Template:Cite web/doc

This template is used to cite online sources in Wikipedia articles. Cite news can also be used when citing a news source; for general information about citations in Wikipedia articles, see Cite sources. A general discussion of the use of templates for adding citations to Wikipedia articles is available at Citation templates.

Usage
Note: None of the parameters should be capitalised, to avoid the article being tagged as having a broken citation. For example, use "url", "title", etc.—not "URL", "Title", etc.

Common forms with authors in any format
Citations within a page should use consistent formats. However, there is no consensus about which format is best. The following examples are for citations where one or more authors are listed in a single authors parameter, using any format. Also shown below are two separate date formats that are commonly used in Wikipedia:


 * Day Month Year:
 * Month Day, Year:

Common forms with last1, first1; last2, first2
The examples hereafter will suffice for up to two authors each with first and last names; for more, just create more parameters in a similar style:


 * Day Month Year:
 * Month Day, Year:

All parameters
When copying all parameters in either the vertical or horizontal layouts, delete those which are not needed.


 * All parameters, horizontal layout:


 * All parameters, vertical layout:

Required parameters

 * title: Title of source; displays in quotes. Titles containing certain characters will display and link incorrectly unless those characters are replaced or encoded.

Optional parameters

 * url: URL of source; must begin with a supported URI scheme:  and  will be supported by all browsers; ,  ,  ,  ,   and   will require a plugin or an external application.


 * The MediaWiki software does not yet support IPv6 host-names. (See bug 21261)
 * URLs containing certain characters will display and link incorrectly unless those characters are encoded. For example, a space must be replaced by.


 * Single apostrophes do not need to be encoded; multiples will be parsed as italic or bold markup


 * The link button [[File:Vector toolbar insert link button.png]] on the enhanced editing toolbar will encode a link.


 * last: Surname of author. Do not wikilink (use authorlink instead).
 * first: Given or first name(s) of author, including title(s) (e.g. Firstname Middlename or Firstname M. or Dr. Firstname M., Snr.). Do not wikilink (use authorlink instead).
 * The 'last' and 'first' parameters are not ideally suited to authors whose surname is usually written first (e.g. as in Chinese). Use the same format as the source uses to handle these cases.
 * See Examples for typical usage.
 * authorlink: Title of Wikipedia article about author (not the author's personal website). Article should already exist. Must not be wikilinked itself. Do not use this on its own, but along with author or first and last.
 * coauthors: Full name of additional author or authors, separated by ", " (e.g. Joe Bloggs, John F. Kennedy, H. R. Dent).
 * Whether the surname of the co-authors goes first or last is dependent on the citation style (see the citation style section below) preferred.
 * OR: author: Full name of author, preferably surname first. (deprecated) Do not wikilink (use authorlink instead).
 * OR: for multiple authors, use the parameters first1, last1, ..., firstn, lastn to 'correctly' record all the information about the book (the first nine authors are printed, then et al. is appended if even more authors were specified). Do not wikilink as there are corresponding authorlink1, ..., authorlink9 parameters as well. This usage is preferred to the use of coauthors.
 * editor: Name of editor/editors. Do not Wikilink any values in the editor parameter but use editor-link instead. The template automatically displays "in" before the editor's name and "ed." after. This implies that the author is responsible only for part of the work and the editor responsible for the whole work. If, however, the author(s) and editor(s) are responsible for the whole work, then the editor parameter or its alternates described below should not be used. Instead, the editor(s) should be included in an author parameter with possibly "(ed.)" after the surname(s).
 * OR: alternatively editor-first and editor-last can be used in the same way as first and last.
 * OR: for multiple editors up to four in number, use the parameters editor1-first, editor1-last, ..., editorn-first, editorn-last to 'correctly' record all the information about the book in the same way as firstn and lastn.
 * editor-link or editor1-link... editorn-link is used in the same way as authorlink or authorlinkn.
 * others: To record other contributors to the work, such as "Illustrated by Smith" or "Trans. Smith".
 * a date parameter
 * either date: Full date of publication. Should not be wikilinked.
 * or year and month: Year of publication, and Name of the month of publication. If you also have the day, use date instead. Should not be wikilinked.
 * format: Format, e.g. PDF. HTML implied if not specified.
 * work: In most cases this is the name of the website (as usually given in the logo/banner area of the site), otherwise the site's domain name. If the titled item being cited is part of some other larger work, such as a book, periodical or organizational sub-site (e.g., the law school's section of a university's website system), it is usually better to use the name of that more specific work than that of the entire site. Do not italicize; the software will do so automatically.
 * publisher: The name of the entity that publishes (owns or controls) the website. Commonly, this is a government agency, educational institution, or business. For many websites, the author and publisher are the same, and only one needs to be included in the citation; prefer publisher for organizations, author (or first/last) for individuals. Please note that ; that is the work, except in cases where the business name is identical to the site name. For example, the corporation Walmart is the publisher of the website at walmart.com, which is the work; Amazon.com is the publisher of the website at amazon.com, which need not be specified as the work, as this would be redundant. For republished works, generally use the original publisher information (including location, date, etc., and it is often more appropriate to use cite book, cite news, etc. with a url parameter instead of ).
 * location: Geographical location of the publisher (or headquarters thereof).
 * a page parameter
 * either page: Page number if a multi-page web article and referencing a single page. "page=5" produces p. 5.
 * or pages: Page numbers if a multi-page web article and referencing more than one page. "pages=5–7" produces pp. 5–7. This is for listing the pages relevant to the citation, not a total number of pages.
 * or at: Position within the resource when page/pages is inappropriate, e.g. para. 14 (when citing a source without page numbers) or no. 456 (something in a numbered list). This parameter is ignored if page/pages is specified.
 * language: language of publication (do not specify "English" as this is the default).
 * trans_title: A translated title of the article, in case the original title is in a foreign language. Would normally be used in conjunction with the language parameter.
 * edition: When the work has more than one edition. E.g.: "2nd", "Revised" etc. Note that the template automatically displays " ed." after this parameter, so 2nd produces "2nd ed.".
 * arxiv: ArXiv
 * asin: The Amazon Standard Identification Number used for the main web site.
 * bibcode: The document's bibcode in the Astrophysics Data System, e.g., 1924MNRAS..84..308E
 * doi:A digital object identifier for the document, such as  10.1038/news070508-7 
 * Doilabel: If the doi contains some characters that must be escaped, use "doilabel" for the unescaped version. See doi: "id" is equivalent to "doi" and "label" is "doilabel"
 * doibroken: The date that a digital object identifier link was found to be broken.
 * isbn: International Standard Book Number such as 1-111-22222-9. Note that isbn, like all field names, must be in lowercase. The field must not be wikilinked as the template automatically creates a link. The template is insensitive to formatting so an ISBN number without dashes ("-") may be used (e.g. 1111222229), though ISBNs with correctly formatted dashes are preferred (see ISBN and ISBN). Please use the 13-digit ISBN where possible; this can normally be found beneath the barcode as a number beginning 978 or 979. For books with the older SBN system (9 digits), use this field but prefix the number with a zero; thus SBN 902888-45-5 should be entered as 0-902888-45-5. More information about this feature and its advantages is available at ISBN.
 * issn: The publication's International Standard Serial Number such as 1111-2220. The eight-figure ISSN may be split into two groups of four using a hyphen; but not an N-dash or a space.
 * jfm: Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik
 * jstor: Makes a link to a JSTOR article or journal determined by a given parameter. The main purpose is to use as part of an  option in a cite journal reference.
 * lccn: Library of Congress Control Number
 * mr: Mathematical Reviews
 * oclc: Online Computer Library Center ID number, such as 3185581. The field must not be wikilinked as the template automatically creates a link.
 * ol: Open Library
 * osti: Office of Scientific and Technical Information
 * pmc: The document's PubMed Central article number (PMCID) for full-text free repository of an article, such as 246835
 * pmid: The document's PubMed Unique Identifier, such as 15128012
 * rfc: Request for Comments
 * ssrn: Social Science Research Network
 * zbl: Zentralblatt MATH
 * id: A unique identifier, used if none of the preceding are applicable. In this case, you need to specify the kind of identifier you are using.
 * archive parameters (if either archiveurl or archivedate is used, both parameters must be used together)
 * archiveurl: The URL of an archived copy of the page, if (or in case) the url becomes unavailable. Typically used to refer to services like WebCite and the Internet Archive.
 * archivedate: Date when the item was archived. Should not be wikilinked.
 * deadurl: Should be set to "yes"/"no" to indicate if the original link is dead or live. Setting no will change the main link to the original url.
 * accessdate: Full date when item was accessed. Should not be wikilinked. This should be given if the publication date is unknown; see Citation styles.
 * quote: Relevant quote from online item.
 * ref: ID for anchor. By default, no anchor is generated. The ordinary nonempty value ID generates an anchor with the given ; such a linkable reference can be made the target of wikilinks to full references, especially useful in short citations like shortened notes and parenthetical referencing. The special value harv generates an anchor suitable for the harv template; see anchors for Harvard referencing templates.
 * separator: The separator to use in lists of authors, editors, etc. Defaults to ".", but "," may be useful also. If the field is present, but blank, no separator will be used.
 * postscript: The closing punctuation for the citation. If specified, over-rides the default behaviour of terminating the citation with a full stop. If the field is present, but blank, no terminating punctuation will be used. This may be useful when generating an output consistent with other templates. It is preferred to manually adding ending punctuation, as the punctuation occurs within the &lt;cite&gt; tag, so will appear before any icons added by browser plugins. Ignored if quote is specified.

Duplicate periods
By default, cite web separates some fields with periods, so do not encode those fields ending with a period or a duplicate period will be added. Example: "publisher=Camelot, Inc" will correctly show as  but "publisher=Camelot, Inc." will incorrectly show as

Examples
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 * Some standard use cases

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 * Using format

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 * Foreign language and translated title

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 * Using authorlink

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 * Using coauthors

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 * No author

This abbreviated format should only be used when the editor cannot determine the publisher and author. →
 * No author, no publisher

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 * Using "archiveurl" and "archivedate" (and optionally "deadurl") for webpages that have been archived

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 * Using "quote"