Template:Blockquote/doc

Usage
adds a block quotation to an article page.

This is easier to type and is more wiki-like than the equivalent HTML  tags, and has additional pre-formatted attribution parameters for author and source.

Note: Block quotes do normally contain quotation marks.

Synopsis

 * Basic use::

Parameters
text a.k.a. 1—The material being quoted, without quotation marks around it. It is always safest to name this parameter (rather than use an unnamed positional parameter), because, otherwise, any inclusion of a non-escaped "=" character (e.g., in a URL in a source citation) will break the template.

author a.k.a. 2—Author/speaker attribution information that will appear below the quotation, and preceded with an attribution dash.

title a.k.a. 3—Title of the work the quote appears in. This parameter immediately follows the output of author (and an auto-generated comma), if one is provided. It does not auto-italicize. Major works (books, plays, albums, feature films, etc.) should be italicized; minor works (articles, chapters, poems, songs, TV episodes, etc.) go in quotation marks. Secondary citation information can be provided in a fourth parameter, source, below, which will appear after the title.

source a.k.a. 4—Can optionally be used for additional source information, after title, like so: "The Aerodynamics of Shaved Weasels"Perspectives on Mammal Barbering, 2016; a comma will be auto-generated between the two parameters. If source is used without title, it simply acts as title. (This parameter was added primarily to ease conversion from misuse of the pull quote template for block quotation, but it may aid in cleaner meta-data implementation later.)

character a.k.a. char—to attribute fictional speech to a fictional character, other citation information. Can also be used to attribute real speech to a specific speaker among many, e.g. in a roundtable/panel transcript, a band interview, etc. This parameter outputs "[Character's name], in" after the attribution dash and before the output of the parameters above, thus one or more of those parameters must also be supplied. If you need to cite a fictional speaker in an article about a single work of fiction, where repeating the author and title information would be redundant, you can just use the author parameter instead of character.

Technically, all citation information can be given in a single parameter, as in: But this is a bit messy, and will impede later efforts to generate metadata from quotation citations the way we are already doing with source citations. This is much more usable: Later development can assign a CSS  and so forth to these separate parameters, upon which scripts would be able to operate (e.g. to look up things in WikiQuote).

multiline—some of the issues with the formatting of quotes with line breaks can be fixed by using y (see the line breaks section for other options).

style—allows specifying additional CSS styles (not classes) to apply to the  element. For example, when putting a quotation inside a quotation, use  on the inner quotations so that the text doesn't get unreadably small or (on mobile) too large for the screen.

Reference citations
A reference citation can be placed:  In the regular-prose introduction to the quotation:  At the end of the quotation, when a quotation is given without author or source (e.g. because the material before the quote makes it clear who is being quoted):  After the quoted person's name, in author, when a source is not being added:  After the source title, in source (the preferred location when both attribution parameters are present):  

Please do not place the citation in a author or source parameter by itself, as it will produce a nonsensical attribution line that looks like: —&#8239; Please also do not put it just outside the template, as this will cause a: on a line by itself.

Style
Styling is applied through CSS rules in MediaWiki:Common.css. HTML:

Limitations
If you do not provide text, the template generates a parser error message, which will appear in red text in the rendered page.

If any parameter's actual value contains an equals sign, you must use a named parameter (e.g. "E=MC2" is a formula everyone knows but few understand, not a blank-name positional parameter. The text before the equals sign gets misinterpreted as a named parameter otherwise. Be wary of URLs, which frequently contain this character. Named parameters are always safer, in this an other templates.

If any parameter's actual value contains characters used for wiki markup syntax (such as pipe, brackets, single quotation marks, etc.), you may need to escape it. See Template:! and friends.

Put a break (newline) after the template, or the next blank line might be ignored.

Preserving line breaks and spacing from the original
Use  around material, such as poems and interlinear glosses, that require that whitespace formatting be preserve as in the original. Due to limitations of how MediaWiki parses wikimarkup and HTML, attempts to do this by just inserting blank lines and extra spaces will not work. This is true of all block elements, not just block quotations.

Next to right-floated boxes
, the text of a block quotation may rarely overflow (in Firefox or other Gecko browsers) a right-floated item (e.g. a box, when that item is below another right-floated item of a fixed size that is narrower. In Safari and other Webkit browsers (and even more rarely in Chrome/Chromium) the same condition can cause the block quotation to be pushed downward.  Both of these problems can be fixed by either: There may be other solutions, and future browser upgrades may eliminate the issue. It arises at all because of the   CSS declaration in Mediawiki:Common.css, which itself works around other, more common display problems. A solution that fixes  of the issues is unknown at this time.
 * 1) removing the sizing on the upper item and letting it use its default size (e.g. removing   sizing or upright from a right-floated image above a wider right-floated object that is being overflowed by quotation text; or
 * 2) using overflow:inherit; in the quotation template.

Vanishing quotes
In rare layout cases, e.g. when quotes are sandwiched between userboxes, a quotation may appear blanked out, in some browsers. The workaround for this problem is to add overflow:inherit; to such an instance of the template.

Nested quotations
The <blockquote ></blockquote> element has styles that change the font size: on desktop, text is smaller; on mobile, it's larger. This change is relative to the enclosing context, meaning that, if you quote from a source that itself uses a block quotation, you'll find that the inner quotation is either really tiny and hard to read, or really large and barely fits on the screen. Additionally, on mobile, you'll get an extra pair of oversize quotation marks. To fix both these issues, add the parameter  on each of the inner quote templates.

TemplateData
{	"description": "Adds a block quotation.", "params": { "text": { "label": "text", "description": "The text to quote", "type": "content", "required": true, "aliases": [ "1",				"quote" ],			"example": "Cry \"Havoc\" and let slip the dogs of war." },		"sign": { "label": "sign", "description": "The person being quoted", "type": "content", "required": false, "aliases": [ "2",				"cite", "author" ],			"example": "William Shakespeare", "suggested": true },		"source": { "label": "source", "description": "A source for the quote", "type": "content", "required": false, "aliases": [ "3"			],			"example": "Julius Caesar, act III, scene I", "suggested": true }	} }

Errors
Pages where this template is not used correctly populate Category:Pages incorrectly using the quote template. The category tracks tranclusions of Template:Quote that have no text given for quotation or use an equals sign in the argument of an unnamed parameter. It also tracks usage of class, id, diff, 4, or 5.

Known problems
This template sets a text style which might ignore one blank line, and so the template must be ended with a break (newline). Otherwise, beware inline, as: More text here spans a blank line
 * text here "this is quoted"

Unless a "xx" is ended with a line break, then the next blank line might be ignored and two paragraphs joined.