Template talk:Crossreference

SMcCandlish, why would uses of this template to link other article material be considered unprintworthy Wikipedia self-references? What I read from Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Self-references to avoid is that articles should not say, "For more information, see the Wikipedia article on Foo." But it should be fine to use, "See also Foo." The MOS page (probably updated later than the template documentation) actually recommends using this template for these permissible cases, which are not considered self-references. --Paul_012 (talk) 17:50, 19 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

They are self-references. Saying "permissible cases, which are not considered self-references" is confused; there are permissible self-references and not-permissible ones; being a permissible selfref doesn't make it a non-selfref, and being a permissible one doesn't make it printworthy. For WP:REUSE reasons, every article's content should make sense as a stand-alone piece. This is why disambiguation hatnotes, templates like {{main}}, navbars, categories, GA/FA badges, protection notices, cleanup/dispute templates, etc., are all unprintworthy (explicitly or by cascade). If you generate a printed version of the article (through our feature for that, not just from doing File > Print from your browser) these features should not appear in the end result (unless you force them to by turning off "Hide interface elements"). When you do "See also [[Foo]]" in an article, that is a reference to other content somewhere else that is not part of the article content and which will not make sense or be usable if the article content is reused in some other context, like as part of a book chapter. By contrast, a "See [[#FOO|FOO]], below" is in the same article's content and is printworthy, and this is why this template supports |selfref=n AKA |printworthy=y AKA |unprintworthy=n. I'm glad you raised this question, though. I had not looked at the "Print/export: Print page" output in a long time, and I can see something right up top – the "(Wikidata · Import · Edit and import)" stuff that's part of the short description output – that has been improperly made printworthy but should not be.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:30, 19 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the clarification and explanation. But doesn't that mean all "See also" foot sections, and, come to think of it, any use of wikilinks, for that matter, would also be unprintworthy, since they link elsewhere outside of the article? Wikilinks are obviously underlined by the print function, and it was my understanding that this is analogous to book encyclopedias, where cross-references are often made to other entries, so they're considered printworthy. I don't quite see why "See also Foo" should be treated differently from a simple wikilink to "Foo", in terms of printability. --Paul_012 (talk) 20:00, 19 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

You're still making a confusing argument. "Printworthy" is a WP concept that has only to do with generating paper or other non-WP output from our article material. Cross-referencing in other, print-based encyclopedias doesn't relate in any way to our concept of printworthiness. WP printworthiness is about display of a span, div, or other element (does it appear at all, or is it suppressed?) in particular use cases. If someone wanted to fine-tune their reuse of our content, they would need to do additional style-related work (e.g. suppressing underlines, removing text coloration, etc.). That is, we don't seem to be doing everything possible on our end to "scrub" content for reuse; we're only doing what we've gotten around to doing so far, if I may be tautological about it. The entire class of hatnote templates, including ones we use more for footnotes (like {{Further}}) are unprintworthy, as trans-article cross-references; they're all produced by the template/module for hatnotes, which uses the hatnote class, one of several for unprintworthiness. As for "See also" as a section, it probably should be treated as unprintworthy, but I don't know if we have code in place doing this already. It probably could be done, since that is one of the few sections with an invariant name (the other being "Further reading", which properly should have complete enough references they could be of use to a paper [or otherwise off-site] reader, and so is arguably printworthy). Like everything else on WP, the printworthiness systemics are something built over time and probably perpetually incomplete.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:29, 20 May 2020 (UTC)Reply

Parentheses already offset the note from the text, and the additional italics are unnecessary and distracting. Upright text is better for readers for asides in running text. (Hatnotes at the top of a section are entirely typographically distinct – there the point of italicizing and indenting is to make it clear that the hatnote itself is not the start of the text of the section; I think whoever made this template got confused about the relation between hatnotes and inline asides.)

The existence of a template like this is unfortunate because it convinces some editors that every bit of "see X article" text site-wide must be wrapped in the template, and they end up making unhelpful bot-like changes to articles where the prevailing non-italic style was already fine, contra WP:STYLEVAR.

I'd recommend removing the italics from this template (or making them optional with the default set to plain upright text). If that seems impossible, I'd strongly recommend that nobody should use this italicizing template on existing articles, I'd moderately recommend against using it on new or rewritten articles (though I'll leave that to authors' discretion), and suggest offering an alternative wrapper template that doesn't italicize if people are going to insist on having some kind of template involved. (Though frankly including a template doesn't seem necessary; plain wikitext works fine.) –jacobolus (t) 18:42, 27 July 2026 (UTC)Reply

You'll have to take this up with the guidance at MOS:CROSSREF, which specifically says to use this formatting. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:52, 27 July 2026 (UTC)Reply

I started a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style § Italicization of self-refs, redux. –jacobolus (t) 21:56, 27 July 2026 (UTC)Reply