Editing Template:Harvard citation documentation (section)

=== Parenthetical references are deprecated ===

Per [[WP:PAREN]], a certain style of short citations using parentheses, placed ''within the article text itself'', is deprecated on Wikipedia. Several examples were raised and discussed during the [[Special:PermanentLink/976895063#Deprecate parenthetical citations|September 2020 request for comments]]. To summarize the consensus reached there:

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Example !! Consensus
|-
| {{no| The Sun is pretty big. (Miller 2005, p. 1)}} || Formally deprecated; replace with "The Sun is pretty big.{{dummy reference}}"
|-
| {{no| The paper by Eek (2020) showed...}} || Wordy; use "Eek showed...{{dummy reference}}" instead
|-
| {{no| Eek (p. 35) showed...}} || Wordy; use "Eek showed...{{dummy reference}}" instead
|-
| {{no| In 2020, Pelagic et al. found that...}} || Wordy; use "{{dummy link|Pelagic et al. (2020)}} found that..." instead
|-
| {{yes| {{fake link|Smith (2008)}} argued...}} || Acceptable, in contexts where both year and author are encyclopedic information
|-
| {{yes| Smith argued...{{dummy reference}}}} || May be preferable to the above; no consensus
|}

Specifically the {{tl2|harvnb}} or {{tl2|harvtxt}} templates may be used to create the linked author-date in-text citation, as shown in the second-to-last example above.

The deprecation does not apply to short citations in {{tag|ref|o}} tags, so the templates may continue to be used freely in that context.

{{anchor|Additional comments or quotes}}