User talk:Drtheuth

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Questions About References, Sources, and Citations in Wikipedia Articles
"A couple questions about using and inserting references (citations) into Wikipedia articles; please see my user talk page Drtheuth (talk) 21:43, 27 March 2013 (UTC) for the specifics I'm after. Thanks!"

A user recently edited a contribution I made to the Airsoft page by removing the phrase sport or in the article's first sentence. I undid that change and inserted citations to support the characterization of Airsoft as a sport (and not simply as a recreational activity). I have a couple questions about using citations and references in articles. First, I suspect that edits and page histories are a poor place to try to work out disagreements (such as whether it is or is not a sport). Yet I want Wikipedia to be as user-friendly and consistent as possible, so in my original contribution I added the phrase "Sport or" because I found that the Wikipedia article on Paintball characterizes it as a sport, and that the Wikipedia article for Sport defines sport in a manner inclusive of activities such as airsoft. I notice that on the Paintball page the word sport sports its own set of citations, which I assume were put there because in the creation of the article someone felt it important to justify the use of the word sport. So, question one: Can you offer guidance w/r/t figuring out when and how citations are genuinely helpful and when they are simply there as the annoying little remnants of an "I can't debate this any more, so here are some references, now leave the page alone already!" argument?

And, question 2, a much easier-to-answer question: If I want to insert a reference, what's the best form and syntax to use to get the most useful things highlighted and put in quotation marks and so forth? For my recent Airsoft citation edits, I simply copied the language from other Wikipedia citations, but it's clear from looking at them that articles are not consistent in terms of this. All roads may lead to Rome, but some take you there via Ankora--which is inconvenient if you're starting out in Marseilles. So how can I insert and construct clean, easy, useful citations/references when I want to do so?

Thanks a bunch!

Kurt B. (aka Dr. Theuth) Drtheuth (talk) 21:43, 27 March 2013 (UTC)


 * On the first question, I'd say a "reference to end an argument" is genuinely helpful: Presenting a reliable source for your position is the best way to end an argument, clarify a disputed fact and thereby improve the encyclopedia. The place to have an argument is not edit summaries, but talk pages (here Talk:Airsoft). There you can explain the rationale behind your edits and argue why they are an improvement.
 * I'll also note that a reference calling airsoft a sport is much better than a dictionary definition of "sport" - I'd remove that one since it doesn't directly speak on what's at issue.
 * Regarding the second question, you already used the citation templates such as cite web; those are the preferred method of citing sources. They have a "quote=" parameter that should be used for quotes from the source; the "title=" parameter should be the source's title. If the reference is identified clearly enough (say, if you don't just cite a 300-page book but give a page number), it's often unnecessary to explicitly add a quote to the reference at all. Huon (talk) 22:28, 27 March 2013 (UTC)