Template:Cite/doc

Purpose

This template makes it faster and easier to apply [X]HTML's ‎<cite>...‎</cite> markup to text for the title of a work, and more importantly to indicate to human and bot editors they should not use ''...'' or ‎<i>...‎</i> typographic italicization to replace the intentional and semantically meaningful ‎<cite>. The titles of published works are usually rendered visually in an italic (oblique a.k.a. slanted) typeface by default on graphical browsers, but can be parsed and acted upon in customizable ways with style sheets, apps and text-to-speech screen readers. It is said to be semantic markup, i.e. markup that conveys meaning or context, not just visual appearance. Simple italicizing is purely typographic and is semantically meaningless. It is most often used for emphasis, foreign words and phrases, words as words (when quotation marks are not used for that purpose), names of ships, scientific names of organisms and other cases where stylistic conventions demand italics, but they do not convey the meaning of the titles of publications (books, films, albums, etc.). The average reader, and average editor, do not and need not care about this distinction most of the time, but it can be important and editors who understand it can use this template as a baseline insurance against accidental or careless replacement by bots and human editors.

Usage

{{cite|title of a work}}

or, if the title of a work contains an equals sign:

{{cite|1=title of a work}}

These both render as:

title of a work

This template puts intentional and explicit ‎<cite>...‎</cite> (title of a work) [X]HTML markup around the text provided as the first parameter. It is safest to always use the |1= syntax.