User talk:Jjk016

Welcome!
Hello, Jjk016, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 22:22, 10 October 2016 (UTC)

Quick note on citations
Providing complete citations that include the year and the pmid are very important for other editors (and for you!).

One of the refs you recently added to an article looked like this:

No year, and no pmid.

There is a very easy and fast way to do citations, which often also provides a link that allows readers to more easily find the source being cited.

You will notice that when you are in an edit window, that up at the top there is a toolbar. On the right, it says "Cite" and there is a little triangle next to it. If you click the triangle, another menu appears below. On the left side of the new menu bar, you will see "Templates". If you select (for example) "Cite journal", you can fill in the "doi" or the "PMID" field, and then if you click the little magnifying glass next to the field, the whole thing will auto-fill. Then you click the "insert" button at the bottom, and it will insert a ref like this (I removed the ref tags):

That takes about 10 seconds. As you can see there are templates for books, news, and websites, as well as journal articles, and each template has at least one field that you can use to autofill the rest. The autofill isn't perfect and I usually have to manually fix some things before I click "insert" but it generally works great and saves a bunch of time.

The PMID parameter is the one we care about the most.

One thing the autofill doesn't do, is add the PMC field if it is there (PMC is a link to a free fulltext version of the article). you can add that after you insert the citation, or -- while you have the "cite journal" template open --  you can click the "show/hide extra fields" button at the bottom,  and you will see the PMC field on the right, near the bottom. If you add the PMC number there that will be included.

The autofill also doesn't add the URL if there is a free fulltext that is not in PMC. You can add that manually too, after you autofill with PMID.

But with he Davidson ref above, the year was crucial - that is a 16 year old source, and per WP:MEDDATE we prefer refs that are less than 5 years old when they are available. Jytdog (talk) 03:00, 29 November 2016 (UTC)