User talk:Bella2129

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Welcome!
Hello, Bella2129, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:
 * Introduction and Getting started
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 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page and How to develop articles
 * How to create your first article
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Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome! Laterthanyouthink (talk) 07:24, 2 November 2020 (UTC)


 * This is also a useful page, which leads to further help: WP:Reference desk. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 07:29, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

Help me!
Please help me with... Hi! I'm trying to figure out how to add a citation to an infobox. I'm not sure how to do it in visual editor, and when I do it in source editor the information appears in short form in "citations" at the bottom of the article, but not in "sources" with the full bibliographic information. Bella2129 (talk) 12:49, 2 November 2020 (UTC)
 * The way Koori is set up, the references need to be manually added to the "Sources" section, and then the sfn tags link to the "Citations" section, so it's not that you're doing anything wrong, it's just that the article is set up a little bit differently than you might be used to seeing. If you want more help, change the help me-helped back into a help me, stop by the Teahouse, or Wikipedia's live help channel, or the help desk to ask someone for assistance. Primefac (talk) 14:03, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for that. I've added citations to the Koori article before, and had them automatically added to the "Citations" and "Sources" sections. Why would this have changed? I'm trying to add this sourceto the population stats in the infobox --Bella2129 (talk) 14:24, 2 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Koori is one of nearly 700 articles on Aboriginal Australians, mainly written by, all written in a consistent citation style using short-form referencing. Unfortunately all the citation tools provided by Wikipedia are bad, and the citations generated by Visual Editor (VE) are some of the worst I've ever seen. What you can do is simply use whatever (diabolically awful) tools that Wikipedia provides that you find the easiest to use, and I will come along and run a script (an automated tool) that I wrote myself, which will transform the gawd-awful citations (not your fault in the slightest) generated by whatever tools you're using into something more useful and readable and consistent with the existing citation style (WP:CITEVAR), namely short-form referencing. I do this at unpredictable intervals, but I am keeping a special watch on this article, as I like to help and encourage newcomers. There is a huge long, pinned thread near the top of my talk page which explains why the usual way of doing it is so bad. I call it the dungheap citation style. Some of the advantages of short-form are:
 * It keeps the clutter of huge citation templates out of the body of the article (there are other ways of doing this, but I find that short-form is usually the best).
 * This makes editing much easier.
 * It suits cases where you want to cite lots of different pages/chapters in the same source, typically a book or journal article. Which is good, as books and journal articles are generally the highest-quality sources.
 * The full citations are in a nice, alphabetically ordered list.
 * Admittedly it takes some effort to familiarise yourself with short-form, but once you get used to it, you'll find it easier to use.
 * You can find more information on short-form at sfn, and examples of how my script works at User:NSH001/ETVP/examples. I recommend always looking to see if the source you want to use is already in the list at the foot of the article; this is easy to do, as it's in alphabetical order. If it's aleady there, then it's much easier to type out a little sfn than to generate a full cite.I hope this helps. Don't hesitate to ask if you have any difficulties. --NSH001 (talk) 19:09, 5 November 2020 (UTC)

Hi NSH001 Thank you so much for that; it was extremely informative. I've just begun adding citations to the Knowledge and Culture section of the Koori article, with no luck using sfn (I guess I just need more practice). I tried a few times, but it didn't come out quite right. Any help you could give would be highly appreciated! Thank you again --Bella2129 (talk) 06:34, 11 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Evening Bella! (well it's early morning here, but I'm thinking of your time zone) Don't worry, you're doing OK for a beginner. First, an easy one to fix: in cite #28 you made a typo – "p-36" should read "p=36" (incidentally, this is one of the many common errors that my script fixes automatically). But all the other Veth & O'Connor short cites are correct, so you've obviously "got" the basic idea of how it works. Well done! Now for the more, er, "interesting" stuff. You have the choice of the easy way, or the hard way. The easy way is to let me run my script to fix all the problems. I do this as a matter of routine on Nishidani's Aboriginal articles, so it's no great trouble for me. You might prefer this choice if, for example, you're running up against a deadline. Alternatively, as this is supposed to be an educational exercise, and the best way of learning is by doing – and making mistakes along the way – you might like to have a go at doing it the hard way. The basic problem you have is that the standard tools provided by Wikipedia are not designed for this citation style (BTW, I actually quite like this state of affairs, as it keeps 90% of the usual crappy edits off the page). Assuming you'd like to do it the hard way, here are some points to note:
 * Adams et al is already in the biblio listing. So you should replace cites #23 and #24 with sfn (IMPORTANT: always specify the page number(s) within each sfn!). Check all the numerous backlinks to #23 as well.
 * Saunders 2000 is not in the biblio listing. Therefore the first thing you should do is add it to the biblio listing, in alphabetical order. Edit it so that it follows the same pattern as the other full cites in the biblio listing. This pattern is designed to make it as easy as possible to read the full citation. Once you've done that, then you can replace its occurrences in the article body with sfn, not forgetting the page numbers, of course.
 * Repeat as necessary till you've dealt with all the full cites that are still in the article body.
 * As a general rule, always start by adding the full citation, in alphabetical order, to the biblio listing. If a full cite is already in the article body, you could copy-paste it, in alphabetical order, into the biblio listing, and edit it there, then replace in the article body with sfn. Alternatively, you could simply forget about the citation-generating tools (they're crap anyway) and create the whole of the full citation yourself. The best way of doing this is to copy-paste a similar citation and then replace the details from the source. You'll probably need to refer to the documentation at cite book, cite journal, etc. A common mistake when doing this is to forget to change some detail from the original, so you might prefer to first blank out all the old details before adding the new.
 * OK, that's enough for now – I'm off to cook some porridge for breakfast. Good luck! --NSH001 (talk) 10:33, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

Hello again NSH001! Thank you so much for all of that help. I believe I have fixed most of those citation issues. I'm sure there are still mistakes, but overall the referencing is looking far more consistent and coherent. Thank you again, I really do appreciate it. Hope you enjoyed your porridge! --Bella2129 (talk) 13:08, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Jolly good, you seem to have mostly nailed it now. A small point: only the first 4 authors (or editors if there are no authors) are taken account of in the harv/sfn family of templates; any more than that are ignored. This is all documented in sfn. Note that my script automatically removes any excess authors/editors. Thanks for fixing my typo in "partnership". --NSH001 (talk) 20:25, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

Wonderful! Thank you so much NSH001. You could not have been more patient or helpful :)