User:Kattusite/Citing sources

Wikipedia requires that all content posted in an article must be verifiable. This means that, when writing a Wikipedia article, you must take great care to cite any sources of information that you referred to, just as if you were writing an academic paper.

Thankfully, Wikipedia provides you with several convenient tools to make the citation process as painless as possible.

Wikipedia's Citation Style
At its core, Wikipedia's citation style consists of a list of inline citations, which are automatically processed into a list of references that can be inserted into the article. Typically, this list is placed in its own section after the main article body named References. Every time you make a specific factual claim that was taken from one of your sources, you should place a citation immediately after that claim indicating the source.

When you introduce a source for the first time, you must include the full bibliographic information for that source, like the title of the work, the author, the year of publication, and so forth. When you do this, Wikipedia also gives you the option of associating a convenient abbreviated name with this source, so that you can re-use the same citation information again later without having to re-type it. A good way to systematically name sources is to use the author's last name, followed by the publication year. For example, a book called A Grammar of Goemai by Birgit Hellwig, published in 2011, might have an abbreviated name of "Hellwig2011".

Hopefully, you should now have a general idea of how Wikipedia citations work - now let's look at the specific tools Wikipedia gives us to accomplish all this.

Citing a source for the first time
Whether you are in the Visual Editor or Source Editor, Wikipedia does not make you remember the rules of any specific citation format, like MLA or Chicago.

Visual Editor
If you are in the Visual Editor, citing sources is incredibly intuitive. Just hit the Cite button on the top toolbar. Wikipedia can try to automatically detect the citation using the Automatic citation option, but it's probably a good idea to select the Manual citation option and type the information in by hand so you can be sure that everything is completely correct. Once you select the type of source (most likely Book for our purposes), fill in all the fields you can, and click Insert.

Source Editor
If you are in the Source Editor, you will be using  tags. In general, you can add a reference by copy-pasting the following:

Thankfully, Wikipedia gives an easy way to generate the bibliographic information too, in the form of citation templates. Wikipedia provides a citation template for all of the kinds of sources you might encounter.

Books
First, let's take a look at citing books. This is done using Template:Cite book. Feel free to click the link to read the full documentation.

To get started quickly with the Cite book template, copy-paste the following Wikicode into your article:

Fill in the appropriate values for your book after each equals sign. If you don't have a particular piece of information, you may leave it blank. For example, your bibliographic information might look like this:

Then, the complete citation would look like this:

Here's an empty version you can copy-paste:

Websites
Now, let's look at Template:Cite web. Feel free to read the full documentation for more info. You can generate bibliographic information by filling in the blanks in the following template:

And the full reference:

Here's a sample:

Others
Wikipedia has a whole slew of other types of citations available. See Citing_sources for more examples.

Re-using citations
You only have to enter bibliographic information for a source once, the first time it is cited. After that, Wikipedia will save a copy of the citation that you can insert wherever you like.

Visual Editor
If you are in the Visual Editor, simply hit the Cite button in the top toolbar. Then, select the Re-use tab, and you will be shown a list of all of the sources that you have used in the article so far. Select the correct one, and hit Insert.

Source Editor
If you are in the Source Editor, you will use tags as before, but this time, you will just include the abbreviated name of the source, and no other bibliographic information. For example, to re-use a citation that you named "Chomsky1967", copy-paste the following:

Citing Ethnologue or Glottolog
If you need to cite Ethnologue or Glottolog, there is a good chance Wikipedia has already created a named citation with all of the bibliographic information, and you will be able to re-use it. If your page doesn't yet have a Template:Infobox language on it, check out User:Kattusite/Advanced features and add one first.

Once your page does have a Template:Infobox language on it, and the infobox has the ref field filled in, then you can simply reuse the value of ref as the name of your reference. For example, if your infobox has, to indicate that your article refers to the 22nd edition of Ethnologue, you can copy-paste the following to cite Ethnologue:

Citing specific page numbers
Whenever possible, it is a good idea to include the relevant page number when you are citing a specific fact or claim. This makes it easier for readers to verify the claim if they have access to the source material. Wikipedia provides Template:Rp (for Reference Page) to allow you to cite specific page ranges.

Visual Editor
Click on Insert in the top toolbar, then on Template. Type in rp, hit Enter, then enter the page numbers, and hit Insert to add the page numbers to your citation.

Source Editor
Immediately after your inline citation (the  tags), insert. Replace ## with the page number or a range of page numbers, and it will be added next to the citation.

For example, here is a complete citation:

which renders as the following citation.