Category:Pages using citations with old-style implicit et al. in editors

This is a tracking category It is used to build and maintain lists of pages—primarily for the sake of the lists themselves. They are not part of the encyclopedia's categorization scheme. More information: This category is hidden on its member pages—unless the corresponding user preference is set. These categories are used to track, build and organize lists of pages needing "attention en masse" (for example, pages using deprecated syntax), or that may need to be edited at someone's earliest convenience. These categories also serve to aggregate members of several lists or sub-categories into a larger, more efficient list (discriminated by classifications).

Administrators: Please do not delete this category even if it is empty! This category may be empty occasionally or even most of the time.

This is a tracking category for citations that use the old-style implicit "et al." when specifying editors.

• Help desk
  |display-editors= suggested (error message hidden by default)

To resolve this error for cited sources with more than four editors, add the remaining editors to the citation or set |display-editors= to 3 or some lesser value to truncate the editor list. If there are exactly four editors, then set |display-editors= to 4 or higher to display all four editors without including "et al."

Prior to the introduction of Lua-based citations, the citation formatting templates were designed to support no more than four editors. Specifically, if four (or more) editor parameters were specified, then the template would display three editor names followed by "et al." to indicate that the list had been truncated. Some editors relied on this behavior to include the "et al." label. For example:

The Lua-based citation templates can accommodate an arbitrarily large number of editors. The Lua-based templates can also explicitly include an "et al." label with the new |display-editors= parameter, a parameter that was not available to the old-style templates.

The old-style templates supported at most four editors. The new Lua-based templates cannot know if Wikipedia editors created citations with exactly four editors because there were only four editors or, because old-style citations were limited to four editors. This error message is reported by citations with exactly four editors but without |display-editors=. To preserve the behavior of old-style citations, Lua-based citations display "et al." in place of the fourth editor.

Pages with this error are automatically placed in Category:Pages using citations with old-style implicit et al. in editors^[a]

While most of the Citation Style 1 and Citation Style 2 error messages are visible to all readers, some remain hidden. Editors who wish to see all of the CS1|2 error messages can do so by updating their common or skin CSS stylesheet to include:

.citation-comment {display: inline !important;} /* show all Citation Style 1 error messages */

Even with this css installed, older pages in Wikipedia‍ '​s cache may not have been updated to show these error messages even though the page is listed in one of the tracking categories. A WP:NULLEDIT will resolve that issue.

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