User:Dmoss/Wikicite2

Wikicite is a free, open source, public domain software program for Windows XP and Windows 2000 that helps Wikipedians to properly reference Wikipedia articles. As of 2006 it is the only program in the world that performs this function. Wikicite is currently written with Visual Basic .NET 2.0. Wikicite is self-contained within one executable file and makes no permanent entries into the Windows registry.

Operation
Wikicite was created to produce perfectly formed Wikipedia references for Web, Journal and Book sources that conform to the Wikipedia footnote style of referencing.

In this style, references are inserted into the text of the article and are displayed as superscripted numbers that hyperlink to detailed information about the source in the references section. The references section is usually located at the end of the article, just before the category information.

Wikicite is used by filling in simple, descriptive forms on the Wikicite program and then clicking on the Copy Reference button, which pastes the reference to the clipboard behind-the-scenes. Users then simply paste the reference where it belongs into the Wikipedia editing form for making pages.

Example
The following text illustrates a Web reference produced by Wikicite, indicated by the superscripted and bracketed number 2.  Bibliographic software enables writers to make easy work of citing their sources. 

The above text is repeated below between and  tags to illustrate how the reference appears after copying it from Wikicite into the Wikipedia editing form:

 Bibliographic software enables writers to make easy work of citing their sources. 

Users must then create a References section in their Wikipedia article, conventionally the last section to appear in an article just before the Category information, by adding a Reference heading and tag with the text:

  ==References==   

This enables the MediaWiki software on which Wikipedia runs to properly display a populated References section.

Author
David Moss wrote Wikicite in his spare time during 2006.

Moss is an Australian. Outside of programming, he is an Information Systems Technician for Education Queensland.

Criticisms
Since Wikicite is currently written with Microsoft's Visual Basic .NET for .NET 1.1, it is not a cross-platform application. It is known to run only on Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003. Additionally, users of Windows 2000 may find they must install Microsoft Installer 3.0 in order to install the .NET framework, which is necessary for Wikicite to work.