User:Mike Peel/References guide

This is a guide to the various referencing systems available on Wikipedia, put together by User:Mike Peel. If anything is missing from it, please feel free to add to this page, or please let the author know.

The aim of this guide is to give a good introduction to (and provide a reference for) the technical aspects of referencing on Wikipedia. It does not tell you what references you should use, or where you should use them. See Citing sources for that.

Referencing systems
There are three main referencing systems in use on Wikipedia: Footnotes, Harvard referencing and embedded citations.

Note that all three consist of two parts - a reference in-line with the text, with full details of the reference at the bottom of the page. It is a common mistake to only put one half of the reference onto the page - just the URL, in the case of embedded citations, or just the full reference, in the case of Harvard references.

Harvard referencing
A Harvard reference can be inserted into an article by placing the author and year of the reference in-line with the text, for example (Peel 2006), followed by the complete details of the reference in the References section of the page. Note that both parts of this referencing system should be used - a common mistake I see on many articles is a big list of references at the bottom of the page, and no inline references to say what part of the article can be verified using which reference.

Embedded citations

 * Note that I do not recommend using this system - it is very easy to misuse if you don't know it well, and as such it is frequently mis-used throughout Wikipedia.

This is mostly used for referencing websites in-line in an article. It is probably one of the most common of the referencing systems used on Wikipedia, although it is frequently used incorrectly. The references consist of two parts: an external link located in-line with the text, such as <-- that. This is done by placing at the appropriate place is the text. Note that no title is given, just the URL. Then, a complete reference should be given in a References section at the bottom of the article, preferably using one of the citation templates (see "How do I cite..."). This last part is frequently missing from pages where this is used, however it provides the actual citation, so should ideally always be present.

How do I cite...
Note: use of these templates is not required, but is prefered by me (and, hopefully, others...)

A book
Copyable version:

Available options:

An example would be: which gives:

A journal
Copyable version:

Available options:

The arxiv field can be used to provide a link to the arXiv version of the article. This should only be used when the article has been published in a journal - for unpublished arXiv works, Cite arXiv should be used (see below). It is useful to provide a link to the arXiv citation if possible, as the arXiv is freely available to everyone, whereas journals typically require expensive subscriptions to access them.

An example of a paper that has not been published in arXiv would be: which gives:

An example of a paper that has previously been published in arXiv would be: which gives:

Common problems
This can occur when you put a new line into the description field for the URL. For example (see source):
 * A link appears malformed

which gives:

This is caused by an inability in the MediaWiki software to handle new lines in the middle of external links (see ).

Other template guides

 * Category:Citation templates
 * Citation templates
 * Template messages/Sources of articles/Citation quick reference