Talk:Climate change/Citation standards

A core principle of Wikipedia is WP:Verifiability: "All content must be verifiable." This requires citation. You need to identify each reliable source you use and the page number (etc) where the relevant content is found. A common mistake is to write desired text and then look for something to back it up. Instead, find the page number in a quality reliable source, and then decide what to write, including the citation. Learning citation formatting is sometimes challenging and we understand mistakes will be made. The important thing is to make an honest effort, boldly, and be willing to learn if you err. Thanks for trying to improve the article based on what you found in reliable sources!

On the other hand, verification is very difficult after editors are careless or add haphazard formatting. Therefore, editors at this page have agreed to follow the standards below. Per WP:CITEVAR we ask new editors at this page to follow suit. If you have questions or need assistance, please ask on the Talk page.

New editors are strongly encouraged to learn the citation guidelines above, and all editors are asked to convert any nonconforming citations to these standards.

Basic concept
The basic concept here is very simple: the full citations (such as created with one of the family of templates) are not put into notes (such as created with  tags) in the text, but listed in the "Sources" section. In the text they are replaced with short-cites, created with the harvnb template. The short-cites include enough information to identify the full citation. In many cases this information consists of the author's last name (corresponding to what was specified in the full citation) and year.

E.g.: creates the short-cite, that links to the full citation:

That full citation was created with a template that begins:

Formatting: (1) When full citations are collected in a list they are most conveniently arranged in a generally vertical (stacked) format, with most parameters on separate lines. However, names – in the first and last parameters – should be on the same line, so they don't get mixed up. (2), finding a template's closing pair of braces can be difficult, so it is strongly recommended that the closing pair of braces always be placed at the beginning of a line so they are easier to find. Also recommended: a space after the equals sign makes it much easier to distinguish the name of the parameter from the value assigned to it.

For two or three authors: produces, and  produces , the additional authors also being specified in the full citation.

Four or more authors
For citations with four or more authors only the first four are given to harvnb. E.g.: produces the short-cite, which links to:

The template to create this full citation is:

For the previous cases: If a short-cite fails to link to the full citation the first thing to check is that the full citation a) exists, and b) has set harv. The second thing to check is that the names and year used in harvnb match exactly the last names of the authors (up to four) and year (including any suffixes) used in the full citation. (Ask at Talk:Global warming if you have difficulties.)

Periodicals
Newspapers and similar periodicals, and also news articles and other non-refereed content in journals, appear so frequently that a more precise date than just the year is desired. Also, the actual writers are often less important than the publication, and their names are often omitted. For these reasons news articles are usually cited by the name of the periodical and a more precise date, such as. This is produced with, which links to:

The full citation is:

As the link anchor expected here is not the default author-date style of anchor it needs to be specified with ref.

See Global warming for various examples. Note also how newspapers, etc. (but not peer-reviewed articles in journals) are sub-listed chronologically under the entry for the publication.

IPCC reports
The IPCC reports are cited with special short-cites, such as. Short-cites and the full citations they point to can be found at WP:IPCC citation. Note that most of the IPCC citations have an extra layer: the short-cite links to a full citation for the chapter, which in turn links to a full citation for the report.

In-source location parameters
All of the Harv templates (except harvid) will also take a p, pp, or loc parameter to specify the page, page range, or other in-source location to specify just where in the source the article content is taken or supported. Such information can also be added immediately following, or even preceding, the short-cite. Where the source is available on-line it may also be possible to create an external link that jumps straight to the location in the source.

Where a source, such as a webpage, does not have page numbers or other locators, a short piece of text from that location should be quoted following the short-cite. (Use of the ps for this purpose is deprecated, as it makes it harder to read the template.)

Reminder
Full citations should be put into the proper sub-section of the "Sources" section. These are linked to from anywhere in the text using short-cites. Ask at Talk:Global warming if you need assistance or have a question.

And a script that sniffs out mistakes
It can easily be installed following the instruction on User:Ucucha/HarvErrors.