Help:Tutorial/Citing sources
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As stated in About StarfinderWiki, "if you add information to an article, be sure to include your references, as unreferenced facts are subject to removal." It is best to use inline citations so that other editors and readers can verify the information you add. Also, make sure that every source you use is from a canon source for setting material, or is otherwise trustworthy if about a real-world topic.
Footnotes
The easiest way to create an inline citation is with a footnote. You can create a footnote with Wiki markup, by adding ref tags around your source, like this:
- <ref>Your Source</ref>
If you're adding the first footnote to an article, you also need to make sure that there is text that tells the software Wikipedia uses to display footnotes. That text will look like this:
- {{Refs}}.
That text should be immediately below the section heading == References ==. If that section doesn't exist, you will need to add it (both the heading and the "Refs" text above). Place the new section near the bottom of the article, just above the "External links" section (if that exists).
Once you have saved your edit, the ref tags will convert your citation of a source into a footnote reference (like this one[1]), with the text of the citation appearing in the References section at the bottom of the article.
If the citation you are placing between the ref tags as your source is a link to an external website, place the website address (URL) within single square brackets along with some text, which the reader will see as a link. For example:
- <ref>[http://www.nytimes.com/article_name.html Article in The New York Times]</ref>
StarfinderWiki highly recommends providing more information than that in a footnote. To provide a more complete footnote for a web link, use a citation template, such as {{Cite web}}:
- <ref>{{Cite web|author=Name of author|url=http://www.nytimes.com/article_name.html|title=Title of article|page=The New York Times|date=date}}</ref>
It is not recommended to use bare URLs for your external link references, because of link rot.
While material from external websites is a common reference source, StarfinderWiki prefers canon or official sources, especially for material describing the Starfinder campaign setting. If your source is a book, journal, magazine, newspaper article, documentary or other source, place identifying information about that source between the ref tags. For print sources, use {{Cite book}} or a pre-generated citation.
| What it produces when you save | |
Two separate citations.<ref>Citation text.</ref><ref>Citation text2.</ref>
|
Two separate citations.12 |
Multiple<ref name="multiple">Citation text3.</ref>citation<ref name="multiple" /> use.<ref name="multiple" />
|
Multiple3 citation3 use.3 |
| ==References== {{Refs}} |
References_________________ |
Templates that can be used between <ref></ref> tags to format references
| |
Please see Help:Citing sources for further instructions on writing footnotes. Also, there are templates that help with the proper formatting of references (footnotes); see Category:Citation templates for further details.
External links section
Many real-world articles have a separate section called External links. This section is for linking to websites with significant and reliable additional information on the article's topic, such as homepages for people and businesses related to a given topic, or blogs, news sites, etc. relevant to the article. Only a relatively few, very relevant external links are appropriate for this section. If an article already has more than a few links in the "External links" section, and you're an inexperienced editor, you probably should suggest any new links on the article's Discussion (talk) page before actually adding one.
To add a new external link, just type, inside a single set of brackets, the full URL for the link, followed by a space and the text that will be visible. For example:
- [http://www.example.com/ Official website]
will display the following, while linking to the full URL: