Bq

Example indented content. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Template documentation

Usage

This template is to help facilitate the indentation of blocks of content (quotations, computer source code, etc.) with the semantically correct <blockquote>...</blockquote> element, which can also be further styled and given metadata. This method is often preferred to using wikimarkup's ";" indentation (actually an abuse of <dt>...</dt> code), and other means that can cause problems or which are complicated and error-prone, and for accessibility, content/presentation separation, Semantic Web, and metadata reasons; [X]HTML's <blockquote>...</blockquote> element has semantic meaning, while many tricks for indenting do not, or even have incorrect semantics.

Example:

{{bq|1={{lorem}}}}

which renders as:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

compare to the longwinded <blockquote>{{lorem}}</blockquote> markup:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Note that this example makes use of the "lorem" template-- if you wish to use other text in your own quote (which you almost certainly will) you should not enclose that quote in pairs of template brackets. Doing so will produce a template error and your text will appear in red.

Parameters

• |text= or |quote= or |1= (required) the content of the indented block; it is always safest to specify this parameter explicitly, as it will otherwise break if the content ever contains the "=" character, and can also fail under other technical circumstances.
• |class= an additional CSS class; it already uses templatequote by default.
• |id= an identifier, which can be used as a link target or for other purposes, e.g. custom user scripts; it must begin with a letter, not a number or symbol, and be unique on a page.
• |style= inline CSS directives for custom styling, like background color.
• |title= metadata that indicates a title or label for the element; different browsers handle this differently, most often as a pop-up "tooltip" on mouseover.

Cited quotations

For use with cited quotations, {{bq}} supports the sourcing parameters (and their aliases) of the older and simpler {{quote}} templates and the frequently abused {{cquote}}, so {{bq}} can be used as a drop-in replacement for them that provides the above additional features. Conversion from several other templates, including {{quote box}} and {{quotation}}, even {{talkquote}}, is trivially easy. Converting from {{rquote}} requires deletion of its first parameter, which is always left or right and then the rest of its data will just work without modification. Such conversions of course lose features (decoration, etc.) of many of those templates, but sometimes that is precisely what is desired.

• |2= or |sign= or |cite= or |author= or |by= author/speaker of the quotation; this is free-form text and can including a link to the author's article.
• |3= or |source= or |ts= source from which the quotation is drawn; this is free-form text and can including links, styling, etc.; if converting from {{quote box}}, the author would also be included in |source=, but should really be moved manually to the above parameter.
• |4= or |diff= optionally, you can divide the citation up further, e.g. |2=Lastname, Firstname|3="Article Title"|4=Book Title, but this is not really necessary, and is mainly to make conversion from {{quotation}} a little easier. Parameter 4 is automatically italicized, since it is only used for larger works like books, albums, magazines, or TV shows. It also maps to |diff= for conversion of {{talkquote}}.

Examples:

{{bq |text={{Lorem}} |sign=Anne O. Nymus |source=''<cite>The Unlightable Being of Bareness</cite>'', 1992, p. 37}}

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

—Anne O. Nymus, The Unlightable Being of Bareness, 1992, p. 37

{{bq |1={{Lorem}} |2=Anne O. Nymus |3=1992, "Introduction", pp. vii–ix |4=The Unlightable Being of Bareness}}

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

—Anne O. Nymus, 1992, "Introduction", pp. vii–ix, The Unlightable Being of Bareness

Working around display problems

Lists and other complexities

Complex markup may require a simple trick to work around a longstanding MediaWiki bug; this is the inclusion of the code <nowiki /> immediately after the |1= (or |text= if the content following the = begins with a linebreak:

This fails:	{{bq|1= *Foo *Bar *Baz }}		as:	Foo Bar Baz
This works properly:	{{bq|1=<nowiki /> *Foo *Bar *Baz }}		as:	Foo Bar Baz

This tweak unfortunately cannot be put into the template code itself, as the nowiki markup doesn't pass through the transclusion process.

Multiple paragraphs

Due to the utterly intractable MediaWiki bug reported at Bugzilla: 6200 , and still unfixed as of February 2012, block quoting on Wikipedia, with or without a template, cannot handle freeform linebreaking for paragraphs and poems and the like, unless formatted one very specific (and annoying) way. It's not a problem of blockquote templates, but all uses of <blockquote>.

As of February 2012, the only solution for the problem is to use unbroken markup with <p>...</p> or <br /> elements (or others, like nested blockquotes and lists):

{{bq|Line 1<br/>Line 2<br/>Line 3<br/>Line 4.}}

which, while hard to read, especially for long content, results in the expected:

Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4.

And it does work with wikimarkup ":" indentation, unlike the failed test cases above:

Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4.

Happily, there is an HTML-comment workaround for readability that lets you do whatever you want:

{{Bq|1=<!--

-->Line 1<br/><!--
-->Line 2<br/><!--
-->Line 3<br/><!--
-->Line 4.}}

or even:

{{Bq|1=<!--

-->Line 1<br/><!--

-->Line 2<br/><!--

-->Line 3<br/><!--

-->Line 4.}}

which results in the expected:

Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4.

They are indentable:

Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Line 4.