User:Melicans/Useful Templates and Links

What follows on this subpage is a listing of the policies that I find to have the most valuable use for my edits/reverts, as well as some helpful formatting that I (in)frequently use in articles and on talk pages. Both are placed here for reference purposes only, for my benefit as well as anyone else who wishes to use them. Really, it's just a little handy how-to guide for me in case I forget any of this in the future (it's been known to happen).

Policies
These policies are the ones that I refer to most frequently when reverting a good faith edit, or any vandalism.


 * WP:VAN &mdash; Vandalism
 * WP:NOT &mdash; What Wikipedia is not
 * This includes blogs, game guide information, etc.


 * WP:REF &mdash; References
 * WP:RS &mdash; Reliable sources
 * WP:EL &mdash; External links
 * WP:SPS (Self-published sources) is a sub-policy of External links


 * WP:ARCHIVE &mdash; Archiving
 * WP:TRIV &mdash; Trivia
 * WP:POV &mdash; Point of view infomation

Tags
These are generally used at the very top of an article; place them in front of the infobox in an article. Always remember to add the tag date to these (example below):


 * &mdash; Placed at the very top of articles that have few or no references
 * &mdash; Placed inside the main text of the article after a fact that you believe is questionable and needs to be sourced.

Example
The following is an example of a dated fact tag. Note that you only write the month and the year, without the punctuation. Today is February 1, so if I were to tag a piece of information as needing a source, I would write: On Canadian keyboards, the "pipe" (|) is located between the Backspace and Enter keys.

Starting the reference
At the bottom of the page, but above External Links, create the following section: Underneath this, place the reflist tag: When citing a source, go to the piece of information that needs citing. First, write down the reference tags after the information. Then place the source inside inside the tags: If the source is in the middle of the sentence, place it after the punctuation (usually a comma or a semi-colon), but before an &mdash;. The most recent template to use for references is. An example of each "cite" is listed below. Please note that Wikipedia pages cannot be used as references for other Wikipedia pages.
 * ==References==

Cite web
To reference a website, please use the following template in between the tags:

Cite book
To reference a book, please use the following template in between the tags:

Cite video
To reference a video (documentaries and the like), please use the following template in between the tags:

Cite episode
To reference an episode of a television series, please use the following template in between the tags:

Bold
For bold text, place three apostrophes in front of and behind the word(s) you would like bolded. Bold text is typically only used at the very beginning of an article to highlight the subject. On Featured Article candidacies, and article or template deletion discussions, bold text is used to state whether you Support/Oppose (for FA discussions) or believe an article/template should be Kept, Deleted, or Merged befor providing your rationale. It is also used on talk pages to emphasize a point during discussions, although this is more infrequent.
 * Bold text becomes Bold text.

Italics
For italicized text, place two apostrophes in front of and behind the word(s) you would like bolded. Italic text is infrequently used, it's main purpose serving to highlight the titles of books, albums, or movies. On talk pages it is frequently used as a method of quoting policy during discussions.
 * Italic text becomes Italic text.

Strikethrough
For strikethroughs, place the strikethrough tags,, front of and behind the word(s) you would like to be struck out. Strikethroughs are used very infrequently, their main purpose being to cross off issues brought up by other editors on article talk pages after those issues have been addressed
 * Strikethrough becomes Strikethrough.

Signature
WWhen leaving a comment on an article or user talk page, it is very important to sign. This helps to identify who made what comment(s) on the talk page without having to look through the article history. Although SineBot does a fantastic job in signing for those who forget, it doesn't catch every missed signature. To sign, simply type four tildes (~)after your comment.
 * ~ will become your signature

No wiki
I'm sure you've noticed that throughout this page, I've shown templates and formatting without actually generating the formatted text. This is because of the no wiki tag. It is infrequently used, but a valuable tool if helping others how to format. Simply place   around the text that you do not want formatted; this will leave it as it was written. This coding should never be used on actual articles.