User:Yunshui/References for beginners

Wikipedia's guidelines for citing sources are, as you may have already discovered, long. Really long, so much so that many people just want to give up before they get halfway. This page is designed to condense the process of citing references down to a very basic format, so that you can get started without having to wade through half-a-million bytes of extraneous info.

Why cite references at all?
Wikipedia is guided by a need for verifiability - we won't just take your word that what you say is true. In order to show that statements on Wikipedia are correct (or at least, have been reliably reported as such), we need references that show reliable sources have already covered the information. Finding such sources isn't within the scope of this essay, but you may want to see some of the suggestions at this page.

Creating citations
Once you have a reference, you need to insert it into the article. Many new editors, seeing that there's a list of references at the bottom of most pages, assume that new ones should be added there; that isn't the case. The lists of footnotes you see in the "live" version of the article are generated by a bit of wiki-markup called a reflist template. Here's how to use it: So for example, you might find the sentence: "Ian's favourite food is roast beef" and reference it thus: "" When combined with a reflist template, this will render as follows in the text: "Ian's favourite food is roast beef." and at the bottom of the page, you'll see:
 * 1) Start by opening the page in "Edit" mode, and find the place in the text which needs a citation.
 * 2) Immediately after that text, type the tag.
 * 3) After the tag, type or paste in your reference.
 * 4) After the reference, close the tag by typing.
 * 5) At the bottom of the page, under the   header, check to make sure that a reflist template has been placed (it looks like this:  ). If it's not there, type one in. You do not need to put anything else in the "References" section (don't list the references there).

Whatever you put in between the tags is what will display in the page's footnotes. If you want to find whereabouts in the text a reference is held, click on the little caret (^) symbol next to the reference number, which will take you to the point in the text where it's used.

Formatting citations
One of the reasons that the citation guidelines are so unwieldy is that Wikipedia accepts a large number of different citation styles. You can use just about any professional or academic citation style you know, but for the sake of simplicity, I'm only going to cover one basic style here: the use of the template.

Numerous versions of this template exist, and the parameters and use of each is explained at its relevant template page (Template:Cite book for books, Template:Cite web for websites and so on). Basically, you place the information for your reference inside the template, then place the template inside the tags as above.

Here's an example of a basic reference formatted using the template: "" The components are as follows:
 * opens the template. The double curly brackets tell the software that a template is being used, and the name tells it which one.
 * the author's first and last names.
 * the book's title. The  parameter automatically italicises the text, so you don't need '' double inverted commas around it.
 * the publisher.
 * the page number for the reference. You can also use  for longer sections, e.g..
 * year of publication.
 * closes the template.

With the exception of the template identifiers ( ... ), the parameters can appear in any order; they will arrange themselves correctly when rendered. The above code produces this:

Do it the easy way!
To make life even easier, you can do all of this automatically - first, place your cursor at the point where you want the citation. At the top of the edit window you will see a toolbar, the last option of which is "Cite".

Selecting this gives you a drop-down selection of templates to choose from. Each will bring up a form for you to enter as much information about the reference as you can - you don't need to fill in every parameter, although there needs to be enough information for someone else to have a reasonable chance of finding the original source. Click "Insert", and a template will automatically be created, enclosed in tags, and dropped into the appropriate place in the article. Job done.