User:Joeystanley/Citation Help

I am writing this page mostly as a tutorial for myself on how I like to cite things. It's been a few months since I've made any edits and I was getting a little rusty, so this page will serve as a refresher.

All my information has come from several Wikipedia pages. Since I've already learned how to cite, I don't remember all the pages I ones I used. However, it seems that relevant info can be found on this page on citing sources, this one on footnotes, and this one on list-defined references. I'll add more if I find them.

First off, I don't usually use Wikipedia's template for citing. By this I mean opening the form and putting the information in each category. I find it cumbersome in many ways: it's hard to put the text in, it's hard to read and edit once it's there, and it's often not formatted the way I like. I've cited hundreds of sources in research papers and I'm quite used to the format, so I just type the text straight in there.

Citing on regular pages

The simplest citation just uses the <ref>...</ref> syntax.

If you want to add a name to it, add it as an attribute like this:

<ref|name=Guasch>...</ref>

Note that there are no quotes around the name. Additional instances of that same source are like this:

<ref name=Guasch />

If I know I'm going to be using the same source multiple times, I adopt this syntax for page numbers:

<ref name="Guasch">...</ref>{{rp|19}}

which looks like this.. Usually though, I'll include the page number in the reference itself.

If there's not already a list of references, insert that using {{reflist}}.

My own userpage

Citing

For regular webpages that's about all there is to it. For my own userpage however, I take a more complicated method.

For footnote markers, this is the syntax:

{{refn|Example Source typed as it looks.}}

If it's a one-of-a-kind type of source, I'll include the page number. Otherwise I leave it out of the source and put if after, as shown above.

{{refn|Example Source typed as it looks.}}{{rp|19}}

If I cite the same source multiple times, the syntax is slightly different than for ones with the <ref/> tags:

{{refn|name=exampleName|Source}}{{rp|19}}

Notice that the attributes here are between vertical bars (|) rather than spaces. In subsequent citations, the source is not typed in.

The reason why I use {{refn}} is because I want a footnote within that footnote and I can't embed <ref> tags. So, this should be the outer one, which contains the information for the source. At the end of it comes the regular footnote syntax for it, giving information about what book I used. Thus the full citation is

{{refn|Example Source typed as it looks.<ref group=book name=Name/>}}{{rp|19}}

Some things to keep in mind here. The group and name <ref/>attributes can be in either order. The name of the group will show up exactly the way it appears in the superscript (i.e. if the group name is book, it's show up as ^{[book 1]}. Also, I don't include pages for the book the way I do the article because they should already be cited in the reference itself. It looked too cluttered and redundant to see …p.117–120^{[book 1]:117–120}. Plus, I wanted to keep the page numbers in the actual citation since it's a legitimate, fully-formed citation and the additional book superscripts are just my own thing. Finally, since the <ref/> tag is part of the source, it's autmaticallyy included in subsequent iterations of that same source.

Lists of references

The way the {{reflist}} works is if I just put one, I'll get a list of all the books and all the sources. To split up the references, add the group name "book" to the books. To do that, use this:

{{reflist|group=book}}.

Other sources that have no group will be populated in the {{reflist}} with no group.

However, it appears I've listed the books in the reflist itself:

{{reflist|group=book|refs=<ref name=1>example</ref>}}

The reason for that was probably to make it less cluttered in the text and to make sure I've cited each book. I've listed the books in alphabetical order in the source code, but they appear chronologically on the webpage. To do that, just list each reference in the {{reflist}} itself. Every reference needs a name. When citing the books in the actual body of the page, there's no need to ever write out the full citation since it's already down there in the source code.

So that's about it. Not too complicated now that I've done it and it works well. This is a rough sketch of the page. Maybe later I can make it look nicer and explain things a little bit better.