Cannot figure out what I am doing incorrectly on my ref tags on spouse

Question

Can anyone advise me on what I am doing incorrectly that I keep getting cite errors on this? On his wife's profile, the information on Bracken Lewis DAVIS keeps coming up like this:

Bracken Lewis DAVIS was born about 11 September 1838 in Kentucky.^[2] and died on 1 December 1921 in Johnson County, Kentucky.Cite error 2; Invalid <ref> tag; refs with no content must have a name He was the son of Elias DAVIS and Elizabeth CURTIS. His death certificate stated that he was buried in Wheeler Cemetery.Cite error 2; Invalid <ref> tag; refs with no content must have a name

when the code on the file edit is this:

Bracken Lewis DAVIS was born about 11 September 1838 in Kentucky.<ref name=”Bracken L. Davis, 1921”>"Kentucky Death Records, 1911-1963," database, <i>FamilySearch</i> (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:NS2Z-XZN : 20 October 2016), Bracken L. Davis, 1921; citing , Johnson, Kentucky, United States, Office of Vital Statistics, Frankfort; FHL microfilm 1,943,361.</ref> and died on 1 December 1921 in Johnson County, Kentucky.<ref name=”Bracken L. Davis, 1921” /> He was the son of [[Davis-37796 | Elias DAVIS]] and [[Curtis-6215 | Elizabeth CURTIS]]. His death certificate stated that he was buried in Wheeler Cemetery.<ref name=”Bracken L. Davis, 1921” />

I cannot figure out what I am doing incorrectly on the 2nd and 3rd citation of the same source as his death record that it keeps coming up with this error. Please advise if you can figure out what I am doing incorrectly. I need to fix this before I can add it to his own profile edit.

Answer 1

Hi Jeanne, 

I went through and changed your ” to  ".  This seems to have fixed it.

Comments

ha... I didn't even notice that.

yes, those special Microsoft "curly quotes" are different characters altogether (and causes code to fail)

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May I say your eyesight is fantastic?

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Thanks Dina. That is a hard one to catch, but I see it occasionally. :)

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Thanks for Best Answer Dennis

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Ty, yeah I took my paragraph from microsoft word because I have been redoing my files and sometimes my computer decides to not like the internet so I was typing them up first before I went to wikitree to edit the file so I wouldn't loose most of my data. Believe me it has happened once or twice so I learned my lesson. Now I guess I'm going to have to watch this in the future.

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I work with Notepad for that reason Jeanne. If you want to still work in word copy it all when you're done, paste into Notepad, and then cut and paste into the profile. It will take out any hidden characters etc.

Answer 2

I don't think you can have spaces or punctuation in the <ref> name.  I would change it to <ref name=BDavis1921>

You also cannot start with a number, but you can have numbers after a letter.

Comments

according to the source page i have to have the " " around the name to cite it like this. I took out the . and , and it gave me a different error message. ugh!

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which source page is telling you that you have to have quotes? That page is probably wrong and needs to be updated.

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https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Help:Sources on wikitree. I think without the quotes it gives me another error, but someone else figured out what was wrong. Some glitch between microsoft program and when you copy it gives you a different character for the " "s

Answer 3

apparently we have a new syntax checker, and it doesn't like quotes around the reference name value -- which otherwise, should be legal, actually.

but, of course, without the quotes, you can't have spaces in the value either.

remove all the spaces (and probably the punctuation too), and the quotes, and you should be fine.

technically, probably a bug in our syntax checker.