Template:UN document/doc

Usage

This Citation Template Structure is to be used for referring to UN documents from a Wikipedia article. Detailed instructions are available on WP:CITE#HOW. But for a very brief introduction by way of an example, see the Water for Life Decade page and click on "edit" to see the source text. In it you should find:

 <ref name="UN_ARES58217_page2">{{UN document |docid=A-RES-58-217 |
    type=Resolution |body=General Assembly |session=58 | resolution_number=217|
    highlight=rect_190,300_813,350 |page=2 |accessdate=2007-11-13|
    date=[[23 December]] [[2003]]}}</ref>

This is a generic representation of the document containing its official symbol, a page number, several parameters such as session number, type, and finally a highlighting to bring the readers attention to a specific part of the page. The <ref> part causes it to appear as a footnote.

At the moment, for technical reasons, these links redirect through a webpage called www.undemocracy.com. When the United Nations webpage becomes able to serve these essential deep links itself, then all wikipedia links can be moved to point to their proper place.

For an explanation of the format of the docid (known as the document symbol), see United Nations Document Codes.

Parameters

Some of these values are mutually redundant, but alternatives are necessary.

• docid: Document code (e.g. A-58-PV.12)
• anchor: a pointer of form pg(pageno)-bk(blockno)-pa(paragraphno)
• body: General Assembly, Security Council
• type: Presidential Statement, Resolution, Verbatim Report
• session: session number (e.g. 58)
• meeting: meeting number (e.g. 12) (when type=Verbatim Report)
• resolutionnumber: (when type=Resolution)
• title: title of section or document being referenced
• page: pagenumber
• highlight: overlays a shaded rectangle over a page
• date: date of publication (the one on the document)
• meetingtime: time of meeting (sometimes several happen on one day)
• speakername: name of the speaker whose speech is being referred to
• speakernation: nation of the speaker whose speech is being referred to
• accessdate: date of access
• language: defaults to English

A page of codes is at http://www.library.yorku.ca/ccm/ScottReference/govpubs/guides/unindex.htm

For reasons best known to itself, the UN site does not support links on their website that go directly to these documents. For now everything is factored through http://www.undemocracy.com

It's possible to decode it into English without reference to all the fields, but it will require http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/StringFunctions to be installed.

You can get to the documents through http://documents.un.org/simple.asp or through http://www.undemocracy.org

Best practice

If you are viewing a document on the [1] site and you want to reference it in a wikipedia article, it is recommended that you find the line at the top of a holding page which says:

wiki [(some greyed text here)]

and cut and paste from the text box. This will give provide a citation to the document in a correct form for use by this template.

If you are reading transcripts of a speech, then you can click on the

[link to here]

box to the side of the text and be presented with a similar text box as above from which to cut and paste the fully formed template citation.

Every official United Nations document has a unique ID. An outline of the coding system is at United Nations Document Codes.