Template talk:Citation needed

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Template:Citation needed is permanently protected from editing as it is a heavily used or highly visible template. Substantial changes should first be proposed and discussed here on this page. If the proposal is uncontroversial or has been discussed and is supported by consensus, editors may use {{edit protected}} to notify an administrator to make the requested edit. Usually, any contributor may edit the template's documentation to add usage notes or categories. Any contributor may edit the template's sandbox. Functionality of the template can be checked using test cases.

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Citation needed template.

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This template was considered for deletion on 2006 July 1. The result of the discussion was "nomination withdrawn on procedural technicality (and discussion was overwhelmingly in favor of keep)".

This page has been mentioned by a media organization: Kerry Howley (March 2008). "Artifact: The World Needs Citations". Reason Magazine.

This page has been cited as a source by a notable professional or academic publication: Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined (N.Y.: Viking, hardback [3d printing?] 2011 (ISBN 978-0-670-02295-3)), p. 113

Date in examples

Hey JPxG. In this edit, you changed the examples in the Usage and Examples sections. They now unchangingly say "July 2024", instead of automatically displaying the current month. Was this intentional? Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 17:30, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like JPxG decided to change all the examples to use <syntaxhighlight> in this series of edits, which since they used the tag instead of something like {{#tag:syntaxhighlight|<nowiki>{{citation needed|date=</nowiki>{{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTYEAR}}<nowiki>}}</nowiki>|lang=wikitext|inline=}} meant losing the helpful auto-date. Presumably they thought that would be more helpful than harmful, which if enough people blindly copy-paste the example may not be true. Then Gonnym changed just the Usage section to {{tlx}} in Special:Diff/1237750529, with no explanation beyond "some cleanup". Anomie⚔ 18:09, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Is there an advantage to using syntaxhighlight tags over Template:Template link null? Is it possible to include an auto-date in the tags? Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 18:13, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Some people might find syntax-highlighted text easier to process. OTOH, as it is now we could easily change the Usage section back since it's no longer syntaxhighlighted (I just did so now). To have an auto-date with syntaxhighlight you'd have to use #tag (and some sort of inline escaping) like what I said above. Anomie⚔ 18:33, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Firefangledfeathers: Anything inside <syntaxhighlight>...</syntaxhighlight> tags is taken literally, there is no expansion at all and the only parsing is carried out purely in order to determine which colour, font-style, font-weight etc. to use for each token. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:53, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 19:22, 1 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Quotation Mark

The article contains the phrase "Double quotation marks" that I assume means "quotation marks". Punctuation in US English is defined in a number of authoritative places. I argue that double quotation marks mean "", so placing double quotation marks around 'dog' would appear as ""dog"". In my opinion, this practice began with English-deficient programmers who didn't know the correct names of 'apostrophe' and 'quotation mark'. Gggustafson (talk) 20:11, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Gggustafson: Double quotation marks means the " character, or ASCII 34 decimal, 22 hex. Contrast ASCII 39 dec, 27 hex, which is the ' character, the apostrophe or single quotation mark. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:43, 31 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"T:CN" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect T:CN has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 February 4 § T:CN until a consensus is reached. M.C. (talk) 21:49, 4 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Mandatory

I suggest this template as mandatory on ALL languages here, especially the German one. 109.250.16.196 (talk) 21:28, 20 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure what you mean, but this is the English Wikipedia; the other language Wikipedias are out of scope. DonIago (talk) 02:55, 21 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I suggest that you raise the matter at meta:Wikimedia Forum. That covers all of the (several hundred) wikis within the Wikimedia Foundation. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 14:46, 21 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Is there a way to sort articles by how many of these they have?

I feel like it would be good for morale if you could make a dent in Category:Articles with unsourced statements just by sourcing one or two statements. Can't find a way to accurately identify articles where that is possible, unfortunately. Is there a way to do that? Can one be made? JustARandomSquid (talk) 07:26, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

MediaWiki doesn't track how many times a template is used in a page, just whether it's used at all. It's specifically not possible to count it via wikitext or Scribunto either: when Parsoid was first getting going, they wanted to eliminate as much as possible cases where you'd have to parse the whole page to get the correct rendering for some bit of wikitext; what they'd have done for citations if mw:Extension:Cite didn't already exist I don't know. You might see if Wikipedia:WikiProject Check Wikipedia has any information collected from their analysis of the dumps. Anomie⚔ 14:32, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Shorten text to either [cn] or [c.n.]

"Citation needed" is extremely long and anyone who knows how to click on references will know how to click on "cn" and come to the Citation needed page. OmegaAOLtalk? 22:06, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

No, it's an attention-getter, and rightly so. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:51, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The undocumented {{Citation needed in table}} might be what the OP is looking for. – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:01, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]