Template:Infobox earthquake/doc

2007 Peru earthquake
	Picture showing earthquake damage. Piles of rubble, one week after the shock
	Map of the Peru coastline, showing location and strength of quake. Map of the Peru coastline, showing location and strength of quake. Star marks epicenter.
UTC time	2007-08-15 23:40:37
ISC event	1280473
USGS-ANSS	ComCat
Local date	August 15, 2007
Local time	18:40
Magnitude	8.0 Mw
Depth	39 km (24 mi)
Epicenter	Lua error in Module:Coordinates at line 489: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).
Fault	Nazca-South American plate
Areas affected	Ica Region (Pisco, Ica and Chincha Alta) and Lima Region (San Vicente de Cañete)
Tsunami	flooded part of Lima's Costa Verde highway, and much of Pisco's shore
Casualties	519 confirmed dead, 1,366 injured

2007 Peru earthquake
	Picture showing earthquake damage. Piles of rubble, one week after the shock
	Map of the Peru coastline, showing location and strength of quake. Map of the Peru coastline, showing location and strength of quake. Star marks epicenter.
UTC time	2007-08-15 23:40:58
ISC event	1280473
USGS-ANSS	ComCat
Local date	August 15, 2007
Local time	18:40
Magnitude	8.0 Mw
Depth	39 km (24 mi)
Epicenter	Lua error in Module:Coordinates at line 489: attempt to index field 'wikibase' (a nil value).
Fault	Nazca-South American plate
Areas affected	Ica Region (Pisco, Ica and Chincha Alta) and Lima Region (San Vicente de Cañete)
Tsunami	flooded part of Lima's Costa Verde highway, and much of Pisco's shore
Casualties	519 confirmed dead, 1,366 injured

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This is a documentation subpage for Template:Terminate sentence
It may contain usage information, categories and other content that is not part of the original template page.

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This template uses Lua:

For presenting the key data of an earthquake in a consistent, standardized format.

Usage

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Examples

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New parameters

As of March, 2018, new parameters have been added to resolve some long-running problems regarding the specification of the date and time of earthquakes. On one hand, the local population (for whom the event has the most significance) and local sources identify an earthquake by the local day and time-of-day, which is also a significant factor in societal impact. On the other hand, earthquake catalogs identify and index earthquakes by their UTC time. Unfortunately, this Infobox has had only one pair of parameters for this purpose – 'date' and 'time' – and indicated neither to the editor whether local or UTC time should be used, nor to the reader which time was used (unless an editor was thoughtful enough to indicate the time zone). There is also an 'origintime' which, being similar to the "origin time" used in some catalogs, suggested UTC time and format, but, when used, actually supplanted the value given for 'time'. Some editors have used a time conversion utility to derive a UTC time from a specified local time, but this is a dubious practice: the UTC time actually used to index a quake should be obtained directly, not calculated from a non-authoritative local time.

These issues can now be avoided by using three new parameters: timestamp, local-date, and local-time. The latter are two are exactly what they say they are: the local day and time, and labeled as such in the display. There are no restrictions on how these are formatted; lacking any other guidelines they can be formatted at the editor's discretion. On the other hand, 'timestamp' is the quake's UTC time in all numeric 'yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss' (ISO) format (the seconds being optional), as found in an authoritative catalog. A properly formatted UTC timestamp is now required (unless 'pre-1900' is set); any other text (including timezone or citations) generates an error. Adding "UTC" is not necessary, as that is included in the displayed label: "UTC time". With these new parameters the use of the ambiguous 'date' and 'time' parameters is deprecated, and should be removed. However, please do not simply copy the old values. These should be checked with an authoritative source such as the ANSS or ISC (see below), which have chronological indices (here and here).

There is also a pre-1900 parameter. Setting this to "yes" identifies a quake as being "historical" (meaning it occurred before the dawn of the instrumental period), relaxes the formatting otherwise required for 'timestamp', and makes certain other parameters optional.

Please note that newspapers and other news sites are NOT reliable sources for the technical details of earthquakes, such as time, location, depth, and – most importantly – magnitude. For details of "breaking news" earthquakes recourse should be had to the same source the news agencies go to: the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS), a partnership of the USGS (NEIC) and various regional networks which monitors global seismicity and provides information on notable events, usually within 15 minutes. (See Latest Earthquakes, or the Significant Earthquake archive, which link to specific event pages in the Comprehensive Catalog.) The new anss-url parameter provides a link to a specific event page, given either the whole url to the event page (e.g.: |anss-url=https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/usp000fjta), or just the final part (e.g.: |anss-url=usp000fjta). For uncataloged events (mainly before 1964) use "n/a" ("not available").

The new isc-event parameter provides a link to the event's bibliography page at the International Seismological Centre (ISC) (see chronological Event Index), with a summary of the preferred magnitude and epicenter, and a link to the event's data page. Data collected by the ISC is generally not available until about two months after the event. After two years all available data is reviewed and the magnitudes and location recalculated to provide the most authoritative values available. For uncataloged events (mainly before 1964) use "n/a" ("not available").

Replacement of the deprecated parameters with the new parameters should include verification of the data, and citation to the authoritative source. For this purpose please see the {{cite anss}} and {{cite isc}} templates.

Doublet earthquakes

Doublet example
UTC time	Doublet earthquake:
	A: 2011-02-21 23:51:42
	B: 2011-02-22 00:04:17
ISC event
	A: 16168897
	B: 16461282
Local date	February 21, 2011
Local time
	A: 13:54 a.m
	B: 14:05 p.m.
Magnitude
	A: 6.1 M_w
	B: 5.5 M_w

There are special provisions for handling doublet earthquakes, the small number of large earthquakes where the main rupture is interrupted or delayed, resulting in two (or more: multiplet) shocks of similar magnitude, usually within minutes to days of each other. These are not aftershocks (a series of consequent events that usually begin a whole magnitude less than the main shock and steadily diminish in magnitude and frequency according to known laws), these are multiple main shocks. In such cases it incorrect to identify one shock that is slightly bigger than the rest as the main shock, and the rest as foreshocks or aftershocks. Aftershocks can be distinguished in part by starting immediately following a main shock, but usually about 1.2 magnitude smaller, and rapidly decaying in magnitude and frequency (see Bath's Law, whereas doublet/multiplet events are usually only a few events of roughly the same magnitude, separated by hours, days, or even weeks.

Setting |timestamp=doublet (or "triplet" or "multiplet") produces a wikilink to Doublet earthquake so the reader will understand that the following lines refer to the different parts of a multiple event, not to aftershocks or to different estimates of magnitude for a single event. This feature will automatically add the article to Category:Doublet earthquakes. Where doublets have separate articles and this feature is not used, the category should be explicitly added to each article. In general, stating that the quake is a doublet should be contingent on a source.

For handling multi-part main shocks, seven parameters – timestamp, isc-event, anss-url, local-date, local-time, magnitude, and depth – have a suffixed form (e.g.: timestamp-A, etc.) for adding multiple values, as seen in the example. Other parameters (like intensity, etc.) are free-format, and multiple values can be added by judicious use of "<br>" and " ". To enable explicit labeling of each part add the line |tags=y. See the articles in Category:Doublet earthquakes for examples; see 2010 Mindanao earthquakes for a complex example.

Microformat

The HTML mark-up produced by this template includes an hCalendar microformat that makes event details readily parsable by computer programs. This aids tasks such as the cataloguing of articles and maintenance of databases. For more information about the use of microformats on Wikipedia, please visit the Microformat WikiProject.

Classes used

The HTML classes of this microformat include:

attendee
contact
description
dtend
dtstart
location
organiser
summary
url
vevent

Please do not rename or remove these classes
nor collapse nested elements which use them.

Tracking categories

The following identify articles needing attention.

TemplateData

This is the TemplateData for this template used by TemplateWizard, VisualEditor and other tools. See a monthly parameter usage report for Template:Infobox earthquake in articles based on its TemplateData.

TemplateData for Infobox earthquake