Forum:Citation Needed
I'm looking for some help with regards to adding the citation needed button, in particular the one that says [this is a lie]. Any help would be muchly appreciated. Coutzy 08:33, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
No one will help you here Noob. Now bugger off! [This is a lie] ~
09:32, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
- I think it's {{Cn2}}. --Sir Starnestommy
(Talk • Contribs • CUN • Capt.) 09:43, August 8, 2007 - I recently changed the [citation needed] templates recently (see also Uncyclopedia talk:Accuracy) the [this is a lie] one is actually used as one of the possible options for {{Cn2}} if you want to just [This is a lie] just use this:{{cn3|this is a lie}}--Scott 01:54, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
Policy guidance, please
I see youse doing touch-up work with the Category:Inline templates, which are primarily the {{Cn}} family of templates.[citation needed]
At Wikipedia, where these templates come from, they are inserted to mark a passage as being dubious and lacking a citation (or worse yet, being the hated Original Research). (The template is added by one of the endearing Wikipedians who want to tag someone else's edits as bad, and task yet someone else with doing the actual work to fix it.) Wikipedians being not just work-averse but obsessive-compulsive, they have created a Category:Articles with unsourced statements to enumerate all of these cases.
Uncyclopedia is a humor wiki. This means that, in the usual case where {{Cn}} is used, we might want to imitate Wikipedia, but we never actually want someone to research and add a citation in that spot! Instead, it marks a passage that is particularly crappy, by way of calling the same out to the reader, or makes some other comedy point. Let's pick one, Dominican Republic, where they write: "the women on the island preferred to breed with the Indians and Blacks[citation needed] instead," the joke[citation needed] being, who would prefer Blacks?!
- Because of this, we no more need to enumerate all such articles with Category:Articles with unsourced statements than we would need a Category:Articles that use irony or Category:Articles that have double entendres.
- Some of the uses of {{Cn}} are just bad writing. Writing a doubtful sentence and tagging it[This is doubtful] is beating a joke into the ground, or explaining a joke to the reader, or salvaging a funny sentence that unfortunately came out unfunny.
- The {{Cn}} family now has gotten a dollop of randomness (mentioned in the previous section). As I wrote to Dark Web, White Hat a couple weeks ago, "Author amuses himself by seeing that the article renders differently each time. Reader is not amused at all because he doesn't keep hitting F5 to see what he gets next." {{Cn2}} generates a random phrase within the brackets. Worse, {{Cn}} very occasionally branches to {{Cn2}}, giving editors randomness even if they didn't want it; that is, an editor pranking an editor by burying an Easter Egg in the article that might be noticed years later.
- {{Cn3}} lets the author provide his own text (example above). This might have nothing to do with Citation Needed and should have a name that explains what it does, such as {{BracketedNote}}.
Please discuss, which could lead to updating the templates (followed by a very tedious task of tracking down all the pages that use them), or could lead to revised guidance to editors at HTBFANJS. Spıke 🎙️14:20 22-May-21
- We also have {{citation needed}}, which is static. The difference between this and {{cn}} should probably be documented. I don't have strong feelings about {{cn2}}, but we should keep in mind that the output of RandomSelection is cached for logged-out users (because of Varnish) and is cached by default for everyone in more recent versions (> MW 1.32, so taking effect here after the next upgrade). So the joke of changing on every reload doesn't work that well, as you said. Randomized content is more useful for including a variety of items in a page when each works best separately. Is {{cn2}} one of those cases? Maybe; it parodies [citation needed], [original research?] and such tags more generally. If it's too silly, it could be brought closer to its roots.
- As for the category, no, it's not useful. May be amusing but probably won't be noticed. ❦ Llwy-ar-lawr • talk • contribs • 18:55 22 May 2021