NewsEditor1000

Citing sources

Yeah, sure! It's actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it. First off, go here for the general idea of what template to use. For instance, if you use a web page, use {{cite web}} along with the provided parameters (ie web page name, etc). Basically, your citation should look like this:

{{cite web| last = Jones| first = Carol| title = The web page| publisher = www.webpage.com| date = August, 21, 1990| url = http://thewebpage.com| accessdate =May 17, 2008}}

Now, to get it right, add <ref> before and the template and </ref> after that template. Your finished product should look like this:

<ref>{{cite web| last = Jones| first = Carol| title = The web page| publisher = www.webpage.com| date = August, 21, 1990| url = http://thewebpage.com| accessdate =May 17, 2008}}</ref>

If you did it right, if should show up in the reference section of the article. I hope I explained that clearly! If you don't get it, let me know and I'll try to help you further. Also, don't worry about using all the parameters that are listed, the ones you don't use can be deleted (which is what I did in my examples). Again, if I wasn't 100% clear, don't hesitate to contact me again. :) Pinkadelica 05:28, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Good, I'm glad my directions were clear. As far as citing everything, that's not really necessary. Every statement doesn't have to have a citation after it. What I usually do is cite a paragraph from one source after the entire paragraph. If it's the same source, there's really no reason to have a citation for the same source after every sentence. If a paragraph has different sources, then I would go ahead and cite each sentence according to what source I got it from. That's usually fairly rare though, so it's pretty easy to cite a source for one whole paragraph. When you have a quote, that needs to be cited directly after the quote no matter what. Basically, you can just go by what other articles do. That's how I learned how and when to cite. Some good examples to look at are what Wikipedia considers "Good or Featured Articles" (they can be found here). Those article have been poured over by other editors and written and cited in the exact way any article on Wikipedia should be written. If you have any more questions, feel free to contact me. I'm almost always on here doing something. :) Pinkadelica 07:29, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

May 2008

Welcome to Wikipedia. Although everyone is welcome to make constructive contributions to Wikipedia, at least one of your recent edits, such as the one you made to Of Montreal, did not appear to be constructive and has been automatically reverted by ClueBot. Please use the sandbox for any test edits you would like to make, and take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. If you believe there has been a mistake and would like to report a false positive, please report it here and then remove this warning from your talk page. If your edit was not vandalism, please feel free to make your edit again after reporting it. The following is the log entry regarding this warning: Of Montreal was changed by NewsEditor1000 (u) (t) deleting 10814 characters on 2008-05-18T07:55:52+00:00 . Thank you. ClueBot (talk) 07:55, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

The recent edit you made to Billy Bush constitutes vandalism, and has been reverted. Please do not continue to vandalize pages; use the sandbox for testing. Thanks. Enviroboy^Talk_Cs 07:56, 18 May 2008 (UTC))

Please do not vandalize pages, as you did with this edit to Of Montreal. If you continue to do so, you will be blocked from editing. Enviroboy^Talk_Cs 07:57, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Please accept this apology. My reverts and warning were not the appropriate response to your edit. Although your edit blanked most of the page, I should have realized from your edit summary that it was not vandalism. As for help with citations, I can point you to WP:Cite but I can't really give you more advice than Pinkadelica's above. Just a note on removing material: you may find it helpful to avoid such drastic blanking. The anti-vandalism software (such as ClueBot) easily mistake those edits for vandalism. I'm not excusing my mistakes; I'm just saying that if you need to blank articles, you may have better results editing in smaller chunks (section-by-section for example). Descriptive edit summaries are always important in that situation. Again, sorry. Enviroboy^Talk_Cs 08:23, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

I would look for sources to support the information that's already on the page. I would only blank it if I'm sure it could not be verified. There is a set of maintenance tags at WP:CTT that alert other users to reference problems. If I can't verify an article but I believe that another editor could, I would use one of those tags. At the end of a the day, if the best way to improve an article is to remove parts of it, just do it. If you need more room than the edit summary provides, you can leave a detailed explanation on the article's talk page and point editors to that explanation from the summary. The summary would say "blanking per talk" or something to that effect. I hope that helps. Enviroboy^Talk_Cs 08:53, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

Please refrain from making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia, as you did to Billy Bush. Your edits appeared to constitute vandalism and have been reverted. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Thank you. --Bongwarrior (talk) 20:34, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Please stop your disruptive editing, such as the edit you made to Billy Bush. If your vandalism continues, you will be blocked from editing Wikipedia. --Bongwarrior (talk) 23:16, 21 May 2008 (UTC)