Question

What Is - 864 almost empty tag report - removed invalid tags. Apparently I’m doing something wrong, about ten times.

Comments

At least I’m not the only one who got at least ten messages in a row. So I changed my home page for awhile.

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One thing it flags is if, say, you have some text that says

In the Encyclopedia of Frog Giggers, Aloysius Smith is said to have been born in Tasmania.<ref>p. 2</ref> His son Aloysius Jr. was the foremost frog gigger of his time and was elected a Renter Warden of the Worshipful Company of Frog Giggers in 1843.<ref>p. 10</ref>

<references />
* Foggybottom, Q.Z., Encyclopedia of Frog Giggers, New York: Stochastic House, 1976.

So it's not like it just senses white space - there's some minimum number of characters required to keep it from being a "bad reference."

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The help file says 9.  I think the plan is to increase it.

There are 70,000 of these.  A lot of them are fine.  On the other hand, a lot of them are junk.

Many people are trying to use ref tags where they really aren't needed, and they'd have been better off not bothering.  Probably they should be classed as an advanced feature.

The other problem is to get the data doctors to leave them alone where they don't need fixing.  Instead of which, they'll just get the message "Short footnotes are WRONG" and mess up a lot of perfectly good profiles.

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Agreed. And ten times seems a bit excessive.

Answer 1

If you use the <ref> and </ref> tags for inline citations, then you need to put an actual source citation between the tags. If you leave it empty between the two tags, or if you put something too short, or if you put some word that the system is set to reject as a valid source, then you'll get that error message. This is a good clue for you to go to those profiles where you have errors and fill in the missing or too-short source citations.

Answer 2

<ref> tags were misnamed by the MediaWiki people.  Their job is to create footnotes.  Footnotes are just footnotes.  They don't have to be source citations.

Footnotes are an alternative to brackets.  Many things you could put in brackets are candidates for a footnote.  "Yuck!" might be a perfectly good footnote, and sometimes appropriate.

Answer 3

Hi, Ellen,

Please read Help: Sources to understand how to format sources so that they are useful to other genealogists and how to use reference tags properly. 

A quick glance at a couple of your problem profiles shows several issues.

Hope that helps!

Comments

Thanks everyone.  Can’t help wishing some of the data doctors would do something about all the gedcom profiles that are devoid of content.