User:Spencer Bliven/References

Several reference systems are accessible for MediaWiki instances. This page reviews the various options. The best option is to use   wrapped in

Cite Template
Wikipedia uses a collection of templates for citations. There are a large number of variants, (, cite-journal, cite-book, etc), which all ultimately call Template:Citation/core. This complex system is poorly suited to copy to new mediawiki instances due to licensing issues and the large number of templates which would need to be transcluded. However, pages which will eventually live on en:wikipedia will have to eventually use this reference system. So a compatible system is desirable.

WikiCitation
The WikiCitation extension seems to be a reasonable substitute for. It was made by the same author and has the same syntax, yet works as an extension and thus is much easier to maintain. It is licensed under GPL2+, but the license is unimportant since no code is editable in the local wiki.


 * Example:

A full in-text citation, which also appears in the bibliography:.

A short author/year citation, where the main citation is defined in the bibliography section below. A footnote-style reference:.

Cite
An older, more stable extension is Cite.php. It encloses free-form references in tags, which are linked to a section at the end. References are free-form, meaning that changing the style requires changing each individual reference. However, the extension is listed as stable.


 * Example:

Some interesting fact .

Cite with Pubmed
The pubmed extension can format references directly from pubmed. For instance: 20937596. It can be combined with the cite plugin to make a nice bibliography section automatically.

By default, the pubmed plugin is configured to output PLoS-style citations. Several other layouts can be chosen by setting the 'layoutfile' attribute in the pubmed tag. Layouts currently installed are:
 * PLoSCB.def The default
 * PLoSCB_noIssue.def The default, without the journal issue displayed. Use if no issue is set, leading to '' in the output
 * layout_ext.def Green boxy layout
 * layout_ext2.def Slightly better blue boxy layout

Template:Cite pmid
Wikipedia does not have the pubmed extension installed. To fetch citations from PMIDs, wikipedia uses wp:Template:Cite pmid, which generates user-editable citations automatically via a the wp:User:Citation bot. To aid conversion to wikipedia, a Template:Cite pmid wrapper to the Pubmed plugin was created.

Conclusions
WikiCitation looks interesting, but is not yet ready for release. Cite.php lacks features, but is straightforward to use and stable.

Use Cite.php with Template:Cite pmid wherever possible.

Bottom line: Use Cite.php