  -  I'll use a horizontal line to separate edits, because indenting would make writing these examples a pain. Let's take a specific example and see what the template does with it. This is a report that was issued in 1893, and is not on the web independently, but is reproduced as an appendix of a larger report.   * {{cite web | author = T. C. Mendenhall |title = Fundamental Standards of Length and Mass |url = http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP447/app3.pdf |date = 1893 |work = Weights and Measures Standards of the United States: A brief history }}   is rendered as  *   As far as it goes, this is exactly as I would expect it to appear. Unfortunately this template does not have some of the parameters that cite book or cite journal have, which allow one to provide a separate entry for the author(s) or editor(s) of the containing work.  I think the real solution to this problem is to rewrite the documentation to tell people to use cite book, cite journal, etc. whenever a work that fits well with those templates is placed on the web, and reserve cite web for types of information that are unique to the web. However, all the parameters would still have to be documented to support existing uses of the template.  It turns out that The Lord of the Rings was not a good example to choose, because there are movies, and also books published in several different formats. Let us imagine that in the future Donald Knuth's book becomes available on the web. The template might look like this:   * {{cite web | author = Donald Knuth |authorlink = Donald Knuth |title = Fundamental Algorthms |url = http://www.example.invalid |date = 2032 |work = The Art of Computer Programming |publisher = To be determined  }}   which renders as  *   The APA Style manual is the style the templates were originally based on. The 6th edition says it should be written link this (except I don't know how to do hanging indents):  Knuth, D. (2032). ''The Art of Computer Programming: Vol. 1. Fundamental Algorithms (2nd ed.). Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. (Original work published 1973)  So it seems to me the cite web really falls far short of what is needed to cite books, movies, etc. that have been placed online.       