Template talk:Google Books URL

Jumping to page doesn't work any more, use phrase

For several months now jumping to a page by number in Google books doesn't work. The page may be available, but can't be jumped to as far as I know. If a suitable unique phrase is found on the page, jump to it with dq=. Pol098 (talk) 22:07, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

This is a terrible idea

Doing this inside citations is not even slightly helpful. All that does is greatly impede the ability of editors to fact-check our articles, while at the time time increasing the template/transclusion count and parser load on the page.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:22, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Actually, I've nominated this for deletion.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:31, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish the result of the deletion discussion was "no consensus". However, we still need to discuss whether to employ it in the `|url=` parameter of a citation template. Kpratter (talk) 09:18, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

To quote GreenC: "English wiki has 1,974,794 Google Books links ie. the template is used in 0.00217 or two-tenths of 1 percent." So there is clearly not a consensus to widely deploy this template. I've laid out some reasons to not use this in citation templates, the main one being that it obfuscates the URL in the source view and thus makes source verification by editors more difficult. It also makes entry more difficult, and does nothing useful for the reader (in the rendered page they see the same sort of clickable link). It also increases the template/transclusion count and parser load on the page (which may be an issue at longer and more complex articles), for no clear gain. One of the more common comments at the TfD (which should have been run longer instead of closed as "no consensus") is that this template is simply rendundant with {{Google books|plainurl=yes}}. But this entire template's purpose can simply be replaced by a URL-checking and -cleanup bot.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:12, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

Furthermore all the tools and bots are not programmed to support this template so it won't get proper maintenance, such as check and fixing link rot (yes GB has it). Citation bot is designed to normalize Google Book URLs and does so, this template is redundant, causes link rot problems, and all the other issues raised by SMcCandlish. Maybe we need a VP RfC or something to get wider community participation and list all the downsides more clearly - though honestly VP usually closes against the proposal, no matter what the proposal is. -- GreenC 15:24, 9 October 2023 (UTC)

@GreenC: When I last checked Google Books could not be archived anyway (at least not via Internet Archive). The page gets archived "successfully" but the pages are blank. Any archives themselves are effectively already rotten even when the URL still works. Has this changed? If not, archiving should be blocked if not by this template then by some other means. (Also, is link rot much of a concern here anyway? These are links to books which are also available in print.) – Scyrme (talk) 02:11, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Scyrme: That was two years ago but I think I was referring to dead links of which Google Books has a problem. The first question is if the link 404. What you do after that (add archives, delete the link, add a {{dead link}}) is up to the tool creator. But if the links are invisible to tool creators inside a special template, nothing is checked no actions taken. -- GreenC 03:02, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

I'm aware that Google Books links often become 404 pages, but automatic archiving doesn't help if the the intention is to preserve the content of the book not merely that a Google Books page used to exist.

No action being taken seems preferable to a bad action being taken, namely adding a rotten archive that makes an article appear as though it's safe from link rot when it isn't. Either way, we end up with invisible rot.

Would it be better if Google Books just didn't use |url= at all, but was instead handled like |doi=? Editors would provide the ID, which a bot could then check to see if it's still valid or a 404 page. If it's the latter it could then be tagged with a parameter that functions like |doi-broken-date=. This would indicate that action is needed, without replacing link rot with archive rot. It might make automated checking simpler than if a template were inserted into |url=, though it would lack parameters like |p= which are supported by {{Google Books URL}}. (The extra parameters might not be important though, especially if the reference provides page numbers in the usual way.) – Scyrme (talk) 03:28, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

IABot generally does not automatically archive Google Books anymore, it is on an exception list. I imagine other tools are also. There are other options besides adding archive URLs, but the first thing is the tool has to be able see the URL and is not hidden in a special template. . -- GreenC 04:05, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

I wasn't aware that changed. Does it still archive them if an editor selects "Add archives to all non-dead references (Optional)" when using the interface to manually submit a page for analysis? – Scyrme (talk) 04:53, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Probably? I'm really not sure. Test it on a sandbox page. It probably has some old bad archives in the database. This GB filter was added a very long time ago probably before 2018. Iabot.org is an extension of Wikipedia: anyone can edit it. If the bot has a bad archive URL you can remove it from the database. -- GreenC 22:35, 16 February 2026 (UTC)

Appreciation for a civil discussion

Further information: Templates for discussion log

I'd like to belatedly thank all who were involved in the deletion discussion archived here. I gained some useful knowledge about how other editors use tools and templates. I appreciated the WP:CIVIL tone of the discussion, especially in view of a lack of consensus. Sadly, that can't be taken for granted, so I'm increasingly grateful when I see it. Lwarrenwiki (talk) 19:43, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Honestly the discussion was weird. It hinged on a few editors who believe if a Google Book goes dead, we want to use this template, because it will prevent tools like IABot from adding a non-functioning archive URLs. But IABot doesn't even do that anymore, nor is this template called Template:Flag IABot so it doesn't add an archive, that's not it's purpose. If a link is dead it needs to be marked dead, and bots can do that, but not when this template is being used. Just one of many reasons this template is a bad idea. -- GreenC 21:17, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Request: Add article_id parameter for newspaper articles

It would be convenient to have an article_id parameter that you can specify so that the Google Books UI zooms into and highlights the newspaper article, instead of just showing the top left corner of the page. This is especially useful when the article starts near the bottom of the page, or in situations when the newspaper scans capture the full two-page width of the newspaper (instead of just each individual page) and the article begins on the right-sided page. For example, to go to the 1966.02.12 Financial Post article CN plans shorter route to shore, which is on page 63, the URL https://books.google.com/books?id=cG8_AAAAIBAJ&pg=PA54 requires you to scroll to the right-sided page, but the longer URL https://books.google.com/books?id=cG8_AAAAIBAJ&pg=PA54&article_id=6296,1923447 takes you directly to the article itself.

The &article_id=6296,1923447 part of the URL specifies the actual article, and it has to be discovered in a roundabout way. You go to https://news.google.com/newspapers, scroll to the page containing the article you're interested in, click the Link to article link in the top right corner, and then pull the article ID out of the URL that's generated in the Paste link in email or IM box. For this article, the generated URL is https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=cG8_AAAAIBAJ&sjid=c1QMAAAAIBAJ&pg=6296%2C1923447. Confusingly, you have to copy the article ID from the pg parameter and replace the %2C escape code with a comma. In the GBurl template, you put the id value from the URL into the id parameter and the URL's pg value into a new article_id parameter. However, you'll still have to populate the GBurl template's pg parameter with a typical value for this template (PA54 in this case), which you have to find by looking for the article again in https://books.google.com.

D271l (talk) 19:35, 17 July 2025 (UTC)

Alternately, the GBurl template could just output a URL in the news.google.com/newspapers format instead of books.google.com/books. You could use that format whenever the article_id parameter is specified, or you could just put the article ID value in the pg parameter, and add a parameter such as newspaper=yes to tell the template to output a URL using that format. D271l (talk) 06:14, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

"Classic Google Books will be turned off. Import your existing bookshelves before they're no longer available."

Hi everyone, is anyone here aware resp. has a solution that current links like https://books.google.de/books?id=srI6AAAAcAAJ&pg=PA106 will soon not work and needs to be replaced by https://www.google.de/books/edition/Alte_Stadt/srI6AAAAcAAJ?&gbpv=1&pg=PA106 due to the disabling of the classic view? The problem here is the term "Alte_Stadt" which was not part of the old link and needs to be determined somehow. This is of course only an example and also holds for other links as well. Any help appreciated, --Arnd (talk) 15:00, 14 December 2025 (UTC)

Hi Arnd: As you say, the new URL contains "/Alte_Stadt/" which is not in the old URL, automatic conversion would need to discover that code, which is unclear how, unless there is a way to form the new URL without it. There are over 2.2 million Google Books links on Enwiki - for dewiki it's about 300,000 which is comparable to arwiki, arzwiki, eswiki, ruwiki, itwiki and ptwiki. So it's a massive pile of links. However at this point, we don't yet have official confirmation the classic site is shutting down, and we don't know how Google will hand old URLs, they might be automatically redirected to the new link. This template is only a small part of the overall problem (not including Commons, Wikidata, etc..). Related discussion Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)#Classic_Google_Books_will_be_turned_off. -- GreenC 18:56, 14 December 2025 (UTC)

One just noticed that the string "Alte_Stadt" can be replaced by any string. This reduces the problem. And maybe Google will establish a redirect so that we do not need to update our links. --Arnd (talk) 19:14, 15 December 2025 (UTC)

A little more documentation on the history of this change and URLs is at https://github.com/5j9/citer/issues/15 . Daask (talk) 14:40, 28 June 2026 (UTC)