User talk:CharlesGillingham/Wikipedia/Verification methods

Intentions of this article
What this article intends to achieve:
 * People learn quickest by example. This article is deliberately heavy on examples and short on rules and justifications. A good example that demonstrates a particular practice will ultimately have as much effect on articles as a carefully worded rule.
 * Consistent graphic format helps users to quickly find the information they are looking for.
 * An introduction to verification methods should be clearly organized in terms of the major choices that an editor has to make. Minor topics should not be treated with the same weight as the major choices. This article emphasizes the structure of the entire article.
 * An introduction to verification should use a summary style, because there are detailed articles on Footnotes, Citation templates, Harvard references and WP:Verifiability. It should avoid details that are covered in these articles, because too many details makes it difficult for new users to find the basic information they need.

TODO

 * 1) Need to find examples of articles that only have general references. Do they exist?
 * 2) Need to find more examples of articles using Harvard references exclusively. Very rare.
 * 3) Should there be an example of embedded links?
 * 4) Should there be an example of "Reference qualification in article text"?

Possible new section
This is a section I would like to add to the article, unless it seems too controversial.

Temporary references
It is more important to provide some kind of source than to format the source perfectly. Later editors can easily fix a badly formatted citation, but they will find it difficult or impossible to do the research necessary to find a source for a random bit of information added to an article. Newer editors may use any means necessary to provide a source for the information they bring to Wikipedia. These examples require almost no knowledge of Wikipedia's special characters or markup language, and no knowledge at all of proper citation formats.
 * A book: add the authors name, the book's title, year of publication and the page number that the information comes from. The year is important since it establishes which edition of the book was used.
 * A website: provide the URL (in brackets) of the particular webpage on which this information appears.