The documentation for Template:Citation states

• "All are optional and indentation is used simply to group related items — these may be mutually exclusive where indicated." (the Full citation parameters section)
• "A full list of this template's supported parameters, their aliases, and their dependencies is shown in the Usage section near the top of this documentation page." (the Parameters section)

Where is this indicated? There is no Usage section, and as far as I can see never has been (just quickly looking at the documentation's history).

How or where do I find an overview over exactly which parameters are mutually exclusive, with what other parameters, under what circumstances?

All I can find that |page=, |pages= and |at= are mutually exclusive, and only by looking at this page, Help:Citation Style 1.

CapnZapp (talk) 10:29, 6 March 2026 (UTC)[]

The indentation referred to was that which existed prior to this edit. Nowadays it's at Template:Citation/doc#Description where a number of aliases are described, beginning straight away with

• last: Surname of a single author. Do not wikilink—use author-link instead. For corporate authors or authors for whom only one name is listed by the source, use last or one of its aliases (e.g. |author=Bono). Aliases: surname, author, last1, surname1, author1.

It could perhaps do with a thorough update, several people have moved things around in the last few years. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 12:01, 6 March 2026 (UTC)[]

Hopefully you or somebody will add that link somewhere appropriate on the help page, User:Redrose64. I didn't ask for my own sake, but for everybody reading the page. Plus: you're talking about indentations and aliases, I posted because the help page talked about (but did not detail) mutually exclusive dependencies. Cheers CapnZapp (talk) 09:21, 9 March 2026 (UTC)[]

Yeah, the note at the top of Template:Citation/doc#Full_citation_parameters is just moldy and ancient, the way it describes indentation has no relationship to current reality.

(And statements like Some hyphenated names can also be placed without hyphens. are an example of a particular sickness that tended to infect template documentation in the Before Times™: Something would be mentioned, but not actually documented. Instead, vague allusions to the feature or functionality would be made in lieu of detailed documentation. Typically that would happen because the details weren't concrete and would be constantly changing at the whims of editors. One editor or another would edit the template to add this or that alternate spelling/format of some parameter, undocumented because it's "just for them" and anyone else who reads the template code to discover it.

For the most part we've grown up and put a stop to that nonsense, in the code itself. The documentation just needs to catch up and quit disclaiming about possible conditions that might arise. It's not helpful in the code, and it's not helpful in the documentation. )

Mutually-exclusive parameters

But you say, All I can find that |page=, |pages= and |at= are mutually exclusive, and only by looking at this page, Help:Citation Style 1. and I posted because the help page talked about (but did not detail) mutually exclusive dependencies., and that isn't really correct.

I certainly can see how it could be missed as the documentation is dense, but it's there. For example, here's the documentation from Template:Citation/doc regarding |page=, |pages=, |at=. I've highlighted all of the points where it notes their mutual exclusivity:

In-source locations

• page: The number of a single page in the source that supports the content. Use either |page= or |pages=, but not both. Displays preceded by p. unless |no-pp=yes. If hyphenated, use {{hyphen}} to indicate this is intentional (e.g. |page=3{{hyphen}}12), otherwise several editors and semi-automated tools will assume this was a misuse of the parameter to indicate a page range and will convert |page=3-12 to |pages=3{{ndash}}12. Alias: p.
• OR: pages: A range of pages in the source that supports the content. Use either |page= or |pages=, but not both. Separate using an en dash (–); separate non-sequential pages with a comma (,); do not use to indicate the total number of pages in the source. Displays preceded by pp. unless |no-pp=yes.
  Hyphens are automatically converted to en dashes; if hyphens are appropriate because individual page numbers contain hyphens, for example: pp. 3-1–3-15, use double parentheses to tell the template to display the value of |pages= without processing it, and use {{hyphen}} to indicate to editors that a hyphen is really intended: |pages=((3{{hyphen}}1{{ndash}}3{{hyphen}}15)). Alternatively, use |at=, like this: |at=pp. 3-1–3-15. Alias: pp.
  • no-pp: Set to yes, y, or true to suppress the p. or pp. notations where this is inappropriate; for example, where |page=Front cover or |pages=passim.
• OR: at: For sources where a page number is inappropriate or insufficient. Overridden by |page= or |pages=. Use only one of |page=, |pages=, or |at=.
  Examples: page (p.) or pages (pp.); section (sec.), column (col.), paragraph (para.); track; hours, minutes and seconds; act, scene, canto, book, part, folio, stanza, back cover, liner notes, indicia, colophon, dust jacket, verse.
• For |quote-page= and |quote-pages= used in conjunction with |quote=, see here.

There's another mutually-exclusive pairing in |quote-page= and |quote-pages=. which are documented in the same manner as |page= and |pages=. And the documentation for parameters like |last= similarly details when |last= (with or without |first=) is the right choice, and when alternatives like |last1= and |first1= should be used instead; which then dovetails into possibly using |author-link= vs. |author-link1=, etc.

There's no overview over exactly which parameters are mutually exclusive because how is that helpful out of context? Without knowing how to use the parameters in question, the information that A can't be combined with B will at best be meaningless to the reader, at worst will lead them to make bad assumptions based solely on the parameter names and their mutual exclusivity.

But I'll grant you that it can be frustrating if the documentation is constantly bringing it up without any specifics. The note about mutual exclusivity is primarily intended to be a caution to anyone cut-and-pasting the blank template form into an article, because the mutually exclusive parameters are all included in that template. An editor who just starts filling in fields without reading the documentation is likely to have troubles. But it could be better presented that way. Ultimately, though there's no shortcut for the need to read the full parameter documentation, when using these templates. Where (as I've shown) the mutual-exclusivity is documented.

Usage link

Now, on to the issue of the "Usage section" link in § Parameters — specifically, it's in the subsection "COinS metadata is created for these parameters", which claims,

A full list of this template's supported parameters, their aliases, and their dependencies is shown in the Usage section near the top of this documentation page.

But, as you correctly point out, there's no "Usage" section, and that link is in fact broken as it goes absolutely nowhere. This is actually quite the can of worms to be opening up, because that text — including the link — isn't part of the documentation page content — not directly, anyway.

Because there are a lot of citation templates (and used to be more), and because their documentation is very detailed, very lengthy, and extremely similar, some editors had the bright idea that they should standardize the contents of that documentation via templates that could be transcluded into each of the documentation pages, so that every citation template's documentation looks the same, has the same information, and is all updated together whenever changes are made.

A noble goal, but because each template is slightly different and takes a different collection of parameters (even now that they've been standardized, there are still differences in which parameters should be used with each template), the parameter-documentation template was made modular and configurable. Instead of just including "the parameter documentation" as a single unit, the document pulls it in section-by-section. The source for the documentation shown at Template:Citation actually looks like this:

===Syntax===
{{csdoc|syntax|lua=yes}}
{{csdoc|sep_comma|lua=yes}}

===COinS===
{{csdoc|coins|lua=yes}}

===What's new===
{{csdoc|whats new}}

===Deprecated===
{{csdoc|deprecated|lua=yes}}

===Description===
====Authors====
{{csdoc|author|lua=yes||contributor=yes|others=yes}}

The {{csdoc|coins|lua=yes}} call is the one that inserts that sentence with the bad link to the Usage section. Because when someone created Template:csdoc, they forgot one of the cardinal rules of template coding, whether it's for internal use or the article space: You can't make any assumptions about the context in which your template will be transcluded. Linking to a section elsewhere on the page is bound to fail when you're (inevitably) transcluded onto a page that doesn't have whatever heading or anchor you're trying to link to.

Which is exactly the case here. {{csdoc|coins}} assumes it will always be used on a page that previously transcluded {{csdoc|usage}} in a section titled "Usage". (And in fairness, its own documentation prescribes doing exactly that, as one of the steps of writing a citation template documentation page.) But just because you tell someone to do something doesn't mean it's reasonable to assume they have done it, or even that they should do it and don't perhaps have very valid reasons for ignoring your rules. An assumption is still an assumption, and assumptions are still bad. Especially when they're encoded into software, making it brittle and unfriendly to users. ...I'll fix the lead-in text for {{csdoc|coins}}. FeRDNYC (talk) 08:58, 25 March 2026 (UTC)[]

if'etal'==max:lower():gsub("[ '%.]",'')then-- the :gsub() portion makes 'etal' from a variety of 'et al.' spellings and stylings

Keyword 'etal' is hardcoded in Module:Citation/CS1, making it difficult for i18n. Please transfer it to the keywords table in /configutaiton. Thanks in advance.--Namoroka (talk) 04:50, 13 March 2026 (UTC)[]

Fixed in the sandbox.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:48, 30 March 2026 (UTC)[]

It should be

if 'etal' == cfg.keywords_xlate[max:lower():gsub("[ '%.]", '')] then

or

if utilities.in_array (max:lower():gsub("[ '%.]", ''), keywords_lists.etal) then

and we can add keyword like

local keywords = { ..., etal = {'etal', 'ほか'},

--FlatLanguage (talk) 14:13, 30 March 2026 (UTC)[]

Yep. Fixed:

{{cite book/new |author=EB Green |display-authors=ほか |title=Title}}

EB Green; et al. Title.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:23, 30 March 2026 (UTC)[]

What change(s) to what modules would be needed to remove the need to add the (( )) accept-as-written markup from |issue= in cite journal and cite news so that numbers like 12,345 appear without a space? I'm not proposing this change, I'd just like to know for a private wiki I'm helping set up. Nthep (talk) 15:31, 15 March 2026 (UTC)[]

Find the line Issue=utilities.hyphen_to_dash(Issue); in Module:Citation/CS1 and comment it out.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:00, 15 March 2026 (UTC)[]

@Trappist the monk thanks. Nthep (talk) 16:33, 15 March 2026 (UTC)[]

Hi, Kartik here. I would like to request adding support for two common library classification identifiers to the CS1 suite (specifically {{cite book}}): |lcc= and |ddc=

While we do currently support identifiers like |lccn= (Library of Congress Control Number) and |oclc=, these refer to specific catalog records rather than the topical classification of the work itself. Many library APIs also sometimes provide these fields alongside LCCN and OCLC.

Example citation of the book "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" using LCC and DDC:

{{Cite book |last=Russell |first=Stuart |author-link=Stuart J. Russell |title=Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach |last2=Norvig |first2=Peter |author-link2=Peter Norvig |date=December 1, 2009 |publisher=[[Prentice Hall]] |isbn=978-0136042594 |edition=3rd |lcc=Q335 .R86 2010 |ddc=006.3 |lccn=2011-288031 |oclc=359890490 |ol=24430154M}} RightYiZheng (talk) 14:31, 16 March 2026 (UTC)[]

I don't think so. We really don't care what shelving system an individual library uses. Of course [many] library APIs include a shelving system identifier; it helps that library's patrons find the source on the library's shelf. That same identifier may not be of any use to someone using a library with a different shelving system.

I don't think we should be adding |lcc= or |ddc= to {{cite book}}.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 14:50, 16 March 2026 (UTC)[]

I agree with Trappist. We have a long-standing, though mostly silent, consensus not to use Dewey Decimal, LCC, or other shelving system numbers in our citations. They are not really helpful to readers who want to locate a source for themselves. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:32, 16 March 2026 (UTC)[]

Would Special:Search/insource:"last=results" be worth adding? If not, would anybody like to remove those from the pages? 1234qwer1234qwer4 23:03, 19 March 2026 (UTC)[]

Quick question (ideally) - links that have been marked as usurped should be supressed in the citation templates, right? Is supressing the archive.today link messing with that? I've seen this a few times, I believe, but just now I came across [1] ref 12 on Jeremy Geidt which is marked as usurped, but presents a link to the reader which still takes you to that usurped page. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸 07:54, 21 March 2026 (UTC)[]

Hide all the links! Izno (talk) 08:30, 21 March 2026 (UTC)[]

I have hacked the sandbox to hide |url= when |url-status= is either of usurped or unfit:

There is still the issue of what to do when |archive-url=//archive.today is removed but not replaced. |url-status=unfit/usurped requires |archive-url=. cs1|2 emits a maintenance message when |url-status= (regardless of assigned value) is present without the required |archive-url=:

{{cite book |title=Title |url=//example.com |url-status=usurped}}

Title.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)

I don't have an answer for that. I do not think that it would be acceptable to allow |url-status=unfit/usurped without |archive-url=. We don't support |url-status=dead without |archive-url= but we do have {{dead link}}. Alas, {{unfit}} and {{usurped}} have been 'usurped' for other purposes. Any ideas?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 18:08, 22 March 2026 (UTC)[]

Hello, another generic title is those containing "Digital Newspaper & Magazine Subscriptions". There are currently 124, most of them start with "PressReader.com - ". Keith D (talk) 00:01, 23 March 2026 (UTC)[]

Category:CS1 errors: ISBN date says:

• reissues of pre-ISBN publications are issued ISBNs, even barring the publication of a new edition. Consider double-checking whether the ISBN is valid before removing it. --- So what happens if the ISBN is valid? Do we get this error forever?
• The reissue date is typically available by querying WorldCat with the reissue's ISBN. --- Typically but not always. And even if it is, how should we present the information to the reader?

ISBN 0-19-814604-3 is a 1958 publication referenced in Catullus 96 (currently on the front page). I dunno what particular reprint impression the article author was referencing. The only online scan I found is this Google books; let's pretend that is the one. (The cited page [p.98] is not visible in preview.) Check of copyright page shows it's clearly post-1988 but no specific date is given other than 1958. Printer's key is 20: possibly the 20th reprint/impression?

search.worldcat.org bn=0-19-814604-3 publicationDateDesc gives numerous entries with various dates, some estimated, some specifying a particular reprint/impression from 25th backwards. 20th ca 2005 seems to match. Dates 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984 are marked reprint but number not specified. 1986 is 8th impression; then later dates from 9th to 15th ca.2001 impression. No 16th or 17th, then 18th ca. 1998 which seems like a mistake in either ordinal or year. No 19th, 22, 23, or 24 in WorldCat. So if the article editor was referencing any of several impressions of the reprint (1-7, 16-17, 19, 22-24) then WorldCat does not tell them the year.

#6 ("n.d.") and #7 ("c. 2005") are possible fixes for #1, but both a little misleading, because the date given by the source itself is 1958 (although admittedly that itself is arguably a little misleading as well). A misleading date visible to users is worse than a misleading error-message visible only to editors.

Underlying all the above is a real-world question: what is best practice in style-guide reference formats? How would a publication using the above source refer to it? Maybe it would just give the publication date 1958 and the ISBN and say nothing about reprints and impressions and the dates of same? In which case, why can't Wikipedia do likewise without throwing up a spurious edit warning that cannot be switched off? One solution would be something like |ignore-isbn-early=y, which would not add to any tracking category. jnestorius^(talk) 15:27, 25 March 2026 (UTC)[]

In many articles, swiping in from the right (on a tablet) will produce a summary list of headings in the article. This Help article produces the right-hand panel when swiped, but there is only one entry in it.
A full listing of headings would be very helpful. ~2026-10237-39 (talk) 03:57, 27 March 2026 (UTC)[]

In this template, presumably imported from zh.wiki, |year=1998年 should cause the template to emit an error message; it does not:

{{cite book |language=en | publisher = M.E. Sharpe, | title = Liu Shaoqi and the Chinese cultural revolution |author = Lowell Dittmer | year = 1998年 | ISBN = 9781563249525 | ref = en1 }}

Lowell Dittmer (1998年). Liu Shaoqi and the Chinese cultural revolution. M.E. Sharpe,. ISBN 9781563249525.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link)

According to google translate, the character 年 means 'year' so that character is not a disambiguation letter but is treated as one by the current module. This happens because in the Scribunto ustring library, the %a character class matches characters from the 'letter' general category. In the standard Lua string library, the %a character class matches ASCII letters. The simple fix for this is to change %a to %l which in the ustring library matches 'lowercase letters' and in the string library matches ASCII lowercase letters. I have tweaked Module:Citation/CS1/Date validation:

Switching the disambiguator character to Cyrillic causes an error message when the character is uppercase:

but not when lowercase:

Rewriting the example templates to use |date= with the same Cyrillic disambiguators also causes an error message when the character is uppercase (as it should):

but not when lowercase:

—Trappist the monk (talk) 21:57, 28 March 2026 (UTC)[]

Unrelated but noticed while I was doing the above fix, there were/are some TODO notes in Module:Citation/CS1/Date validation/sandbox. I have dismissed some of them as not doable or not practical. These include the TODOs at

• line 22 (permalink): not doable because the language object contains functions which may not be loaded with mw.loadData()
• lines 730–733 (permalink): I had thought to put nd and n.d. in the keywords table in ~/Configuration but that would not do because we need the patterns not the keywords. I have moved the patterns into the patterns_t table in ~/Date validation lines 444–446 (permalink); see also lines 735–738 (permalink).

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:00, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[]

The only allowable value for doi-access is "free" so when doi-access is not free, the practice is to leave the doi-access card out. However, the Citation bot then comes along and adds a bogus |doi-broken-date= tag that generates an erroneous CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of <date> error. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 19:39, 30 March 2026 (UTC)[]

This sound alike something that should be reported at User talk:Citation bot. It's had issue with technical support recently, this looks like another bug. There's no reason for it to ever add blank fields. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 19:45, 30 March 2026 (UTC)[]

card? What is card?

This is about Kitty Oppenheimer and doi:10.1163/2468-1733_shafr_sim140060087? That doi appears to me to be functional and links to this page at Brill which clearly shows that the cited source is behind a paywall so |doi-access=free is not appropriate. Setting |doi-access= to any other value (were other values permitted) would not change effects of |doi-broken-date= were that parameter in use in the template.

I do not know why Citation bot thinks or thought that the doi is/was inactive but, as mentioned above, the correct venue for Citation bot issues is at User talk:Citation bot.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 20:01, 30 March 2026 (UTC)[]

May I have help from someone with experience in this maintenance category stack to look at Category:CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of 2026? I came across it because it was uncategorized. I dropped it into the parent category but I notice that the categories it contains are all by month, not by year. Was this created in error? Bsherr (talk) 01:43, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[]

Probably. Ask OboeBlanket who added |doi-broken-date=2026 at this edit. As it is with almost all 'dated' maintenance templates, cs1|2 expects the format |doi-broken-date=<Month> <year>. But, doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2022.871041 does not appear to be broken so we might also wonder why the |doi-broken-date= parameter was added in the first place... Perhaps |doi-access=free was the intended parameter?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 02:08, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[]

There, I removed the incorrect parameter. OboeBlanket (talk) 12:06, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[]

A thought that's been floating around in my head for a few days -- there are a great deal of journalists who are not "wikinotable", but are cited on hundreds of articles across Wikipedia. It would be useful to have a way to search for articles by cited author, aside from the old-fashioned method of searching their name in quotes. I'm wondering if we can add something like a wikidata-author parameter to facilitate this citation tracking. I'm having difficulty envisioning what exactly this would look like, but hopefully I'm getting the idea across. What do we think about this?

As an aside, we should also change ISSN links in citations from WorldCat to the ISSN portal. See Template talk:ISSN for more discussion on that. Never thought to post here until now. Cheers, MediaKyle (talk) 15:42, 3 April 2026 (UTC)[]

I'm not sure that I follow what you are trying to suggest. I did a simple search for The New York Times and from the results picked the first listed article which happened to be BTS. Then I did a Ctrl+F search for The New York Times on that page which took me to this reference (permalink). From that ref, I copied Qin, Amy and pasted that into the search box which took me to these results.

Then I did this search at wikidata. The Amy Qin cited in the BTS article is likely to be this Amy Qin (Q123406389).

Repeating the above for the other NYT reference in BTS led me to John Yoon (Q59749937) and John K Yoon (Q104471283); neither of whom look to be NYT authors...

I presume that you want to search en.wiki for the cited author's wikidata qid. We don't need to invent a new parameter for that. You could (in Amy Qin's case) add |author-link=:d:Q123406389 which will link her name to her wikidata entry. You would of course have to find all instances of her name in cs1|2 templates and make the same change to each template so that you could search for Q123406389. Seems like a lot of work for very little gain. What am I missing or what have you not clearly explained?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:38, 3 April 2026 (UTC)[]

Sorry, I'm having a hard time articulating this. Essentially what I want is a method of viewing all the articles on which a particular author is cited, without doing a regular search. The idea is that by adding a wikidata-author parameter that links citations to a specific author, it would be possible to generate lists of connected articles. There doesn't have to be a visible link to the Wikidata item in the citations. I might have to think this through some more... I know what I'm looking for, I just don't know how to get there. MediaKyle (talk) 17:02, 3 April 2026 (UTC)[]