User talk:Floatingcircle

Adding references (with Template:RefPage)
I am glad we both got to meet some local Wikipedians at the recent MassArt edit-a-thon. Also, lots of help is available online, both in prewritten documentation and introductory tutorials, as well as from other editors.

You may find the article Help:Referencing for beginners useful in learning how to build complete and well-formatted references in Wikipedia. The methods shown in Using refToolbar are particularly handy for enabling efficient cut-and-paste construction of a proper Wikipedia reference. The refToolbar method is very helpful for both novice and experienced editors, because it uses a simple form to cue an editor to include the most important parameters (for example, author, date, publisher), while it takes care of the formatting details automatically. For websites, books, and academic journals, many fields can automatically be filled in, and only need to reviewed for accuracy.

You can skip the later sections in the tutorial, on manually building references, until/unless you need to "look under the covers" to make custom modifications.

I would also like to point out a technique used in Wikipedia to show the page numbers in footnoted references, without triggering an absurdly large number of nearly-identical full citations. The abbreviated format is described at Template:Refpage, which was designed specifically to handle this problem. This and other useful techniques for efficiently formatting references are explained at Help:Referencing for beginners.

If you have questions now or as you progress in editing, please feel free to ask me on my Talk page. Best wishes, Reify-tech (talk) 18:11, 8 March 2020 (UTC)