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RFC on publisher and location in cite journal

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
This RfC sought to answer 3 questions, each of which is addressed below. The short answer is that there is consensus that Citation bot should stop automatically removing the parameters.

1. Should Citation bot continue to remove these data?

There is consensus against automatically removing the parameters (|location= and |publisher=). However, assuming arguendo that I am mistaken, I am still quite certain that there is not a consensus in favor of automatically removing these parameters. Since the bot policy requires that a bot only performs only tasks for which there is consensus, a no-consensus close would also result in stopping the automatic removal. Accordingly, @Smith609 is requested to disable the bot until the code is updated and compliant with the results of this RfC. Since they have not edited in almost 2 weeks, I will leave a note at WP:ANI asking that the bot be blocked until it is updated to be compliant with the result of this RfC.

2. Is there consensus for this removal, anywhere, by anyone?

This question is a bit trickier. The discussion relating to question 1 discussed the benefits and drawbacks of having the parameters included, and the consensus was that the parameters should not be automatically removed. Thus, there is consensus against the indiscriminate removal of these parameters in the manner of a WP:MEATBOT. However, there is consensus that these parameters can be removed in the same way as any other edit is made (respecting the BRD process, discussing on the talk page, etc.); likewise, they can also be included in the same manner.

3. Should we continue to support these parameters in Module:Citation/CS1 for {{cite journal}}?

There was less discussion about this question. But, given that there is consensus against indiscriminately removing these parameters (see questions #1 and #2), it would make no sense to remove the support for the parameters. Accordingly, we should continue to support the parameters for {{cite journal}}.
This was a complicated topic; if anyone has any questions about this close feel free to ask me. I will leave notes on the maintainer's talk page, as well as at WP:ANI and WP:BOTN, regarding this close. Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 19:50, 22 February 2019 (UTC) (non-admin closure)

Right now, Citation bot removes publisher and location in {{cite journal}}. Proponents of this removal state that this is recommended by nearly every style guide under the belief that there is little value to the information.

However:

  • Several recent threads at User talk:Citation bot indicate that removing the parameters is unexpected at-best and believed to be detrimental at worst;
  • "nearly every style guide" is not our style guide
  • Removing them does not respect the consensus in Module:Citation/CS1, which is to provide the parameters in cite journal.

This RFC seeks consensus for the following questions:

  1. Should Citation bot continue to remove these data?
  2. Is there consensus for this removal, anywhere, by anyone?
  3. Should we continue to support these parameters in Module:Citation/CS1 for {{cite journal}}? If we continue to support these parameters, should we:
    1. Support them only in metadata without display;
    2. Display them only without support in the metadata;
    3. Status quo, which is both to support them in the metadata and display them?

RfC added to Template:Centralized discussion and relisted by Cunard (talk) at 07:48, 7 February 2019 (UTC) after an RfC close was undone. --Izno (talk) 15:59, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

For the record, {{cite journal}} does not emit metadata for |location= and |publisher= because COinS does not support those parameters for journals. For more, see these:
Matrix defining the KEV Format to represent a journal publication
Matrix defining the KEV Format to represent a book
Matrix defining the KEV Format to represent a patent
Matrix defining the KEV Format to represent a dissertation
With respect to the metadata, all cs1 periodical templates are treated as journal templates; all cs2 templates that use a periodical parameter (|journal=, |magazine=, |work= etc) are treated same as their cs1 counterparts.
—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:34, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
Thanks. Amended the RFC. :) --Izno (talk) 16:37, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
  • [For clarity: Stop automatic removal and Continue to display 16:57, 27 November 2018 (UTC)] I think if there is a DOI/ISSN/URL/some sort of identifier to the journal/article which eliminates the need to disambiguate, there is no need to add publisher or location. But when there is no such identifier and the publisher or location can be used to disambiguate/help locate a journal then it should be displayed. I don't think it should be blindly done without making sure that this information isn't useful to the reader. From CMoS 17: If a journal might be confused with another with a similar title, or if it might not be known to the users of a bibliography, add the name of the place or institution where it is published in parentheses after the journal title. Umimmak (talk) 16:47, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Stop removal and display. (edit conflict) First, it is not true that nearly all style guides say this information should be omitted from citations. Chicago Manual of Style 17th ed. §14.182 states that "if a journal might be confused with another with a similar title, or if it might not be known to the users of a bibliography, add the name of the place or institution where it is published in parentheses after the journal title."
Second, conference proceedings are typically bound like a book, but they usually come out every year, so may be thought of as a periodical, and hence, a journal. An editor might be unaware of {{cite conference}} and cite a paper in conference proceedings with {{cite journal}}, but include the place and publisher because it is like a book. Just deleting the place and publisher is the wrong way to correct such a situation; the way to correct it is to change from the journal template to the conference template, and leave all the parameters alone. Jc3s5h (talk) 16:52, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Stop removal and display. Lots of citations use cite journal for minor periodicals with generic names like "Insights" that are re-used over and over by multiple organizations, and can only be properly identified if the publisher is also listed. It is also important in some cases to show the publisher when a primary source associated with the subject of an article is used, to make clear its non-independence. Humans may be able to figure out these distinctions; automation, currently, can't. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:14, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Block Citation bot until fixed. If Citation bot is unable to abide by WP:CITEVAR it should be blocked. If its operator (creator/coder in this case) is unable to abide by WP:CITEVAR and the bot's task approval they should be admonished or sanctioned as well as being banned from making autmated edits. WP:AWB users do not get to impose their style preferences on random articles (do we need to go into that history?) so I am baffled that Citation bot's operators imagine they should be allowed to do so. --Xover (talk) 17:23, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
    Comment - the action of removing these should be stopped until the RFC is completed. (Unless the owner is proposing to reinstate all removed items if this RFC concludes in favour of retaining.) Keith D (talk) 18:43, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
    +1, agreed. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 01:28, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
    If you believe these removals should be stopped with that much interest/investment, I left a threat at BOTN regarding this discussion. You may wish to add on to that thread to have the bot blocked. --Izno (talk) 03:37, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
    Comment - Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Citation bot is 10 years old. Is it even the same bot? Barely recognizable. My understanding is this is a user-triggered tool and tools don't require community approval. Every editor who uses it is responsible for their action. -- GreenC 22:45, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
    That is a concern as well. I am willing to contest that the original authorization even applies at this point in time given how the bot has changed since the original BRFA. --Izno (talk) 03:37, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
    @GreenC: That is strictly speaking correct, but in this case it amounts to sophistry: the rule that suggests removing these parameters is implemented by the bot maintainers and reflect their personal preferences, in a blatant attempt to impose that on articles in contravention of WP:CITEVAR. WP:AWB users are also responsible for the edits they make with the tool, but they had to have special rules added to prevent the users from running around thoughtlessly making edits that AWB suggested but which were considered controversial. What defaults are implemented in such a tool has a disproportionate impact, and hiding behind an argument that "it's the users' responsibility" is disingenous. It's a valid argument when a bug or edge case messes up an edit for otherwise uncontroversial cleanup (which parts of Citation bot's functionality and use I fully support), but not for explicit rules deliberately implemented in the tool itself. If you look at, e.g., Headbomb's argument below (and the issue at the bot's talk Izno linked), you'll see they argue for their preference for how citation should be formed and therefore the bot should behave this way, implicitly because that's the way to get their preferred style implemented across articles (I should note that I mean implicitly in the sense "the implication of which is"; it's not intended to suggest bad faith on the part of the ones making the argument. That I find it a bad argument does not make it a bad faith argument.). The correct and upfront approach to realising that desire is to argue its merits at WT:CITEVAR (any argument based on external style guides rather than enwp policy belongs there). Making that argument by way of bot is inherently an end-run around WP:CON. --Xover (talk) 07:46, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
    For the record I have no opinion either way on this issue. I agree that each bot function should be open to community consensus and presumably that is what this RfC does. If this RfC closes no-consensus it should be the same as 'no feature', the burden should be on those who want the feature to obtain consensus, which is in-line with how other bot consensus discussions work. -- GreenC 15:05, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
    The bot feature in question is a decade old. I don't have a strong opinion other than making sure that facts a kept straight. This feature is really old. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 04:08, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
    In your edit summary you claim bot is approved for this and historically it has consensus. Please provide a link for the bot approval for removing |publisher= and |location= from all {{cite journal}} instances in all articles as well as the community-wide consensus process that supports overriding WP:CITEVAR on this issue. Those are question #2 in this RfC and central to the issue under debate. --Xover (talk) 08:41, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Keep, per compliance with pretty much every style guide out there. You will not find one single manual of style that recommends inclusion of the publisher for journals, stopping this function is a net negative for the project. Note that the bot does not remove the publisher for books and other non-journal publications, where certain style guides recommend the inclusion of the publisher. If disambiguation is needed, that's why we have the ISSN parameter. Publishers are not stable enough and can change several times over the lifespan of the journal. If a special snowflake citation is desired, for whatever reason, the usual mechanism of telling the bot "leave this one alone" works just fine, especially given that the bot does not edit automatically, and the activating user is responsible for the bot's edits. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:06, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Stop automated removal and continue to display per the arguments to that effect above. XOR'easter (talk) 18:48, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Keep status quo per Headbomb (removal recommended). I think the removal is no big deal, but it's a net positive, inter alia, because people nearly always fill in the "publisher" parameter incorrectly, the publisher name changes constantly and often in non-obvious ways (for instance subsidiaries with slightly different names), and finally publishers or places nearly never help identification of journals or works in recent decades (you see people using the ISSN if they're desperate and all of DOI, IDs, names and dates failed them, but the possibility of people using publisher names for a journal is so remote that not even the typical SFX mask considers it, let alone modern discovery tools). The parameter is also used by a vanishingly small amount of citations, less than 1 % in the most recent XML dump (and they look like citations added by some automatic system, such as VisualEditor, without a specific consensus or user will, probably assuming that other automated systems would clean up). Nemo 22:08, 27 November 2018 (UTC)
    • The point isn't whether we should recommend removal in some or most cases. It's whether we should automatically remove the publisher in all cases, and/or prevent the citation template from ever even showing it. And 1% of our cite journal instances is a huge number of actual citations. So you're answering the wrong question. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:20, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
      • It doesn't remove publisher in all cases. It removes publishers by default, but you can overrule it by either 1) not activating the bot 2) putting a comment telling the bot to leave it alone. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:46, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
        • The editor who added the citation cannot prevent removal of publisher or location by not activating the bot; it will almost always be some other editor who activates the bot. Putting in the comments is not a valid defence of CitationBot because the documentation about citation templates does not warn editors of the need to defend their work from CitatonBot. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:09, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
How does one trivially prevent another editor from running a bot, aside from just blocking the bot entirely? ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:12, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
I was talking about the documentation update, but if you want to know about how to prevent citation bot from touching a citation, simply put a comment on the problematic citation (e.g. {{cite journal<!-- Bypass citation bot -->|...}}), or simply add {{Bots|deny=Citation bot}} to the article to tell it to leave everything alone. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:49, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
The problem with "bots deny" is that one might want to be more selective than all or nothing servicing. And I've seen a bot-driver remove the bots-deny on the grounds that "all" is better than "nothing". On the otherhand, is this "bypass" comment simply a note to the bot-driver? Or is it bot detectable, possibly with specific requirements? ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:44, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
@J. Johnson: As I understand it, the comments just make the bot skip over it by interrupting the string it searches for in the code (e.g., strings like {{cite journal|, presumably). It's still annoying that someone who might not even be aware that some future editor might go ahead and mess up all the citations by running a bot should be expected to go and comment out exceptions in all the fields which Citation Bot makes worse though. Umimmak (talk) 22:04, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
Curious. An undocumented feature? Well, thanks for that info. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 23:39, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Keep status quo (per Headbomb and others) of consistency with nearly universal citation style.
Izno waves his hands around a bit alleging various points (such as "Several recent threads at User talk:Citation bot ..." and "the consensus in Module:Citation/CS1"), but his links don't point to any specific language supporting his alleged points. Perhaps there is something there (like, one comment at Citation bot), but waving one's hands around isn't the same as describing an actual problem. That is a poor basis for trying to generate consensus for multiple questions on a matter of deep significance. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 00:15, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
Comment I'm not sure which discussion Izno has in mind, but a quick search produces the following relevant discussions on User talk:Citation bot: Publisher (Nov 2018); Bug: Publisher weirdness (Oct 2018); Publishers being deleted & specific pages being changed to page ranges... (Oct 2018); I disagree with the Consensus the drives the bot's actions (Sept 2018); Do not remove the publisher (Jul 2018). Umimmak (talk) 01:10, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
^ --Izno (talk) 03:37, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
Nor am I sure which discussion Izno has in mind, lacking any definite statement of his argument. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:42, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
Those same discussions show that the users asking for the publisher parameter to be filled could not agree on which name to put in it, for instance in the case of what appears to be a society journal. Those who want publisher names in citations should first come up with a system to choose the name and settle disputes on it. (Do we have exact records for who was the registered/legal publisher of every journal dating back to centuries ago? See also Umimmak below.) Nemo 07:02, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
@Nemo bis: That's a valid argument on an individual article or at WP:CITEVAR. But in terms of enforcing it across articles by way of rules in an automated tool, CITEVAR exists because the community as a whole has decided that such issues need to be settled at each article rather than centrally imposed. As it happens I would prefer there be One True Citation Style for enwp—and would make a strong argument for what The One should be and in favour of strict enforcement—but CITEVAR has stood steady for ages and I see no reason to think the community-wide consensus on this has changed since the last time.
PS. And, yes, for most journals, at least in my field, we know exactly who the publisher of record is over time, and, where relevant, who the actual publisher is (other fields may differ). In some cases the publisher is relevant information (location less so, but sometimes relevant), and some times it's not. That this is difficult to determine in some cases, or that editors agree on the specifics in others, does not really bear on the general issue (there are cases where author is unknown or editors disagree on authorship; it's a problem in the specific case, but doesn't really impact the general case). --Xover (talk) 08:00, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
WP:CITEVAR is about styles for otherwise equivalent information. Just read it: «Editors should not attempt to change an article's established citation style merely on the grounds of personal preference». It's not about giving total freedom to anyone to add whatever they want to citations unless someone objects on each talk page. Otherwise tomorrow someone can start adding fax, phone number, street address, ZIP code and their library's preferred unique identifier in the "publisher" field on the grounds that it's what they find most useful for the specific citation. Nemo 08:30, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
Actually, yes, that's exactly what CITEVAR provides for. It's just that such extreme examples are very unlikely to be actually used by anyone, and it's exceedingly unlikely that such use would find consensus on that article's talk page. There are also technical limitations when using citation templates: for example, |url= must actually contain a valid URL (but these do not apply when not using citation templates). But whether or not to include publisher and location information for journal cites is absolutely within the scope of what CITEVAR addresses. To wit: the arguments for mass removing these refer to external style guides. (Note that there are several good arguments for why this information should not be added in a lot, or even the majority, of cases—some of which have been brought up here—but per CITEVAR these must be decided on an article-by-article basis). --Xover (talk) 10:52, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
And if you want to keep the publisher/location because you have a special snowflake citation, you can do that by 1) not activating the bot 2) inserting a comment in the citation template. However, I've yet to see a valid, on-Wikipedia case, of where publisher/location acts an actual disambiguator, rather than something that was just added automatically by tools, or added by users mistakenly thinking "if there's a parameter, the parameter must be used". But if the publication is somehow ambiguous, and there's a need for disambiguation (e.g. you don't have a DOI), then using the ISSN should be teh go-to solution, rather than figure out what corporate entity was publishing the journal at the time of publication, because that may very well have changed 3-4 times since the article was published. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 11:53, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Exclusion method needed—I think the argument about disambiguation among sources is pretty compelling. I do think, though, that many journals which are widely known and cited don't need the publisher/location information. In regard to publisher-often-wrong/changes-frequently ... the publisher at the time of the cited article is the one which should be reported, not updated to the most recent publisher, if, in fact, the publisher information is needed for disambiguation. All this being said, I'm thinking there might be an exclusion list would direct the bot to NOT take action on periodicals on the list; I wouldn't leave this up to an individual citation editor (i.e. an in-citation tag) as this would lead to chaos and a lot of warring. I'm thinking the number of periodicals which would need to be on the list would be relatively small, but I don't have a good sense of this. Definitely include information about the exclusion list and the bot activity in the Cite Journal template documentation. --User:Ceyockey (talk to me) 01:26, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
    Comment The thing with the types of journals which need non-ISSN disambiguation is that they tend to be older, obscurer publications. I doubt the usefulness of such a system just because I suspect most of these journals aren't going to be cited in that many different articles, but maybe I'm wrong on this. I do think it's safe to remove |location= if there already is |issn= to disambiguate (obviously not possible for journals which don't have one, due to, say, being discontinued before the 1970s), but that's not ideal to make it a requirement for removal since, I believe, for the most part ISSN isn't needed either. (The same many journals which are widely known and cited and which don't need the publisher/location information don't need an ISSN to identify them either.) Umimmak (talk) 01:38, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
  • While publishers/locations may not normally be necessary for normal, well known academic journals or magazines, the cite journal templates are also used for circumstances which aren't regular journals - examples include Annual publications like Jane's Fighting Ships which some editors will treat as a periodical and some as a book - in these cases, removing publishers would be harmful as it would remove valid metadata and make it more difficult to change between templates.Nigel Ish (talk) 23:24, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
    • The solution to GIGO situation is simple: Just revert the bot and fix the citation from the pre-bot version. Seeing the bot making those changes makes it immensely easier to actually fix those issues btw, since they show up in the diff, and will expose a problem. As for Jane's Fighting Ships, it's not a journal, and shouldn't be cited as such. If you want to cite it as a periodical, use {{cite magazine}} instead of {{cite journal}}. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:21, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
      • You write as if there is a clear distinction between journals, magazines, and other periodicals (newsletters, yearbooks, trade magazines, bulletins, etc), that the distinction is easy for editors to make, and that the distinction is easy for automated citation-formatting tools such as Citoid to make. None of those things is true. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:39, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
  • Keep status quo – There is a reason why style guides recommend against. In the vast majority of cases, |location= and |publisher= are unnecessary clutter. Boghog (talk) 09:18, 30 November 2018 (UTC)
    • I really wish people would wikilink the Journal and make wikipedia better instead. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 00:03, 1 December 2018 (UTC)
      • Why would they do that and how would that make Wikipedia better? I really doubt that every journal is notable enough to warrant its own Wikipedia article, first of all. And those which are notable enough for an article probably are going to be the ones readers will have no issue finding. It would be an incredible instance of WP:OVERLINKING to wikilink every reference list's mention of journals like Cell, Science, Nature, etc. Plus wikilinking shouldn't be used to disambiguate /provide citation information since it's useless for anyone who prints Wikipedia articles or encounter unlinked, republished Wikipedia content. Umimmak (talk) 00:47, 1 December 2018 (UTC)
        • i think you missed the word instead. so for journals that people think need a publisher listed. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 01:09, 1 December 2018 (UTC)
          • So strike the sentence about overlinking. Everything else holds -- the journals which would benefit from listing a publisher in the citation aren't going to have Wikipedia articles. Umimmak (talk) 05:25, 1 December 2018 (UTC)
        • On "every journal", not what AManWithNoPlan said: he was talking about a subset of an already minuscule amount of journals where somebody (or some bot) happened to use such a syntax. The discussion would be less abstract if those who think the publisher name can be useful and should be allowed brought some example of acceptable usage, but I've not seen any so far. Do you need help going through the current usages? Nemo 11:57, 1 December 2018 (UTC)
      • Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals/Journals cited by Wikipedia —Trappist the monk (talk) 12:10, 1 December 2018 (UTC)
As a side note: that is a very interesting project. ♦ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:31, 2 December 2018 (UTC)
  • I don't think the removal should be automatic. Yes, in the majority of cases publisher and location information is unnecessary, but there are situations where it is helpful. One inolves disambiguation: when there are different journals that happen to have the same title. Another has to do giving enough information to be able to track down really obscure journals (typically without ISSNs or ones that have only ever had one or two issues published). – Uanfala (talk) 15:33, 3 December 2018 (UTC)
    • And you can tell the bot to ignore those extremely rare cases pretty easily. Worse case, a whitelist of such journals could be built. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:49, 3 December 2018 (UTC)
      • But isn't that what optional template parameters are there for in the first place? {{Cite journal}} supports |publisher= and people who need to use this parameter, use it. And instead of allowing uses of the paramer but aslo having some automated tool that goes around and removes them all and then after that some editor who comes and builds an exclusion list, can't we, like, just not go through the whole rigmarole? If an editor has taken the trouble to specify a parameter, then it's best to assume they've done it for a reason (as far as I'm aware this paramter isn't filled in when you export citations from bibliography mangers, at least not from Zotero). – Uanfala (talk) 01:12, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
        • The vast, vast, vaaassst majority of those are parameter misuse by bots/tools that filled every parameter they could, or people that were given bad advice or under the misguided impression that if there's a parameter, it must be used. They are not added because they disambiguate anything. Knowing that Cell was published by MIT Press for a few years, then got purchased by Cell Press, who eventually got purchased by Elsevier add nothings to anything. And even worse, if you click on DOI, you're taken to the modern publisher page, even if the journal wasn't published by that publisher when the article got published, and will therefore lie to readers by falsely claiming Cell Press/Elsevier published the journal when it fact it was MIT Press. Again, having the publisher listed serves zero purpose whatsover, is often misleading, and goes against every style guide out there. So yes, it is simpler to remove by default, because the default is bad usage. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:37, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
  • Stop removal and display. I agree with the arguments put forward by Jc3s5h and David Eppstein — Preceding unsigned comment added by Morgan Leigh (talk • contribs) 01:31, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
  • Keep—for all of those commenting that the templates should display the publisher, they already do. In most cases, the publisher name of a journal isn't needed and should be removed per the standards most style guides use. In the rare cases it's needed, 1) it will be displayed if provided, but also 2) adding a comment will prevent any bot from removing it. If it's not needed, it's just clutter in a citation. Imzadi 1979 → 03:18, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
  • Keep status quo and continue to remove them. (t) Josve05a (c) 01:23, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
  • Stop removal as this is removing potentially correct and useful information. If it is no appropriate to display for some styles then that should be done at the template level, not by editing with a bot. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:54, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
  • Create a whitelist for the (rare) cases where |publisher= should not be removed. That will permanently solve the problem (and the whitelist could also be used by other tools). Even without a whitelist, I favour keeping the bot as it is, as the exceptions are rare, and we already have an easy way of stopping the bot on particular citations. --NSH001 (talk) 14:11, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
  • Stop removal and display instead. There never was a consensus to remove publisher and location information from citations, with one exception: In journal citations, the publisher sometimes has the same name as the journal itself, and only in these cases it was okay to remove the publisher. However, this scenario should be handled inside the template by suppressing the display of the publisher if it is the same as the journal name, so that the template still contains complete data for machines to read. In all other cases, it is perfectly okay to include publisher and location information per WP:CITEVAR, and often enough it is even interesting and useful information to know. In my own experience publisher and location information has often helped me to locate historic references in archives I would not have been able to find otherwise. Likewise, this info may also help future editors in locating references, including those which today may still be obtainable without this information. Therefore, when I know this information, I provide it as well - and I consider it downright rude and disruptive when another editor thinks he can remove it because he doesn't need it. It is possible that some editors have no use for it, but then they have just not run into those cases where it is viable. If those editors remove the info from citations, they are acting with the wrong attitude in a collaborative project, and if they even start edit-warring over it (as I have seen several times recently), they should be banned from the project - we don't need pushers and vandals here. The same goes for citation bot - this bot was never approved to carry out all the actions it tries to perform in recent months. Citation bot has been found to remove the info not only in the single case described above, but also elsewhere, including from non-journal citations. The shocking long list of complaints about issues on its talk page make me believe that the bot is broken beyond possible repair. It's not a single rule that needs to be removed, there are dozens, possibly hundreds of cases where it obviously malfunctions in bold ways. It is causing huge harm to the project instead of assisting us by working on routine cases as bots should do. Unfortunately, with the attitude shown by the bot / talk page maintainers towards complaints in recent months, I don't see citation bot ever being converted into something useful. They are part of the problem, therefore the bot should be stopped permanently. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 16:19, 15 December 2018 (UTC)
  • Stop removal - this should be done at the template level, if and when consensus can be reached. Or we could depreciate the parameters, rather than deleting possibly useful information.  Mr.choppers | ✎  16:36, 19 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Stop removal - I see no evidence consensus was reached for this and if it were, agree that it should be explicitly handled in the template. It seems like potentially useful information and see no justification based on "citation clutter" - what does that mean - does it make it more difficult to see the information in other fields?" MB 16:44, 27 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Remove and do not display. First, the "publisher" item: I don't know of any major style guide (or even a minor one), that includes "publisher" for journal citations. Books, sure. Journals, no. This info should be included in our articles on journals, but not in references. Second, the "location" parameter. Again, for books this is more or less standard in almost all style guides (I know of no exceptions). Books usually mention the location where they were published on the same page as the ISBN is displayed. Still, even then it is not always unambiguous: many large publishers have offices all over the world and it is not uncommon to see something like "Berlin, Heidelberg, New York" for books. For journals its even worse. What is the location for, say, Behavior Genetics? It's published by Springer Science+Business Media, which is headquartered in Germany (with offices in Berlin, Heidelberg, and elsewhere). It recently merged and is now a division of Springer Nature, which I think is based in Switzerland, but has offices in London, Tokyo, Beijing, New York, etc etc. The editor-in-chief is John K. Hewitt, who is at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The associate editors are in Hong Kong, US, UK, France, Netherlands, and South Korea, the editorial board add a handful of other countries. I'm not even talking about authors here. Pray tell me where this journal is located? I don't think it's possible even to pinpoint a country, let alone a particular city. And I just picked a journal, this is quite typical nowadays for the large majority of journals. There are a few minor journals that will be published by a university department and edited by them. There you can determine a location, but those journals are the vast minority (I'd say 1% of all journals at most). --Randykitty (talk) 16:28, 29 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Stop removal The information regarding the publisher is useful. Debresser (talk) 20:35, 29 January 2019 (UTC)
  • . Keep, but do not ordinarily display. And remove it manually, not by bot 99% of the times it is unnecessary, and should not be routinely displayed, butthe othe 1% it willl be needed. Back around 1850, when cataloging and citation rules were first devised, there were very few journals, even in the sciences, and most were the proceedings of societies The city was usually named, because the only other word tended to be something like "Proceedings". And by 1900, when there were more journals, there were still the exception, and the assumption was that the best rule would include everything. BY 1975, when I became a librarian, one of our principal jobs wa helping users decipher the various cryptic abbreviations of journals, and convert them to the form used in the catalog, so the user could find them on the shelves. But by 2000, each field has its own journals, the authority for their names is the major index in each field, and nobody has to look them up in a library catalog to find them. The simplest citation is the name of the journal. If necessary, the place of publication has to be added to distinguish journals of the same name, such as where journals that have controversially split and where each of the continuing publishers uses the name, or where an almost unknown journal has the name of a much better known journal and must be distinguished. So we must have the fields in existence. But almost always they're not needed and just add confusion. So for normal display, simper is better. This is especially true now that many articles here have many more citations than would have been the case in the past, and that we include full article titles. DGG ( talk ) 06:26, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
    • I understand the argument about place for old publications, but what about the publisher name? Could you make an example of such a journal where the publisher name is helpful (and can be uniquely determined)? Nemo 14:45, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
  • @DGG:, what about locations for modern journals, that are not based at a single university or edited by a single person, like the example that I gave above? --Randykitty (talk) 15:20, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
  • @Nemo bis: I can't find it now, but it's just weeks since I last ran into a pair of journals with the same name and wasted hours figuring out what was going on until I noticed sources giving two different publishers (in the humanities there are a lot of names like Poesia, Caliban, etc.: poetic but ambiguous). In that case the publishers were different learned societies in the same or a very closely related field, most likely they were societies for the same area independently created in the UK and North America (a common occurence, but a lot of them have merged post-internet). Most journals in my field have such a publisher and then use a publishing house (Springer, T&F, MIT Press, OUP, etc.) for the technical and practical bits. Giving the latter isn't completely useless (Springer vs. T&F is still a disambiguator), even if exceedingly generic; but the actual societies and organisations publishing these journals are good disambiguators. I've previously given the example Shakespeare Quarterly which is published by Folger Shakespeare Library, and used the publishing house services of Johns Hopkins University Press until a month ago when they switched to Oxford University Press. Taylor & Francis is also the actual publisher of the journal Shakespeare (in addition to being a publishing house for third party journals). In these examples, JHUP and OUP are basically journal database providers like JSTOR and Project MUSE: they change over time and provide little or no information in terms of disambiguation or assessing reliability. The Folger and T&F, for the respective journals, provide both disambiguation and information to help assess the source.
    If I go looking for examples (rather than ones I've actually run into myself while editing) I quickly find that there are two journals called Africa (one by CUP, one by Istituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente), two called Agenda (ANU Press and T&F on behalf of Agenda Feminist Media), two American Art Journal (Henry C. Watson and Kennedy Galleries), two American Studies (Mid-America American Studies Association and Universitätsverlag WINTER), two The Art Journal (D. Appleton and CAA, both in New York, incidentally), two The Art News (The Art News Company and Sadakichi Hartmann, also both in NY), two Arthuriana (Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, and Scriptorium Press for International Arthurian Society-North American Branch), two Asian Perspectives (Lynne Rienner Publishers in South Korea and University of Hawai'i Press). TLDR? That's the ones starting with A. On one database. With no cross-referencing.
    Unlike DGG I can't think of a single actual instance where I needed location for scholarly journals (magazines and newspapers, sure, but not journals). However as a constructed example it's easy to imagine a case similar to the above: Dingus Danglers United forms in both the UK and North America, and both start publishing Modern Dingus Dangling. Neither title nor publisher is sufficient for disambiguation, so you're dependent on location to tell them apart. Then there are Sunday Times (Islamabad, Pakistan), Sunday Times (London, England), The Sunday Times (Perth, Western Australia, Australia) (see The Sunday Times (disambiguation) for more examples). Or the gazillion papers published with The Times on its front page, but always called The Times of London or The Times of Northwest Indiana (note the title on the front page there). For older periodicals that are not modern academic journals (often called a "journal", but closer to what we think of as a magazine or newspaper) there are probably plenty of examples. There were a whole gazillion funnily named publications like The Universal Magazine, The Spectator and The Spectator, The Gentleman's Magazine, or the Monthly Review and the Monthly Review and the Monthly Review. Some of these are sometimes best treated as journals, even though they differ somewhat from what we typically think of as a modern academic journal.
    @Randykitty: This RfC came about because CitationBot is forcibly removing location and publisher parameters from citatation templates in violation of CITEVAR and without seeking consensus or BRFA. Your argument is a good one in terms of editor practice (i.e. "What details should an editor add for their citations?"): most journal citations do not need a location, and publisher needs judgement to decide whether it is relevant (but see above for why that's slightly more often then immediately obvious). However, if merely "the vast minority (1% at most)" legitimately needs either parameter, that is also an argument that 1) CitationBot should not automatically remove these parameters and 2) these parameters should not be disabled/deprecated in cite journal. The conclusions will be very different depending on whether we are discussing what a bot should automatically enforce, or what is best practice usage for editors. When you above write "Remove and do not display" your !vote is likely to be counted in favour of a bot or bots mechanically removing all instances of these parameters in all articles using cite journal—including your "1%" of articles who legitimately need them—and {{cite journal}} being altered such that giving |location= and |publisher= will be an error. Does that accurately reflect your position? --Xover (talk) 20:01, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Actually, it does. I don't have any examples handy and have no time right now to search for them, but I have seen cases where, for example, PubMed uses a disambiguator in a journal title, such as: Journal of Foo (Bristol). Citations in articles to this journal will use that name. So "location" in this case is not a separate field, but part of the journal name. If we had two articles to such a pair of journals here, we'd actually do something similar. For most modern journals, as I argued above, the "location" parameter is impossible to determine. --Randykitty (talk) 21:07, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
The method just mentioned is the usual library method in distinguishing titles. For modern journals, there will be instance where at least the place field will be needed. The need for a publisher field is less frequent, but there will be situation where it too is needed, especially for small journals, neither the place nor publisher is necessarily stable.There are also confusions in the title that even place and publisher will not resolve, especially when a journal ceases and restarts either immediately or many years subsequently with the same title but a different set of editors/publishers/sponsors, in which case the beginning and ending dates of both serials are added to their titles, as Foo (1909-1949), Foo (1950- ) . We could do this also, but very often the user will not be aware of the difference, and will not cite it as a matter of course. I can easily find examples that would defy and one single simple method. The general approach for libraries is to include in the record every pssible ariation, but not necessarily display it. There fore I would never think of reoving the fields from the template entirely, but it takes a human who know the field when to display them. DGG ( talk ) 01:26, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
This The general approach for libraries is to include in the record every pssible ariation, but not necessarily display it. There fore I would never think of reoving the fields from the template entirely, but it takes a human who know the field when to display them. is a cogent summary of how to approach the issue. It's also, incidentally, a good description of one aspect of CITEVAR: it needs human judgement and is subject to local consensus. --Xover (talk) 06:10, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
Two thoughts:
  • It would be inaccurate to imply that a desire to promote the use of human judgement or to encourage local consensus was a significant motivation for CITEVAR. My main goal was to stop edit wars between humans whose judgement differed. adapting the WP:ENGVAR approach has stopped most of those disputes. I would not necessarily object to replacing it with a rejection of all variation in favor of a single, unified style (which is the other major way to stop edit wars over ref formatting).
  • User:DGG, among the editors I spend the most time around, I think that a publisher might be added for specific purposes, i.e., to differentiate an academic journal by the Society of Respectable Folks from a pseudoacademic journal by Crackpots R Us. A neutral place-based differentiator does not have the same value in that instance. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:55, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
Yes indeed, WhatamIdoin, thanks for mentioning it. That has become a critical factor, and it's becoming more and more important as predatory publishers are deliberately using names that are almost exactly like those of respected journals. DGG ( talk ) 06:35, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Stop removal and Continue to display. The current documentation for Template:Cite journal lists the parameter publisher and it is a valid piece of information. We are not short of electons and an online encyclopedia has no need to obey style guides designed for printed works that want to save ink. In the past ArbCom has sanctioned bot operators who made significant changes to current practice by performing a fait accompli to their own preferences, and I fail to see how this bot is doing anything other than that. It should be shut down or fixed. --RexxS (talk) 16:22, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
    • OK, so you want to keep the publisher field. At least that one is unambiguous. How about the "location" field, any ideas how that should be filled out for a journal like Behavior Genetics? --Randykitty (talk) 16:34, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
      @Randykitty: (Aside: see Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility #Lists) Although I could make a similar argument for retaining location  – valid data; documented as current practice; no shortage of storage space  – I'm less convinced of the usefulness of the parameter to the reader. While a linked publisher like Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society may be of genuine interest to a reader, I doubt that specifying the location as New York adds much. I have occasionally come across cases of a book having different content depending on whether you're consulting the edition published in New York or London; but I've never seen that in a journal. I don't think I'd worry if location were deprecated for {{cite journal}}. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 16:57, 2 February 2019 (UTC)
      Since this is apparently the issue holding up closure, I'll reply briefly to Randykitty's "serious concerns" about |location=. Presuming you meant Behavior Genetics and not Behavior Genetics, for any current or reasonably recent article in this journal, the |location= parameter should probably not be provided (ditto for any article published first or concurrently in electronic format, which is most but not all current journals). It's a bit hard to tell without viewing a physical copy of it (where such information is usually provided, if at all, in the colophon): from a quick look it appears neither Springer Science+Business Media nor Behavior Genetics Association has any inherent "location" above Springer being a US corporation nor provides one for the publication. However, previous volumes of this journal have been published using different publishing houses (I see Westport, Plenum Press, and the German arm of Springer), some of which probably provided a place of publication in their bibliographic data (and Worldcat includes that datum). For those articles one might consider whether there was a meaningful value for |location= and whether it provides any value for the reader (or automated tools, scraping for a bibliographic database or some such, but primarily for the reader). I don't forsee there being very many cases where |location= will add much value, much less be absolutely needed, for journal citations. It's actually conceivable that this journal (older volumes) could be such a case, given its extremely generic name (so generic, in fact, that you linked the associated field rather than the journal when you provided the example), but based on what information I gleaned in the 90 seconds or so I was looking at it there is no obvious reason why you would want or need a |location= for citations to articles in this journal. I would almost never remove such data if provided by another editor though: it does no harm and every extra little bit of information helps when you're trying to track down an incomplete or otherwise confused citation (which are the majority of citations on Wikipedia: we're here effectivey just discussing the small subset that actually use {{cite journal}}, and if they made the effort to provide a given bit of information we should not presume to remove it mechanistically or without due consideration (see also WP:CITEVAR)). I spend a lot of time fixing incomplete and broken citations. If a bot went around and removed every instance of a parameter that might be redundant or extraneous for a complete and perfect citation, that job would be much much harder. If all you have to go on is, e.g., a last name and a location you stand a chance: without the location you would be hosed. There's a big difference between searching for something in "All journals published in 1821" and "All journals published in Dublin in 1821". --Xover (talk) 12:46, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Your comment actually illustrates my point. Springer is absolutely not "a US corporation". It has offices in the US, sure, but also in Japan, China, the Netherlands, and a lot of other places. In origin, it was a German company, but even within Germany it always had multiple locations. I follow your argument that any tidbit of information can be useful in some situations. My point is that this only is true when the information actually is correct. In the case of BG, almost any location chosen will be incorrect and misleading. (BTW, the title of the journal is unambiguous, even though its generic, because there's no other journal with a name like that, there isn't even a Journal of Behavioral Genetics or something similar...). In the very few exceptional cases where city of origin is important in the name of a journal, they are cited (in PubMed, for example) as name="Journal of Foo (New York)", the location being part of the journal name, not something in a separate field. --Randykitty (talk) 15:18, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Which was why I said I would not suggest a |location= be added to citations to this particular journal (also: give me a break. I spent 90 seconds looking at your example. Your "Gotcha!" style of argument based on an irrelevant aside in one sentence of my reply is not constructive. Nothing in my reply was predicated on Springer being a US corporation: it was given as an example of a location too unspecific and tangenital to be relevant.). I also very much doubt there is a significant number of cases where a location is needed for articles published electronically (the vast majority of these have unique identifiers that are far better than any number of bibliographic details, iff correct). Any cases of this will be pre-electronic publishing. However, note that the larger Springer conglomerate being multinational is irrelevant: if the particular arm publishing the journal gives a particular place of publication then that is the relevant location. For example, Oxford University Press titles are always notionally published in Oxford (and sometimes New York and New Dehli, depending on the arrangements for a given title), but OUP is most definitely a multinational. And a lot of older Springer-Verlag titles (books, I mean) were published in (that is, the publisher gave its place of publication in the colophon as) |location=Berlin (caveat that they don't do much in my field and I may misrecall).
    One should most certainly not add a location to {{cite journal}}'s |journal= parameter as that would pollute the metadata (in addition to being technically incorrect). Removing a tacked on location or faux "of City" suffix from a journal name, unlike removing a |location= parameter, would actually be correct and a good thing to do! In comparing relative harm, having available a |location= parameter that is only rarely used, and even more rarely is used incorrectly, does essentially no harm ("It offends me!" is not actual harm). Polluting the metadata for |journal= does some harm. Note that I'm not arguing that there is some pressing need for |location= that would justify adding support for this parameter to {{cite journal}} if it didn't already have it. But the support is there; there is even less need to remove it; and it nicely mirrors the same parameter in the other citation templates (I'd have to check to make sure, but I suspect we'd actually need to special-case to prohibit |location= for {{cite journal}}). It makes no kind of sense to get rid of a parameter that might possibly be used incorrectly some time by deliberately placing incorrect information in an unrelated parameter. And in no case can a bot mechanistically determine the merits of a given instance of a citation's |location= parameter. --Xover (talk) 17:32, 3 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Stop automated removal and continue to display - Beyond My Ken (talk) 08:41, 7 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment. Is it technically feasible to create a long list of journals where the information is clearly never needed eg Cell, Science? This could be based on journals with existing articles, excluding ones where there's obvious title overlap. Also, could the documentation of cite journal attempt to make it clearer that this information is only needed in rare cases? I'm sure some editors are dutifully filling it all in, without understanding the purpose, like some editors fill in all the parameters in infoboxes. Espresso Addict (talk) 18:36, 7 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Stop removal and continue to display I've read the past arguments and found Xover's to be the most convincing. I would add that while some editors feel that the result of a parameter's helpfulness is a binary concern—in that it's either helpful or not helpful—IMHO a parameter's actions provide for 3 degrees of results:
Degree of action
⬅ ⊖ ➡
Hinderance No difference Helpfulness
I see in the posts above examples of when the |location= and |publisher= parameters have been helpful or have offered no help. But I don't see where anyone has identified an instance where the parameter has fallen under the hinderance column, in that it made a source more difficult to locate. Providing an example of the parameter's hinderance in locating a source would seem to offer the best argument for removal. Without it, the move towards excluding the parameter feels like it's based on aesthetic qualities alone. Regards,  Spintendo  19:48, 7 February 2019 (UTC)
The parameter's hinderance is that nobody ever agrees on what it should contain, so editors keep quarrelling about what to put in it, which is a waste of Wikipedia's resources. I think the discussion above was able two suggest one or two cases of journals where there might be consensus on how to use the (location) parameter, but we don't yet have a proposal for how we could test those cases and write comprehensive documentation for the users to know how to use the parameter. I don't remember seeing a single example where consensus could be found on what to put in the "publisher" parameter. So for now there is no consensus on putting anything at all on these two parameters. Nemo 07:06, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
No, there is no consensus to support the removal of these parameters. And absent a global consensus that means CITEVAR obtains, leaving their use up to local consensus on each article as for all other such citation issues. CitationBot is now, was previously, and has apparently during this RfC intensified its removal of these parameters, without consensus and in violation of CITEVAR. And bots editing against consensus is sanctionable! Please stop before this ends up at the drama boards (which really shouldn't be necessary to resolve this issue!). --Xover (talk) 09:20, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
Removal is the status quo of ten years, so you need consensus to stop it, not to continue it. Are you saying that WP:CITEVAR in your opinion means that I can put whatever I want in the "publisher" and "location" field (say, the name and place of birth of the last author of the paper) and then people need to find consensus on each talk page to change it? Nemo 09:28, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
Whatever CitationBot has been doing for 10 years, absent a valid bot approval and consensus to begin doing anything, no bot is allowed to edit. At all. The burden is very much on CitationBot's maintainers to demonstrate both community consensus and authorization for this behaviour. And please don't resort to strawman tactics. Of course there are certain de facto limitations on what can go in citations in general, and specific such in specific cases. Given more than just a small entrenched group of editors on a given article, any of the more extreme theoretical examples (author's home phone number in |url= say) gets reigned in right pronto. For example, |url= should obviously contain a valid URL absent very good reasons otherwise (I can't think of any). And there are very good arguments that what gets put in |publisher= should be something that can reasonably be interpreted as a publisher, and a location for |location=, and that it would be strongly preferable that these are as correct as possible. However, whether to include or not various bibliographic datum for a given citation is exactly what CITEVAR regulates. Ditto what threshold of "correctness" should be required for this. For example, the practice of shoehorning unrelated information into a citation template parameter in order to get it to display in the desired way is fairly widespread and common. I would wish editors didn't do that, and I've done my fair share of cleanup of such, but if local consensus is in favor of that there's nothing much I can do. CITEVAR means that these questions are subject to local consensus on each and every article (unless you can establish a community-wide consensus to override CITEVAR for a specific issue). And that's completely irrespective of whether the specific citation in question uses a citation template or not. If you want to try overturning CITEVAR and get consensus for One True Citation Style on Wikipedia (good luck! the last attempt went down in flames last autumn if I don't misrecall badly) you have my !vote, but until then nobody gets to impose their preference on such details by automated editing. --Xover (talk) 10:15, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Stop automated removal until a consensus is reached to resume it. — Godsy (TALKCONT) 06:29, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Stop automated removal there is no need for continuous pointless edits like this to be made. There's no need to remove it, it's useful to have and consistent with many citation styles, and it's a giant waste of a time for a bot to do this, and to clutter up the watchlists (and recent changes lists) of thousands of editors and pagers. --Tom (LT) (talk) 08:08, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
    Tom (LT), could you be so kind to tell us which citation styles include publisher and location in journal citations? Because in my ignorance I actually don't know of any that do that. (Nor the joournal's ISSN, for that matter). --Randykitty (talk) 10:38, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
    (Aside: please read MOS:LISTGAP) The answer to the question "which citation styles include publisher and location in journal citations is "just about every citation style used on Wikipedia". Check the documentation of any core CS1/2 template and you'll find the parameters included there. --RexxS (talk) 02:08, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
  • RIght. So WP has this for some reason included in their "cite journal" template. I was talking about the world at large. I don't know of a single academic journal adding publisher or location (or ISSN for that matter) to citations to journal articles. Not A Single One. Go ahead, name just one. --Randykitty (talk) 18:50, 13 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Chicago for one, as has been mentioned earlier: If a journal might be confused with another with a similar title, or if it might not be known to the users of a bibliography, add the name of the place or institution where it is published in parentheses after the journal title. Umimmak (talk) 22:51, 13 February 2019 (UTC)
  • The important part here being "IF a journal might be confused". That is something else entirely than what is being proposed here, namely always including this info. As I have indicated above for Behavior Genetics, a "location" parameter will in 99% of cases be ambiguous or impossible to determine. The remaining 1% are the cases that "Chicago" talks about. I maintain that there is no single style outside of WP that always includes location, publisher (and ISSN). --Randykitty (talk) 11:29, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Nobody here is saying those parameters should always be used, just that a bot should not always automatically delete the information in those parameters when an editor has decided that those parameters would be helpful additions to particular citations. Umimmak (talk) 11:34, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Literally nobody in this entire thread has proposed (or even just suggested or implied) that these parameters should always be added. I even responded to your initial !vote explaining precisely what this RfC is actually about, since you at that point appeared to have possibly misunderstood. Since you then reconfirmed your position (and argued vehemently for it) I took it for granted you had taken the time to make sure you had understood what the question was before !voting. If you are still this confused about the basic premise of this RfC after voting, objecting to a neutral closing (thus dragging this out needlessly), and arguing for a further two weeks, I begin to question your WP:COMPETENCE. The alternative explanation is that this is the second time in this discussion that you have resorted to assigning an obvious and transparent strawman to those you disagree with, which would put your good faith in question. Which is a pity because what seems to be your basic position—that these parameters are needed so rarely and are so easy to get wrong when used, that they should be actively forbidden in all circumstances on Wikipedia—is perfectly valid on its own (I just happen to disagree with it). But when you dare others to "Go ahead, name just one", and they do, and you start pretending the issue is something else entirely without even acknowledging the egg on your face? Not a particularly good approach to convincing other editors to your position, lets put it that way. --Xover (talk) 13:30, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
  • As correctly evoked by Espresso Addict above, if the parameter is in the template, many editors will fill it in, necessary or not, just as they will try to fill in any infobox parameter. And I still maintain that there is not a single citation style that (except in a vanishingly small number of cases) includes publisher, ISSN, and/or location. Having these parameters is asking for trouble. --Randykitty (talk) 16:56, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Thank you, and duly noted. I acknowledge that these are valid arguments. I disagree strongly that the potential trouble of having them outweighs the potential trouble of not having them. Note that the ISSN-related parameters are not at issue in this RfC. Note also that the proper venue for the part of your argument that pertains to citation style belongs at WP:CITEVAR. --Xover (talk) 17:40, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
I'm finding it hard to imagine people add the publisher just because they see there's a parameter for it. {{cite journal}} has almost a hundred parameters, do people fill them all in? The template's documentation doesn't even have any examples with this parameter. I don't know what the reasons might be for any instances of improper use. Maybe people are carrying over their habits from using {{cite book}}? Maybe there are referencing tools that automatically populate the parameter? – Uanfala (talk) 22:57, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
Yes, the publisher field is usually populated by VisualEditor or other automated systems which use Zotero. It's not something that editors usually enter intentionally. Nemo 07:26, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
But Zotero doesn't have a publisher field for journals, at least not the version I use. And if it's wikipedia's own tools that do that, then this is something we have some sort of control over, so maybe the efforts should be directed at making sure these tools don't automatically populate that field? – Uanfala (talk) 15:46, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Stop automated removal The main point of having a citation template is for it to display the parameters in a consistent way. Any changes in the style should be agreed at the template level. If a parameter and its display needs tweaking then the template can handle it best. Having a bot second-guessing editors in this way is inefficient. Andrew D. (talk) 11:39, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
    • The difference being that it's trivial to override an edit by changing the content of the parameter (e.g. to force the presence of a certain location in the extremely rare cases mentioned by DGG), while a user wishing to override the template for a specific case will have a hard time. And if in 99 % of the cases the publisher parameter is incorrectly specified or disputed, hiding it doesn't help those who consume the wikitext itself. Nemo 11:41, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Stop automated removalEdison (talk) 03:38, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Keep and display. I'm not going to re-iterate every rationale I agree with. One I will advance in detail (and several parts) is that citations on WP and citations in journals serve completely different purposes (on WP it's for verifiability and, in their form, for finding and being certain of the identification of cited sources so that the verifying can actually be engaged in; in journals, it's to provide credit to prior researchers). Another distinction is that the citation styles favored by academic journals are geared for academics, who already know where major journals and their publishers are, and don't care where the minor ones are; they care about the primary research and how "hot" it is in their field, while they want this citation info condensed for convenience, and the publishers want it condensed to save space. On WP, no such prior-knowledge assumptions are ever safe, we are not publishing on paper, and our goal is to provide [useful] information not suppress it just because its not the most useful in every single case.

    A second reason that especially matters to me: For journal sources in particular, there's a pressing need for the information here. There are over 100,000 academic journals today, and WP covers every single field. Various journals are "predatory", many that are not are low-end, and many of both sorts have names very similar to more prestigious publications; publisher and location information can help weed out poor sourcing. Finally, location can also help us identify bias; if 90% of the sources in our article on the Elbonia–Kerblachistan War are Elbonian-published, we obviously have a bias problem. All that said, I also do agree with many of the above additional points.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:14, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

I am curious if you would therefore agree that removing is okay when a doi, pmid, pmc, or ISSN is present? It seems to follow. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 21:28, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Closure

On 07:13, 3 February 2019, I closed this RfC with a result of "stop removing parameters" in response to a request for closure. On 10:58, 3 February 2019, Randykitty challenged the closure on my talk page:

Hi, I feel that your closure here does not take into account my serious concerns regarding the "location" parameter. In addition, I'm surprised this got closed anyway, as the discussion seemed to be still ongoing.

To allow for further discussion, I've undone the closure. When the RfC is ready to be closed, any editor may request another closure at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Requests for closure. — Newslinger talk 11:50, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

@Newslinger: In case you are no longer watching this page, Cunard relisted the RFC (which was probably right to do on his part). Just an FYI. --Izno (talk) 20:07, 7 February 2019 (UTC)
Hi Izno, thank you for the update. I did notice that Cunard relisted the RfC, and I had sent them a thanks (which is unfortunately hard to see). I will probably not monitor this RfC anymore, so please ensure that another request for closure gets submitted if you're interested in seeing this RfC closed promptly after the discussion settles. — Newslinger talk 20:45, 7 February 2019 (UTC)
In the meantime Citation bot has been furiously removing publishers from journals today. Shouldn't this stop, at least while the RFC continues and maybe longer depending on the RFC outcome? —David Eppstein (talk) 07:00, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
To stop while discussion is ongoing would indeed be in keeping with… pretty much every single policy, guideline, and good practice on the project. If removal has intensified today that would constitute actively and directly disruptive editing and violating the bot policy (vs. the neglectful failure to get proper consensus first or of stopping once the task was questioned). However, to stop would mean admitting that CitationBot was removing these parameters without consensus and valid bot authorization in the first place, which I imagine might be too much to ask of its operators. Well, operator singular, strictly; the bot has an operator and two "assistants". But the operator and one of the assistants hasn't participated in this RFC at all, nor ever appear to edit the bot's talk page. The last time the actual operator edited the bot's talk page was 5 months ago (and the bot's user page was 17 months ago), and that was a bug report apparently effectively addressed to the "assistants". The other "assistant" hasn't edited the bot's user page in 54 months, and the talk page in 16 months. The actual operator of the bot gives no indication that they are aware of this discussion, which in itself is a violation of the bot policy, and rather negligent given they are actually responsible for the bot's edits. --Xover (talk) 09:20, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Pinging Citation bot (talk · contribs) operators Smith609 (talk · contribs), Kaldari (talk · contribs), and AManWithNoPlan (talk · contribs) to inform them of this discussion. Cunard (talk) 01:32, 10 February 2019 (UTC)
    • Thanks for the ping. Unfortunately, you're correct in assessing that Citation bot is not very actively maintained. I try to contribute bug fixes when I can, but I'm currently traveling for a few weeks and only have very limited internet access. I'm afraid I won't be able to help with this particular issue. The code is all open source and hosted on GitHub, so theoretically anyone that knows PHP should be able to help. Sorry I can't be of more assistance. Kaldari (talk) 03:39, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
      • "you're correct in assessing that Citation bot is not very actively maintained": there has been pretty aggresive maintainance by me lately. PHP help is always welcome. The bot has been changed recently to only remove these if there is an identfier set that makes them not needed (PMID, DOI, ISSN, PMC). I should note that in almost every case that someone has complained about publishers being removed, the publisher has actually been wrong. As for approval and consensus, this feature has been there for over a decade. It is probably a good time to revisit it since consensus can change -- sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 21:26, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
        • Thank you for the fix. However, I'll note that in every case where I've reverted the bot, the publisher has been correct. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data", but it's not a good omen for the feasibility of removing the parameter by bot, no matter how sophisticated an algorithm it uses. Will the bot continue to remove a publisher like the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society (which is much more than just a publisher) when the article has been indexed by PubMed, even though the link to the publisher's article may be of genuine interest to a reader. If so, how will that square with WP:Build the web? --RexxS (talk) 22:47, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
If you look at the journal cover here you will see that it clearly indicates "Routledge". I think the journal itself is a better source than PubMedCentral. Library databases are notoriously unreliable for info like this and more often than not severely outdated. Just one example: the reputed National Library of Medicine's catalog indicates as publisher for Genes, Brain and Behavior "Oxford: Munksgaard" (see here). This is wrong in many senses. Munksgaard never was based in Oxford, it was a Danish publisher based in Copenhagen. It was bought by Blackwell (one of whose main offices was indeed in Oxford), who operated it for a time as an independent inmprint, after a while renamed it "Blackwell Munksgaard", then absorbed it completely, and then was taken over by Wiley to form Wiley-Blackwell. An amateur would all too easily populate the publisher and location fields with "Munksgaard" and "Oxford", the former being most certainly incorrect and without any way of knowing which of the many Wiley offices around the world actually is handling the publication of this journal. To get back to your example, Routledge's journals are all hosted on the T&F Online site, as they (and other publishers) belong to the same parent company (Informa), which operates T&F and Routledge as separate imprints. Similarly, Elsevier's ScienceDirect online platform not only houses journals published by Elsevier and its imprints, but also some journals that are published by other companies. Nevertheless, every page on ScienceDirect has "Elsevier" at the bottom of the page, so if you're an amateur and do not know about this stuff, you'd mistakenly put "Elsevier" on all those journals. --Randykitty (talk) 17:01, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
The bigger issue is that journals routinely change publishers over the years. They get acquired, moved from imprint to imprint, their publishers rebrand themselves and change names and themselves get acquired, and so on. If you take something like Nature, over the years, for the same article you'd be landing on a page that declared the publisher to be Nature Research, Nature Publishing Group, Springer Nature, or Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. Maintaining who publishes the journal now, or deciding amongst this corporate shell game who the publisher is, or tracking back the 1953 published issue to say who happened to publish it at the time, deciding if we mention the original or current publisher, etc... it's pointless work. That's why no citation styles say to mention who the publisher of a journal is. If you care, follow the DOI and figure it out. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:10, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
@Randykitty: Thanks for your amateur advice, but it doesn't alter the fact that Europe PMC indicates the publisher's website for the content supporting the article text is Taylor & Francis. Anybody following the citation can see that. So, what's your justification for claiming that T&F isn't the publisher of the information that I cited? --RexxS (talk) 18:39, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
It's the journal cover itself which prominantly displays "Routledge" and does not mention T&F at all. Or do you think that the journal itself is confused about who is publishing them? --Randykitty (talk) 18:50, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
If you assume that it should be T&F since Routledge is owned by T&F, then the publisher becomes so big to be useless, and furthermore then the publisher should be listed as Informa, since they own T&F. Either way T&F is wrong. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 18:54, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
Guess what the source is for the image of the journal cover that Randykitty relies on. Answer: https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gspm20 - the Taylor & Francis website.
I know that the publisher is Taylor & Francis for two reasons:
  1. Europe PMC says it is;
  2. The article text states "Paulev and Zubieta have created a new conversion factor in order to make any sea level dive table usable during high altitude diving in 2007"
    The source that verifies that statement is https://doi.org/10.1080/15438620701526795
    That turns out to be the webpage https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15438620701526795?journalCode=gspm20
    and there is absolutely no doubt that the publisher of that webpage is Taylor & Francis. It's all over the page in big letters for anyone to see.
    Only in some Bizarro universe would anybody try to claim that the publisher of the source that verifies the article text would be "Routledge". This is what happens when editors who don't write content try to impose their preconceived notions on articles. You're simply wrong. Get over it. --RexxS (talk) 20:46, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
[1] makes it pretty clear that the publisher is Routledge. Taylor and Francis is involved through some corporate shell game / distribution / imprints arrangement "Taylor & Francis Group journals are published under the Routledge and Taylor & Francis imprints". Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:01, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
None of that is relevant to the fact that the source supporting the article text is Taylor & Francis' website. There's no mention of Routledge on that webpage. From our article on Taylor & Francis:

In 1998 Taylor & Francis Group went public on the London Stock Exchange and in the same year the group purchased its academic publishing rival Routledge for £90 million ... Taylor & Francis merged with Informa in 2004 to create a new company called T&F Informa, since renamed back to Informa ... Taylor & Francis Group is now the academic publishing arm of Informa ... Taylor & Francis publishes more than 2,700 journals ... It uses the Routledge imprint for its publishing in humanities, social sciences, behavioural sciences, law and education and the CRC Press imprint for its publishing in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics ... The company's journals have been delivered through the Taylor & Francis Online website since June 2011.

So please don't tell me that Taylor & Francis didn't publish https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15438620701526795?journalCode=gspm20 . You're clearly wrong and you need to just accept that my edit was correct. --RexxS (talk) 21:27, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
"You're clearly wrong" is not an especially constructive attitude. Considering you're currently the only person advocating for that interpretation, in a group of people with considerable experience about scholarly communication, maybe you could accept that this field is more intricated that you initially admitted. Nemo 21:31, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
So after you've got all the rest wrong, your last resort is an ad hominem on my attitude?? Comment on the content, not the editor. I'm the only one, am I? and according to you that makes me wrong? LOL - it's strength of argument, not numbers that count and all your arguments miss the point by miles. Finally you make an "appeal to authority". Well, I'm also an experienced editor with considerable content experience and I know how to find the publisher of a website without being patronised, thanks. The facts of T&F's relationship to Informa, Routledge and CRC Press are laid out for you above. It's not rocket science, and anybody can see that Taylor & Francis Online is the publisher of the source used for the article. They are the publisher of all of that group's online content as is made clear at https://web.archive.org/web/20130509172503/http://resources.tandfonline.com/documents/library-faqs.pdf - maybe you could accept that this particular corner of the field is nowhere near as complicated as you'd like to pretend? --RexxS (talk) 21:48, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
  • RE "ad hominem", somebody (was that perhaps you) wrote above "This is what happens when editors who don't write content try to impose their preconceived notions on articles". Comment on the issue, not the editors, indeed. Putting a PDF online is only the last step in the long process that is academic publishing. In that sense, "Taylor and Francis Online" does not publish anything. It's the online access platform for journals published by Informa and its subsidiaries, which includes T&F and Routledge (and perhaps others, I didn't look closer into that). The link you're citing above (this one) has at the bottom a statement: "Copyright © 2018 Informa UK Limited". Does that now mean that the journal is published by Informa? --Randykitty (talk) 23:02, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
Elsevier does not exist either. It is part of another company, and there are in fact a lot of divisions called Elsevier that are not the same "publisher". Unless you know which one is the right one, then you are wrong. Based upon the above idea, one could just as easy say that sciencedirect is the publisher? Crannking my saltiness up to eleven, does that make the hosting firm the publisher? AManWithNoPlan (talk) 19:23, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
It turns out we do have over a hundred pages with "ScienceDirect" in the "publisher" parameter. Now let's start a hundred talk page discussions with the respective editors to make sure whether they think it's a "bizarro world" to think they might have misunderstood something. Nemo 20:34, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
I thought this was a discussion about closure of the RFC about whether to stop automatically removing publisher and location from references using the cite web template, not an argument about what the publishers of a particular journal are called - these sorts of arguments about who is the publisher are equally applicable to thinks like books, where (I believe) no-one is arguing for removal, so do not seem particularly relevant to a discussion about Cite Journal. This discussion needs closure by an experienced, uninvolved editor rather than just a series of shouting matches. Please keep the discussion on topic.Nigel Ish (talk) 22:18, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
  • The difference with books is that almost every citation style in the real world that I know about includes publisher and location. The same cannot be said for journals. And the shouting match above indicates how complicated these issues can get for journals (especially when dealing with somebody who apparently does not understand what an "imprint" is... Which also would be the case in many many articles where editors unfamiliar with academic publishing practices include references to academic articles. --Randykitty (talk) 23:02, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
Actually for books, once a book is published, the publisher doesn't change. Every printing of A. Pickering (1984). Constructing Quarks. University of Chicago Press. pp. 114–125. ISBN 978-0-226-66799-7. has been published by University of Chicago Press. Reprints by other publishing houses would have been printed in a different year, but there is no question or ambiguity about who published the original copy. And in the case of books, the publisher is often the disambiguator: You will have several books with the same title. You will not, however, have two articles of the same name, in a journal of the same name, where you'd need a publisher to distinguishing between the two. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:33, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
  • This is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia and we use online sources at least as often as printed ones. The distinction between different journals, books, magazines, etc. blurs when we are using an online source.
    You're wrong again: I understand perfectly well what an imprint is in the UK, and it's not a link to a dab page (check the links, LOL). The problem I have is that I'm dealing with someone who apparently does not understand what a publisher is. To be helpful: "publisher: the name of the organization that actually published the source." So the question becomes "what organisation actually published the source?" For a webpage, you often have that information in its metadata. In the case of the source used, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15438620701526795?journalCode=gspm20 you will find: <meta name="dc.Publisher" content=" Taylor & Francis Group " />. You're confusing copyright owner (Informa, the parent company) with the publisher of the webpage (Taylor & Francis). Hope you've got that straight now. --RexxS (talk) 00:11, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

So, since the web publisher and the print publisher are different; does that mean we should just delete publisher? Also, does that make jstor the publisher? What about journals that publish on multiple websites? Lastly, the publisher of the website T&F is transient and prone to change obviously, unlike the print version which is written in stone. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 00:44, 17 February 2019 (UTC)


Build the web does not apply to references and in fact overlinking is discouraged in references. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 02:52, 16 February 2019 (UTC)

Nonsense. You have it exactly backwards. Of course "Build the web" applies to references just as it does to all article text that is displayed to readers – for exactly the same reasons. Overlinking is discouraged everywhere, but a sensible amount of linking is good in references, and more overlinking is tolerated there than in normal article text. --RexxS (talk) 15:24, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
Irrelevent and pointless I vote this discussion to be pointless now that the bot has stopped removing when there is not a unique identifier. This eliminates most of the arguments against removal. Since only Citation Bot (and no other bot) has ever had consensus for removal, I doubt any other bot would ever be able to get this going again. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 22:33, 16 February 2019 (UTC)
1) CitationBot did not "have consensus" for this task, it has merely not been challenged on it before (which counts as consensus in only the weakest possible sense), and bots need actual bot authorization through BRFA in any case. After this RfC it seems likely to have actual consensus against this task (which is why, I suppose, its proponents are so determined to prevent closure). 2) Stopping in some cases but not in all cases is not sufficient when consensus is against bot removal: that you and Headbomb decided that was probably good enough on the bot's talk page does not supercede community consensus here. Bots editing against consensus do not become more acceptable by trying to avoid getting challenged on it. 3) The proponents of bot removal make one very good point: determining the correct (and thus determining what counts as incorrect) publisher is often complicated and metadata in bibliographic databases is frequently incorrect or misleading: they just don't realise that this is a strong argument for why a bot cannot perform this task and discussions are needed to determine each specific case (that "T&F" is incorrect in the example above does not mean "T&F" is thus always wrong: that's an actual fallacy). 4) I concur with Nigel Ish: this discussion has devolved into entrenched positions and ad hominem and should be closed (by an experienced closer). --Xover (talk) 07:21, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
No, it simply shows that there is no consensus on filling the publisher parameter, as we were not able to find a single case where the location and publisher would be uncontroversial. The automated removal allows to counter the indiscriminate automated addition and to make sure that thousands of cite journal calls have consensual content. It would be illogical to conclude that there is a consensus to multiply the lack of consensus. Unless we come up with precise and actionable guidelines on how to determine what names must be picked to fill the location and publisher parameter, we'll see thousands of pages suffer edit wars and the same discussion as above (on T&F vs. Routledge vs. Informa etc.). Nemo 07:52, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
You appear to be quite confused. The previous close, and the most likely conclusion in the next one (up to whoever closes it, but it appears to be the most likely outcome), is that there is no consensus for the automated removal of these parameters. At that point CitationBot will be making automated edits against consensus (if the relevant function is not disabled). Which will get it blocked. Which is not unlikely to get its operators sanctioned since that would be an instance of deliberately and knowingly using a bot to edit against consensus. Which is pretty dumb given all the uncontroversial cleanup the bot could be doing, to great benefit for the project, instead of trying to impose the WP:IDONTLIKEIT preference of a small number of editors. Oh, and there is no indescriminate automated addition of these parameters (that was someone's idle speculation) and the "thousands of pages" do not currently "suffer edit wars", mainly due to CITEVAR, except insofar as CitationBot's proponents created such conflict by attempting to impose their preference on them, in violation of CITEVAR. Rule one for making automated edits on Wikipedia is to make darned sure you have consensus for the changes before you begin, and to be humble, responsive, and sensitive to challenges to them afterwards. CitationBot gives every appearance of operating on the complete opposite assumption (echoes of a certain editor using a bot to enforce their idea of NFCC compliance back when dinosaurs roamed; which didn't end well for anyone involved and caused irreparable harm to the collaborative environment along the way. Really. We still see conflicts and bad blood that started there.) --Xover (talk) 09:55, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
It's a bit rich to cite IDONTLIKEIT when the people arguing for removal of these parameters provide solid reasoning and clear examples, whereas those who argue for maintaining this don't get any further than ITSUSEFUL or ILIKEIT and apparently know so little about academic publishing that they think the act of putting a PDF online is what publishing is about... --Randykitty (talk) 10:51, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
Arguing that our stopping some removals means that we think we are wrong or think we have lost is to violate Wikipedia policy against reading minds. Being kind and letting someone get their way from time to time does not mean they are right or that you agree with them. While I find the ITSUSEFUL argument to largely invalid since the information is so often wrong or so generic as to not be useful. Nonetheless, the changes made to the Bot have eliminated the ITSUSEFUL arguement. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 17:02, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
@AManWithNoPlan: Presuming you are replying to my previous message a bit up the page regarding the "mind reading", I see I owe you an apology. In hindsight I realise that what I wrote comes across as not just excessively snide, but also as if I were "daring" you to follow consensus here and that that would "prove" that it had previously happened without consensus. That's the plain and most obvious interpretation of what I wrote: it was clumsy and careless, and for that I apologise. Mea culpa!
Not that it matters much this far after the fact, but the meaning I intended, but failed badly, to convey was simply that "A" would of necessity imply "B" (in a strictly logical sense), and since "B" is a presumably undesired implication, it would be unreasonable to expect anyone to be particularly motivated to do "A" without a compelling reason (i.e. the point was more that it was "too much to ask"). It was not intended to suggest any deficiency in you or anyone else, and you may, of course, also disagree with the very premise that "A implies B". I did, however, hope to see you, or another of CitationBot's proponents, respond to say that such concerns would not have been to the detriment of disabling this function if the assessed consensus here was against it. I still hope that is the case.
As for the rest of your (plural) points, I'm inclined to let you have the last word: the discussion here is now simply running in circles with ever increasing levels of vituperation, and I would very much like to see this end before people start dragging each other to the drama boards for issues unrelated to the matter actully at hand. --Xover (talk) 06:57, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
Nemo said:

It's not about giving total freedom to anyone to add whatever they want to citations unless someone objects on each talk page. Otherwise tomorrow someone can start adding fax, phone number, street address, ZIP code and their library's preferred unique identifier in the "publisher" field on the grounds that it's what they find most useful for the specific citation. Nemo 08:30, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

You joke, but this is actually much more common than you would want to believe; I have fix hundreds of pages and thousands of citations like this by hand. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 17:06, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Replying to AManWithNoPlan's point above: this discussion isn't "irrelevant and pointless" as disambiguating between different journals with the same name is not the only function of specifying the publisher. Sometimes you would want to make it explicit (and link to a wikipedia article about it) if this is information relevant to the reliability of the source, for example, if that publisher is an organisation known for a certain kind of bias. – Uanfala (talk) 21:37, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
If you want to make it explicit, then that's something you mention in prose, not implicitly through referencing. Likewise, if you want to 'warn someone' that the information is sourced to a predatory journal, you do that in prose, or better, you don't cite that predatory journal in the first place. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:56, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
Yes, that's one way to do that. – Uanfala (talk) 22:12, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
It is the only acceptable encyclopedic way to do it. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:24, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Stop automatic removal and Continue to display. I'm late to this discussion and may have overlooked a similar comment among the many above, but I would like to differentiate between the guidance that style guides provide and that which we should adopt for a semi-automated bot. This is relevant in particular when we consider that the bot is removing information from articles on the presumption that it is of no value.
There are a couple of very good reasons for the bot to leave publisher and location alone by default, even though most style guides do not recommend including this data. These reasons are due to the different editing processes between WP and academic journals, and the different audience for each publication. A style guide such as Chicago provides advice for authors writing articles that will be edited to ensure consistent referencing (among many other things), and then published in journals read by specialists in the same field. There's a reasonable presumption that readers will be familiar with all common journals in their field, and that the copy editor will ensure that journal names are listed consistently. In those circumstances, publisher and location are redundant information.
In Wikipedia, we have a far broader audience and pool of editors. There's no reason to think that citations will be referenced consistently; there's no consistent editor ensuring that style is rigorously followed (and going back to the author to supply missing info); and many readers will be entirely unfamiliar with the journals cited for a particular article. As an example, I'd challenge anyone to track down the journal Anatolian Archaeology without knowing that the publisher is the British Institute at Ankara. Since yesterday, a WP user is now able to follow the redirect I created to find out that this journal is now called Heritage Turkey. Prior to that, tracing the two references in Wikipedia that cite Anatolian Archaeology was very difficult without knowing the publisher. Now, if User:Citation bot removes the publisher that's a definite loss of useful information.
I can live with automated deletion of publisher and location if the citation has a persistent reference, such as a DOI. Absent that, I'm sure that the bot is taking a large number of confusing cites that can be tracked down by using publisher and location parameters and rendering them useless. That should be halted and reversed. Rupert Clayton (talk) 01:51, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
That's a lot in line with what I have been saying. Linking the journal's to a Wikipedia page is much better than including publisher/location. It eliminates the need to search. Considering that in your examples, the publisher has changed names, just listing that as text is not that useful. Oscure journal that it is. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 04:42, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
Rupert, challenge accepted: search the name in the most popular catalog in the world, click the first result. Time: 20 seconds. Usefulness of the publisher name: 0. Nemo 13:40, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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