Template:COinS safe
 | This template is safe for use in citation templates that produce COinS metadata; see Wikipedia:COinS. If HTML or other markup is added, then the template must be reevaluated. |
Description
It is to indicate whether it can be safely used in citation templates. By default, it indicates the template is safe for use.
When the template is set as "not safe", the page is placed into Category:Templates not safe for use in citation templates.
Usage
To indicate a template which can be safely used in citation templates: {{COinS safe}}
To indicate a template that should NOT be used in citation templates: {{COinS safe|n}}
To add extra info after the standard message: |addtext=
Examples
| Code | Result | ||
|---|---|---|---|
{{COinS safe}} |
| ||
{{COinS safe|n}} |
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{{COinS safe|addtext=Here is the extra info.}} |
| ||
{{COinS safe|n|addtext=Here is the extra info.}} |
|
Explain COinS issues
Citation templates such as Citation Style 1 and Citation Style 2 generate COinS metadata. If a template is used in a citation template field, then it may inject HTML into the metadata.
Compare the rendered HTML for {{cite book}} with |author= using no template and using {{smallcaps}}.
The author metadata is in the rft.aulast field. In this case, it is percent-encoded and is rendered as <span class="smallcaps" style="font-variant:small-caps;">Sam Drucker</span>
Reference management software will interpret the entire span as the author name.