Template talk:Cite letter

How to cite a letter from an organization?

How am I supposed to cite this letter? The fact that it is from the U.S. Dept. of Education seems much more relevant than that it was written by Dale Rhines, but I don't see any parameter for the author organization. Klortho (talk) 18:57, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

@Klortho: I just updated the template a little, shifting the date into parentheses like the other Citation Style 1 templates (which are named "Cite X", so this one appears it should be in that style) and I added a |publisher= for the originating organization, corporation or agency. I would then cite your example as:

• Rhines, Dale (September 25, 2012). "OCR Complaint No. 11-12-1503 Notification/Partial Dismissal Letter" (PDF). Letter to Martina Hone and Charisse Espy Glassman. United States Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights. Retrieved July 17, 2014.

I also added that ability to indicate the format of a linked copy of a letter. I hope that helps. Imzadi 1979 → 02:47, 18 July 2014 (UTC)

How to cite a letter to a journal

How should I cite a letter to a journal (or to its editor)? I'd like to publish a letter written to the "Technical Correspondence" section of Communications of the ACM. However, this template doesn't support parameters such as journal, volume, issue and doi. Should I use {{cite journal}} instead? EdwardH (talk) 16:44, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

What if there's no subject?

A lot of letters have no subject or title, just a salutation. This template would work better if it accounted for that. Ibadibam (talk) 21:41, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

I encounter the same issue. Say for example this letter from Alexander Hamilton to Elias Boudinot from 5 July 1778 on Founders.archives.gov:

From Alexander Hamilton to Elias Boudinot, [5 July 1778]

I would say that most of the letters on Founders.archives.gov if not all of them do not have any particular subject, but it is still the case that there are valid URLs for them. (I just saw also that as they say one ought to use the permalink URL rather than the search URL as that might later on be incorrect)

Jjjjjjjjjj (talk) 22:09, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

What I just did in this edit was to do a preview to get the basic formatting via {{cite letter}}, and then copy that and do it manually. As is done in the first example in Help:Footnotes#Footnotes:_the_basics there's no specific requirement to use a template, so that could be seen as just being a sort of convenience.

Jjjjjjjjjj (talk) 22:59, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

Raising this topic from the dead to say that subject should not be a mandatory parameter for the reasons described above, namely that many (most?) correspondences don't have formal subject lines.

I worked around this by adding a non-breaking space ("& nbsp;" without the space) in the middle, but it looks goofy. Stephen Hui (talk) 04:55, 29 May 2022 (UTC)

Redundancy

One of the examples renders as:

Anduze, Harry (February 28, 1995). "RE: P. de la C. 1422". Letter to Leo Díaz.

Do we need the redundancy in "(Letter). Letter to..."? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 23:58, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

The obvious fix for this is to remove |type=Letter.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 11:35, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

use template wrapper

There is an upcoming change in Module:Citation/CS1 that will cause this template to emit an error message because it uses {{cite news}}, a periodical template. The message will look like this (example from the ~/doc page rewritten to directly call the sandbox version of {{cite news}}):

{{cite news/new
| first = Harry
| last = Anduze
| others = Letter to Leo Díaz
| title = RE: P. de la C. 1422
| date = {{date|1995-02-28|mdy}}
}}

Anduze, Harry (February 28, 1995). "RE: P. de la C. 1422". Letter to Leo Díaz.

The error message above arises because periodical citations ({{cite journal}}, {{cite magazine}}, {{cite news}}, {{cite web}}), should name the periodical that holds the 'article' so that readers can locate it.

In this template's sandbox, I have rewritten the template to use Module:template wrapper and to use {{cite press release}} to do the rendering. This is not a perfect solution (neither was the {{cite news}} version) but it renders correctly visually and the metadata aren't too screwed up (any |work= alias is omitted from the metadata).

{{cite letter/sandbox
| first = Harry
| last = Anduze
| recipient = Leo Díaz
| subject = RE: P. de la C. 1422
| date = {{date|1995-02-28|mdy}}
}}

Anduze, Harry (February 28, 1995). "RE: P. de la C. 1422". Letter to Leo Díaz.

Without objection, I shall update the live template to use this sandbox version.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:09, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

Updated, since there were no objections. Feel free to correct my changes if something is still not right. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:01, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

Example appears to be broken

The first line currently reads: ". Letter to. Missing or empty |title= (help)". I've retained the strange punctuation. Not sure why no title breaks it as it's not listed as required but whatever.Kylesenior (talk) 05:16, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

To editor Kylesenior: not sure what edit you would like to make to this template. The punctuation becomes correct when the template's parameters are filled out correctly. The |title= parameter is tied to the |subject= parameter, which is required. So if the subject is missing, then the title-error message occurs. Editors hopefully preview their edits before saving, and this title error will show up on preview if the subject has not been entered. Example:

{{cite letter
| first = Harry
| last = Anduze
| recipient = Leo Díaz
| subject = 
| date = {{date|1995-02-28|mdy}}
}}

will display as:

Anduze, Harry (February 28, 1995). Letter to Leo Díaz. {{cite press release}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

Hope this helps. P.I. Ellsworth - ed. ^put'r there 07:18, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

I was addressing the example provided at the top of the template page, which is broken and does not display. See here: https://i.imgur.com/puBNxix.png Kylesenior (talk) 08:02, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Template examples at the top of template pages frequently show the bare template result ("bare" means without filled-in parameters), so you can expect to see this again. Once the template is actually used on a page and the parameters are filled in correctly, there are no error messages as shown in the examples that appear in the documentation. P.I. Ellsworth - ed. ^put'r there 08:09, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Since the title-error message is confusing, the template has been enclosed in "includeonly" tags, which just means that the template will appear where it is used, but it won't appear at the top of the template page. That appears to be the norm for "Cite ..." templates. P.I. Ellsworth - ed. ^put'r there 09:05, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Placed a little blurb about this at Help:CS1 errors#Citation without a title of any form. P.I. Ellsworth - ed. ^put'r there 08:09, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Note that my addition turned out to be confusing and so it was reverted. Better to have noted this in this template's documentation, as has been done in the Parameters section. P.I. Ellsworth - ed. ^put'r there 11:48, 24 October 2021 (UTC)