Last modified: 2011-06-18 10:41:05 UTC
Currently if you type an ISBN it links to the book sources page and gives you a variety of places to find that book. To link to a patent, you use one of the patent templates, which can only link to one place. The official US patent office website has different functionality from, say, Google Patents, and they each have their own major benefits and disadvantages. It would be best if a page like Book Sources was generated automatically from a patent link, too, so you could follow a variety of links. See discussion in link.
I'd rather suggest not creating of the same behavior as ISBN and RFC has (creating links from plaintext). It would be hard to deal with it because od i18n. Rather using of [[Special:Patentsources/<patent number>|patent name]] syntax.
I'm for simplifying syntax whenever possible, so something like [[Patent:<patent number>]] or optional [[Patent:<patent number>|patent name]] would be better. Of course this could be done with templates as long as the magicnumber could be passed to a special page and be filled in. And there are other things besides patents and books that could get this treatment, so consider a more general case at the same time.
And there are patents in many countries besides the US with their own numbering systems.
Seems to be suited to an extension. Trivial implementation, and avoids overloading the parser with new "magic". I'd agree that automatic linking things might be more confusing - "ISBN xxx" is quite clear, and flexible enough, but on the whole, there isn't a consistent, universal abbreviation for a patent. An alternative approach might be a parser function, e.g. {{#patent:x,xxxxxx}}, which is then rendered as a link according to some user preference, but I'm less inclined to endorse something like this, since when looking up this sort of reference, people are going to want to be able to open all available sources. Furthermore, we'd want to provide links to different national directories, e.g UK vs. US, etc.
Created the more general idea in bug 10867
(In reply to comment #4) > but I'm > less inclined to endorse something like this, since when looking up this sort > of reference, people are going to want to be able to open all available > sources. Agreed. I might want to open an old patent in Google to be able to copy and paste their OCRed text, or I might want to open it in USPTO to get their higher-resolution TIFF, etc.
We're currently not planning to add any more such magic behaviors, particularly for something as difficult to nail down as one or another nation's patent system. A template would not be difficult here.
Templates aren't good enough. Various patent templates have existed for a few years, and this request is the result of complaints on their talk pages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:US_patent#Google_Patent_Search http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:US_patent#pat2pdf.org_link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Cite_patent#Combine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Cite_patent#Merge_to_other_template This probably *could* be closed if Bug 10867 were implemented, because it would be covered by the ability to pass MAGICNUMBER to pages besides Booksources, though it would need to be alphanumeric, and maybe need some other processing that ISBNs don't.
