Topic on Talk:Citoid

1. Would you be at all willing to maintain a brief list of known paywalled sources such that Citoid can apply a "url-access" parameter to citations to such domains. I'm thinking places like nytimes.com, ft.com, forbes.com, stltoday.com, latimes.com, etc. At present url-access always needs to be added manually, usually after a failed attempt to verify a claim.

2. I've noticed that citations to The Guardian consistently render the website / work parameter as "the Guardian". Would you be willing to uppercase the first letter in the website / work parameter for all sources that don't equal the first bit of the domain name? There may be sources who prefer a different case styling, but it looks weird in the rendered template. Alternatively, could you uppercase the first letter of the website/ work parameter when the first word is "the"?

3. An astute unregistered editor noticed at en:Help talk:Citation Style 1#Unix epoch that many sources using the date "1970-01-01" (the unix epoch) are doing so in error. Would you be willing to discard this date as bogus for sources that are not books, journals, or periodicals?

4. Is this a good place to discuss improvements to Citoid, or would Phabricator work better? I've recently registered an account there.

3. So I realised I'm dumb, and web sources should not report a date prior to c. 1995 in any case. So the unix epoch should probably just be discarded regardless of spurce type.

3. The CS1 templates will all reject an |access-date= before Wikipedia's inception regardless of type (see this discussion), so we must be talking about publication date. The bigger problem is, unlike a physical-media citation type, if a website shows a timestamp of 1970-01-01 on some page (which I cannot prove, but believe with near-certainty, happens somewhere in the wild), then that's the only date we have for that source. IOW, it's arguably "correct" to use it in the citation, despite its obvious impossibility.

Yeah I am talking about |date=, not access-date=

The Zotero translators seem to lean pretty heavily into HTML metadata, so it's possible the hypertext document could have a date listed as the unix epoch, with an actual publication date somewhere in the byline or footer, but the more common scenerio is probably like this one I fixed yesterday at en:Yuan Dynasty: https://www.academia.edu/2439642

Here, the service hosting the source (academia) reports a bogus unix epoch date, which any parser will pick up, but inspecting the actual source document reveals a publication date in 2010.

I'd say that if a genuine web based source has the only available publication date set prior to the deployment of the world wide web in the early 1990s, it's safest to ignore the date rather than use a known incorrect value.

The nice thing about book and journal sources is that they'll have more than one service documenting their existence, so if one site is erroneously reporting a unix epoch date for the source, it can be cross-checked and corrected.

I don't think you would be happy with that. Google Books returns publication dates, such as |date=1982 for https://www.google.com/books/edition/Chocolate_the_Consuming_Passion/egLRDF36ayoC, rather than webpage dates. PubMed and doi entries also get their proper publication dates.

Rereading my comment now a month later, I definitely wasn't clear about what constitutes "a genuine web based source". I miscommunicated similarly in a completely different discussion about overlinking, also by employing the term "genuine" as if I hadn't put a lot of assumptions behind it. Probably time to choose my words more carefully.

In any case, as regards the topic I was initially trying to discuss, the unix epoch date "1970-01-01", it makes more sense to have citation templates add it to a tracking category rather than never return a date from Citoid, purely for visibility reasons. It's easy (although time-consuming) to run through a maintenance category full of likely bad data and fix it; it's much more difficult to find every citation without a publication date and ensure there actually is none provided. The second set is probably three or four orders of magnitude larger than the first, so my initial idea was probably uh ill-considered 🙃

That sounds like a good idea to suggest at w:en:Help talk:Citation Style 1.