Current limitations and false-positive errors[edit]

Brief explanation[edit]

When a short-cite template links to a full citation that is rendered by a template that wraps a CS1 template, like {{cite DNB}} (which wraps {{cite encyclopedia}}), a no target error may be displayed even when the short-cite template is valid and the link works. That is a "false positive" error. If you find what looks like a false positive error, please report it on the talk page for this category, and another editor will either fix the article or add the template in question to Module:Footnotes/whitelist.

Details[edit]

The short-cite templates employ an article reader to read the article's raw wikitext (the same text that you see in the source editor's edit window). While reading the wikitext, the article reader looks for a variety of templates that can create anchor IDs. For each such template found, the article reader attempts to extract the necessary information to determine the template's anchor ID, if it produces one. For cs1|2, the most common long-form citation templates, the article reader looks for:

The article reader extracts similar information from other templates as appropriate for those templates.

Each long-form citation anchor ID is saved in a list along with a tally indicating how many of that ID the article reader found. When the short-cite template renders its output, it looks for its target anchor ID in the anchor-ID list:

The no target errors may be true errors or may be false-positive errors. For true errors, there is no anchor ID in the article to match the anchor ID expected by the short-cite template. A false-positive error occurs because the article reader can only read the article's raw wikitext, it cannot burrow into wrapper templates. Wrapper templates enclose the template that creates the anchor ID. This enclosure hides the necessary details, so the article reader cannot determine that wrapper template's anchor ID. For example, {{cite DNB}} is a wrapper template that encloses {{cite encyclopedia}}. The values assigned to the {{cite DNB}} parameters |year= and |supplement= tell {{Cite DNB}} how to set editor names and date in its call to the enclosed {{cite encyclopedia}}, which uses them to create the wrapper template's anchor ID. When a wrapped template creates a matching anchor ID that the article reader cannot see; the link from short-cite to long-form citation works but is marked with a no target false-positive error message.