User:Trevor MacInnis/referencing for beginners

As Wikipedia has grown in popularity, the number of casual readers who it use as their primary source of information has also grown. verifiability has therefore become an increasingly important core policy of the project. There is no original research in Wikipedia; any information added must be accompanied by reliable sources that are directly related to the topic of the article, and that directly support the information as it is presented. The burden of evidence lies with the editor who adds or restores material that all quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged must be attributed to a reliable, published source using an inline citation.

The are common ways of doing it are with footnotes, citation templates.

Formatting your footnotes*
The easiest way to add a reference: and

The template Reflist can be used in place of parameter of the   tag.



Then at all the other citation points, just enter:



Once you are familiar with footnotes, you can try List-defined references.