Talk:Mary Catherine Lamb

	Biography portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
	This article is supported by the arts and entertainment work group (assessed as Low-importance).

Oregon Low‑importance

	Oregon portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Oregon, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the U.S. state of Oregon on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.OregonWikipedia:WikiProject OregonTemplate:WikiProject OregonOregon articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.
The current collaborations of the month are Women's History Month: Create or improve articles for women listed at Oregon Women of Achievement (modern) or Women of the West, Oregon chapter (historical).

Women artists

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Women artists, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of women artists on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.Women artistsWikipedia:WikiProject Women artistsTemplate:WikiProject Women artistsWomen artists articles

Problems with two-part last names in citations[edit]

While improving the citations in this article, I ran into a problem that brought me to a halt. One of the sources has the last name "Van Flandern," and when I entered that name as a "ref name" before the citation, I kept getting an error message stating that there were "too many names" in the reference. Thanks to a sudden flash of insight, I condensed the ref name from "Van Flandern" to "VanFlandern," and that solved the immediate problem. (There was no problem entering "Van Flandern" in the actual citation, using the citation template for a magazine article.)

However, this is a glitch in the system and really does need to be fixed! I hate to think how many other people have had the same immensely frustrating experience. BTW, the template section has no wisdom to offer on this issue.

To make sure this comment is as clear as possible, here are the two versions of the reference, first the one that got the error message, then the one that was accepted:

<ref name=Van Flandern>{{citation |last=Van Flandern ... [if I write the entire citation, it doesn't show up here]

<ref name=VanFlandern>{{citation |last=Van Flandern ... [again, I can't enter the entire citation – it incorrectly becomes a citation for this comment]

(This strikes me as yet another glitch...)

Thanks in advance to anyone who can fix this!Ailemadrah (talk) 18:01, 17 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Ailemadrah: Please don't raise a WP:RFC for a help enquiry, this will bring in lots of uninterested people and you would need to wait 30 days for a final result. It's better to either post at WP:HD or put {{helpme}} on your user talk page.

Anyway, see WP:NAMEDREFS: if the ref name contains spaces, it must be quoted, as in <ref name="Van Flandern">...</ref> or <ref name="Van Flandern" />.

Regarding your second question: the simplest way is to use <nowiki>...</nowiki> tags, like this:

<ref name="Van Flandern">{{citation |last=Van Flandern |first=Constance |title="All Together Now" |magazine=Budget Living |date=January 2003 |pages=124-127}}</ref>

There are several other methods of causing non-rendering of markup. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:24, 17 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]