Help:Referencing for beginners with citation templates

The easiest way to start citing on Wikipedia is to see a basic example. The example here will show you how to cite a newspaper article using the cite news template (see Citation quick reference for other types of citations). Copy and paste the following immediately after what you want to reference:

and put as much information as you can to the right of the equal signs. For example, suppose you wish to cite the statement

Going forward, Jimmy Wales emphasizes quality over quantity for Wikipedia articles.

in a Wikipedia article's source text by using an article from The New York Times newspaper. It could be done by editing the article's source text to

The last and first parameters are for the author's name. date is when the article was published. url may be given if there is also an online version of the newspaper article and the access-date parameter is when you viewed the online version. page is for the page of the material needed to support the statement. (If multiple pages are needed, use pages instead.) Unused parameters are best deleted but leaving them blank is okay.

After your edit is published, the statement will have a reference footnote and the reference information will appear later in the page (usually in a References section), like so:

That's it! You're done. Good luck!