User talk:Petter.e2

Welcome to Wikipedia: check out the Teahouse!
I, and the rest of the hosts, would be more than happy to answer any questions you have! SarahStierch (talk) 04:53, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

Your sandbox
Hi, Petter.e2! I was looking at your sandbox, and noticed you were having some issues with formatting references. I cleaned it up somewhat, so that the errors aren't quite so confusing. I just wanted to point out a few things. First of all, in order to display references, a Wikipedia page must have a special references section at the bottom, formatted like so:

Without this, the references won't display and you'll get an error. I've added this section to your sandbox, so no need to worry about adding it yourself.

Another thing I've noticed is that you added a reference a few times that looked like this:

There are a few issues with this. I'm not sure if you know any HTML, but in HTML as well as in wiki-referencing, you need both a start and an end tag for the code to work. That means that when you're adding a reference, it must start with  or   and end with. The forward slash in  is what designates it as a closing tag. Neither of these tags contains the actual content of the citation that will display at the end. The name that you place in quotes after  is just something for your own use that will allow you to reuse the citation. In order to format your citation the way I think you were attempting is like so:

Then, if you wanted to reuse the citation later on, you can just type  (notice the forward slash at the end of the tag—this is a reference that does not require two tags, as it is sort of self-contained...if that makes sense).

Finally, you have a reference that was inserted as

This is almost right—it looks like you used the citation toolbar, which is a good choice. However, it appears that some of the text inside the ref tags was accidentally deleted. The citation templates need to begin with, where "type" is "web", "book", "journal", etc. Without this, the template will not appear, and you'll just get a jumble of wikitext. To fix this template, I would suggest removing it completely and using the citation toolbar to re-add it. It's not easy to manually fix citation templates, so I think you'll find redoing it to be the simplest solution. For now I've stopped the jumble of wikitext from appearing by using —this is known as "commenting". To fix the citation, just delete and replace the text that begins with.

Sorry about the wall of text! Your edits look good; there were just a number of formatting issues that were probably making things a bit difficult for you. If you're still having issues with formatting references, talk to me at the next meeting and I can help you in person. – GorillaWarfare (talk) 17:34, 3 November 2012 (UTC)