User talk:Semckenry

Welcome!
Hello, Semckenry, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful: Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place  before the question. Again, welcome! Huon (talk) 23:46, 24 November 2013 (UTC)
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Formatting for Boschniakia rossica
OK, I've started to put some things in order on Boschniakia rossica. What I'm going to need your help with is figuring out what references supplied the information for different parts of the article.

To see the changes I've been making to the wikitext (the formatting language we use to write here), you can always click the "View history" tab at the top of an article or a talk page. That will let you see the difference in wikitext between any two versions of an article (by selecting the radiobuttons for the two versions and hitting "Compare selected revisions"). Here's a link to one of them.

If you look at those changes, what I've done is change one of your references to use a "cite template". Templates, on Wikipedia, always start with. Inside, you supply a bunch of key-value pairs: "this=that". Essentially, you're plugging variables into the template, which works like a little computer program and creates a bunch of formatting based on the information you put in. That's how the article can have a taxobox without a whole bunch of wikitext in the article coding for HTML tables. The templates that start with {{cite... are meant for marking up references. If you look up in the top bar when you have the edit window open to change wikitext, you'll see a little triangle and a link that says "Cite". If you click that link, you'll see a dropdown menu appear below that says "Templates". Select "cite book" or "cite journal" and fill out the form that appears, and it will automatically put the template in the wikitext for you. Save it, and the template will have automatically formatted your bibliographic reference! I've already put your book and journal references in templates, but they have an additional use I'll need more help with.

Here, I added a parameter to each reference: "ref=harv". This is going to let us add Harvard-reference-like notes in the wikitext that will create those little blue linked footnotes common in Wikipedia articles. You've probably seen Harvard references in printed journal articles before: they look like "(Pryer et al., 2005)". In wikitext, we'll do something similar, but with templates. So for your first reference, instead of writing "(Wolfe, Randle, Liu & Steiner, 2005)" after the text based on that reference, I write " {{sfn|Wolfe|Randle|Liu|Steiner|2005}} ". ("sfn" stands for "short footnote".) That change creates a little linked blue footnote. Click the link, and it takes you to "Wolfe et al., 2005" in the Notes section; clicking that link takes you to the reference, in the references section. If you're citing several different pages from a book, you can add that to sfn: {{sfn|Pryer|2005|p=36}} and {{sfn|Pryer|2005|p=89}} would create two notes that say "Pryer, 2005, p. 36" and "Pryer, 2005, p. 89", but both would link to the same reference in the bibliography.

Where I need help from you is to figure out which sentences and paragraphs came from which references. Can you start trying to mark those up with {{sfn}} ? I can always fix formatting if I can figure out which reference the note is pointing to. Thanks a lot. Feel free to leave more comments on the article talk page, on this page, or on my talk page. (BTW, there's a link right under the edit window that auto-inserts the four "~" for signing.) Choess (talk) 15:10, 8 December 2013 (UTC)