Is it just me that finds the usage of this template rather irritating? It just seems to be slapped onto technical articles arbitrarily, with no indication of which particular material it's associated with, making it impossible to discern at a later date.

If article material has in fact come from this particular standard, why can't it just be cited in the normal way, like everything else? Oli Filth^(talk) 18:52, 25 December 2007 (UTC)Reply[reply]

For me it is a good warning sign, since this source is old and i.m.o. nonacademic and incomplete, and wiki articles based on it usually are poorly written. However, people might interpret it as some kind of quality guarantee. I suggest that the template somehow should mention the year 1996, to emphasize that this is old stuff. Okay? The template should be removed from articles that are rewritten to a large extent. Mange01 (talk) 23:03, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

I agree, it looks distracting in articles and makes it difficult to check which parts are actually cited from this. I think whereever possible it should be replaced by a normal reference. Since it is public domain in the US and thereby a copyright was deliberately waived (which is not possible in Europe, but is in the US), we have no legal obligation to put it into articles. Many years ago we had a discussion (which I can't find any more) regarding a similar "some stuff incorporated" template and we came to the conclusion that placing it on the talk page (if at all) would serve the same tracking purpose but not add clutter to the article itself. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 11:15, 27 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Far more useful then dropping this template into articles is to add a proper citation at least in a "Further reading" section:

• "REPLACE-THIS-BY-THE-PROPER-ENTRY". Federal Standard 1037C: Telecommunications: Glossary of Telecommunication Terms. General Services Administration. 1996-08-06. Archived from the original on 2022-01-22.
• MIL-STD-188

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 12:16, 27 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

This template is required by the anti-plagiarism guideline: the minimal requirement is to place the template at the top of the references section. In practice, it is far better to label paragraphs (or even sentences) with inline references. In the latter case, you will still want to use this template, because of WP:FREECOPY. Note that this template accepts all parameters accepted by ((citation)), so you can get the same information as above via:

((FS1037C MS188|article=REPLACE-THIS-BY-THE-PROPER-ENTRY |date=1996-08-06 |publisher=[[General Services Administration]]))

→  This article incorporates public domain material from REPLACE-THIS-BY-THE-PROPER-ENTRY. General Services Administration. 1996-08-06. Archived from the original on 2022-01-22. (Federal Standard 1037C in support of MIL-STD-188).

One possibility is to add the date and publisher as defaults to this template if |article= is supplied.

Alternatively, if you find this to be an ugly inline citation, you can use ((source-attribution)) as a suffix to the reference:

((cite book |title=Federal Standard 1037C: Telecommunications: Glossary of Telecommunication Terms |title-link=Federal Standard 1037C |chapter=REPLACE-THIS-BY-THE-PROPER-ENTRY |date=1996-08-06 |publisher=[[General Services Administration]] |chapter-url=https://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/fs-1037/fs-1037c.htm |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220122224547/https://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/fs-1037/fs-1037c.htm |archive-date=2022-01-22)) ((source-attribution))

→ "REPLACE-THIS-BY-THE-PROPER-ENTRY". Federal Standard 1037C: Telecommunications: Glossary of Telecommunication Terms. General Services Administration. 1996-08-06. Archived from the original on 2022-01-22. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.

If editor(s) are going to cleanup many articles and use this suffix form inline, we can can certainly change the template to match it. I would not encourage editors to abandon the template, because then it would be too easy to accidentally lose the required attribution. — hike395 (talk) 14:57, 27 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

To answer some of the original poster's questions (many years too late), the reason this template is used is that in the early days of Wikipedia we imported the text of this Federal standard in its entirety into Wikipedia, creating hundreds of stub articles that contained text straight from the standard. All such articles were tagged to indicate the source. Even though it's public domain, our standards do not allow us to copy from it without attribution (Wikipedia:Plagiarism). --Srleffler (talk) 19:25, 27 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Please have a look at Template_talk:FOLDOC#Readers_don't_care_about_this!. I have it on my todo list to give the same treatment to this template and ((FS1037C)). Does that still look like the right direction to go? ~Kvng (talk) 16:34, 30 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I think that this template will need its own discussion, separate from the FOLDOC one. I am not convinced that a change is appropriate. There are a couple of issues:

• The standard acts as a reference for material that comes from it. Note that at the time when this standard was imported Wikipedia didn't have inline references, and it was perfectly normal to list sources at the end of an article. Before removing the template from an article, an inline reference should be added to any statements that came from the standard.
• Plagiarism is not acceptable. This goes beyond normal referencing and licensing issues. When we copy directly from a source, we must explicitly say so in the article. If literal text from the standard is still in an article, we cannot remove the attribution and even an inline reference is not sufficient to avoid the plagiarism issue.
• It doesn't matter whether readers care about this. It doesn't even really matter whether editors care about this. It is a matter of principle, and a requirement of our guidelines.

--Srleffler (talk) 19:32, 30 December 2023 (UTC)Reply[reply]

I think achieving your first task is a tall order. The second we might be able to address with Earwig. I'll keep any work I would do on this on hold. ~Kvng (talk) 22:55, 3 January 2024 (UTC)Reply[reply]

The link is dead now. Should the archive link maybe be used? FeatherPurple (talk) 16:38, 5 June 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]

This says you can order a CD! Or use the ATIS Telecom Glossary. ~Kvng (talk) 12:44, 8 June 2022 (UTC)Reply[reply]