Template talk:Collection citation

Template does not work - a system/process issue
Hi Lise, unfortunately I don't think the template will work. I found a couple of pages where the bibdesc coding had been accidentally removed. England and Wales Census, 1901 (FamilySearch Historical Records) and El Salvador Civil Registration (FamilySearch Historical Records).

I used these two pages as a test. First I added this template Collection citation to England and Wales Census, 1901 (FamilySearch Historical Records) and then checked the collection search page for the citation to appear. Even after waiting for 15mins it had not appeared. Then I reinstated the bibdesc coding to El Salvador Civil Registration (FamilySearch Historical Records) and found that the citation information immediately appeared on the collection search page.

Why is this the case? - the code is HTML code used to hide comments. I first thought that the code that is adding the citation information must first find the collection wiki article due to the CID included in the header template and then look for the bibdesc coding to extract the citation. I thought that it was doing this by looking at the HTML the wiki page produces. However looking at the HTML code the wiki produces it is clear that these comments are not include in the published HTML. I now believe that the code producing the citations must be looking into the wikicode and as such, when the comment tags are transcluded via a template the software does not see the bibdesc coding.

Unless the way the software is searching and finding this code is rewritten, the comment tags must be directly added to the wiki code. The problem is that contributors using the RTE will not realise that these comments are important and will regularly delete them by accident. I have seen recent additions to collection talk pages (for example Talk:England and Wales Census, 1901 (FamilySearch Historical Records)) asking users not to remove or edit the code. My fear is that they don't see the code and many will not even see the talk page note and so this will keep occurring.

Only when engineers understand this and are willing to change the way the citation code is found, will the problem be addressed. I would think that they could change the search program to look for this template instead of the bibdesc coding, but that is only my guess. --Steve 13:04, 22 March 2012 (UTC)


 * OK after writing all this, I had a brainwave and realised that the bibdesc coding could still be added directly in the wiki, just enclosed in a template (see England and Wales Census, 1901 (FamilySearch Historical Records)). I believe that contributors using the rich text editor, see HTML comments as small unknown marks, but that they will see the name of templates when used thus adding the citation inside a template will prevent the unwitting from removing the code. It will not stop all instances but they will know that they have removed a template called Collection citation.


 * PS I have also added a little formatting to the template to make the citation stand out from the main content text. What do you think? --Steve 13:21, 22 March 2012 (UTC)