Talk:Mary Catherine Lamb

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Problems with two-part last names in citations

While improving the citations in this article, I ran into a problem that brought me to a halt. One of the sources has the last name "Van Flandern," and when I entered that name as a "ref name" before the citation, I kept getting an error message stating that there were "too many names" in the reference. Thanks to a sudden flash of insight, I condensed the ref name from "Van Flandern" to "VanFlandern," and that solved the immediate problem. (There was no problem entering "Van Flandern" in the actual citation, using the citation template for a magazine article.)

However, this is a glitch in the system and really does need to be fixed! I hate to think how many other people have had the same immensely frustrating experience. BTW, the template section has no wisdom to offer on this issue.

To make sure this comment is as clear as possible, here are the two versions of the reference, first the one that got the error message, then the one that was accepted:

<ref name=Van Flandern>{{citation |last=Van Flandern ... [if I write the entire citation, it doesn't show up here]

<ref name=VanFlandern>{{citation |last=Van Flandern ... [again, I can't enter the entire citation – it incorrectly becomes a citation for this comment]

(This strikes me as yet another glitch...)

Thanks in advance to anyone who can fix this!Ailemadrah (talk) 18:01, 17 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Ailemadrah: Please don't raise a WP:RFC for a help enquiry, this will bring in lots of uninterested people and you would need to wait 30 days for a final result. It's better to either post at WP:HD or put {{helpme}} on your user talk page.

Anyway, see WP:NAMEDREFS: if the ref name contains spaces, it must be quoted, as in <ref name="Van Flandern">...</ref> or <ref name="Van Flandern" />.

Regarding your second question: the simplest way is to use <nowiki>...</nowiki> tags, like this:

<ref name="Van Flandern">{{citation |last=Van Flandern |first=Constance |title="All Together Now" |magazine=Budget Living |date=January 2003 |pages=124-127}}</ref>

There are several other methods of causing non-rendering of markup. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:24, 17 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]