While I am slowly working my way to standardize our citation templates, there's a point that I think needs a bit of community input: do we want to keep the display of the date when the archive was made? To be absolutely clear, I am not talking about the archivedate parameter (over my dead body), only of that part: (archived from the original on month day, year) as seen on {{WebCite}}. If I recall correctly, status boards even requires that whenever using that template with archiveurl, it must go along an archivedate such as |archivedate=XXXX-XX-XX, since WebCite will not display a date of archival otherwise.
This kind of display is absent from a great deal of our citation templates, itself only an artifact of the template origin: Wikipedia, itself taking inspiration from academic citations standards. But frankly, it's not very useful for editors or for readers, as I can't really imagine a situation where anyone would care only for that date AND not check the archive page itself.
I am all for removing this, as not only it is kind of a miss-use the archivedate parameter, but most of our web citation templates don't even bother with that in the first place (and I have yet to hear anyone complain in this regard). NanoLuukeCloning Facility 07:41, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
Discussion[]
- It absolutely needs to be kept, as it helps readers (and editors) differentiate between different saved archivals of the same page whenever applicable, or to help differentiate them from the modern version of the page (when applicable) if it is still up. - Thannus (DFaceG) (he/him) (talk) 08:11, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
- Could you provide a couple example of that? NanoLuukeCloning Facility 08:29, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
- Used to be the Executor/Legends article cited different versions of the SW.com Databank, and it still tries to but looks like someone has changed them all to just the same basic citation lol. Imperators II(Talk) 08:33, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
- What ref(s) exactly, we may correct this easily I think. NanoLuukeCloning Facility 08:52, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
- The only ones that are currently presented as the same - 3, 210, and 216. Imperators II(Talk) 08:56, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
- What ref(s) exactly, we may correct this easily I think. NanoLuukeCloning Facility 08:52, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
- Used to be the Executor/Legends article cited different versions of the SW.com Databank, and it still tries to but looks like someone has changed them all to just the same basic citation lol. Imperators II(Talk) 08:33, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
- Could you provide a couple example of that? NanoLuukeCloning Facility 08:29, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
- Kinda per Thannus, yeah - isn't WebCite the fallback option when we need to cite different archived versions of the same page? Imperators II(Talk) 08:22, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
- Well, I wasn't aware of such use, but thinking of it, and based on the problem you brought up with the Executor, using a regular parameter for this purpose pose another problem: how one is suposed to know this when WebCite is used for such task? We should not burden EVERY use of the template just because of a couple specific instances where a new parameter could handle that. NanoLuukeCloning Facility 08:52, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
- Using WebCite, I don't like the resulting inconsistency of some links having the full date of archiving if they use archivedate while others (using archiveurl) do not. The dates can produce a lot of clutter that is made even worse by the inconsistency of some links showing the date while others do not (a non-article example, but there are prolly similar ones in some reference lists). As others have pointed out, the date is crucial when there are different versions of the same page across different dates, so I think there should be an additional, optional parameter showing the date of archive. Keep archivedate and archiveurl for linking to archive.org and archive.today respectively and remove the automatic date text when archivedate is used; have a new field (maybe showdate?) for editors to manually input the date of archive if it is necessary, as per the Executor/Legends example discussed above. OOM 224 (he/him/they) 10:06, 14 June 2024 (UTC)