Swalker2786

Welcome!

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Happy editing! Allenjambalaya (talk) 10:10, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Welcome!

Hello, Swalker2786, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with Wiki Education; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

I hope you enjoy editing here. If you haven't already done so, please check out the student training library, which introduces you to editing and Wikipedia's core principles. You may also want to check out the Teahouse, a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to helping new users. Below are some resources to help you get started editing.

Handouts
Choosing an article to edit Editing an article • Add images to articles Citing sources on Wikipedia
Additional Resources
You can find answers to many student questions on our Q&A site, ask.wikiedu.org

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:21, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Reusing citations

If you want to cite page numbers, you can cite the source without page numbers and then add the page numbers using the rp template.

To use it, select Insert -> Template from the drop-down menu while you're in edit mode and then type rp in the search box that shows up. This will then give you the option of adding a value. Just type the page numbers in (say 12-18) and then click "Insert". Once you publish your changes, the page numbers should be displayed something like this: ^[4]:(12-18) Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:26, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Questions

Hi! I saw that you had a lot of questions - I wanted to try stepping in and answering a few!

• When it comes to ways citations are formatted (ie, how they look), there's no one set way on how this should be done. The format you use can depend on how many pages you're using from the source and your comfort level. For example:

1. If you're using just a single page or section of the book (say, pages 1-2) then it's fine to just list those in the main citation and re-use the citation as needed. This should be done when you are using it to back up a claim that is written on those pages, such as if the pages covered someone's early childhood. You don't have to use the rp (ie, reference page) on this type of source and you can re-use the citation as many times as you like.
2. If you have many pages that you're referencing (say, pages 1, 10, 234, etc) in a single work, you can either make a new citation for each page or you can use one basic citation for the work (without page numbers) and use the rp template behind each time you cite the book. Either one is fine, but the rp template looks a little bit better when it comes to the reference section.

• You should definitely be citing specific pages when it comes to multi-page sources like books and journal articles (ones that are around 5-10+ pages). If it's something like a newspaper or website article, those typically don't have pages and don't need to be specified. The reason this is important is because someone may want to go back and review the source to verify the cited statement, so this makes it easier to find the claim's location in the source.

• To move content over you should have both pages open in edit mode, then copy and paste the content like you would if you were copying from say, one Word document to another. If you don't have both pages open in edit mode, some of the content won't get copied over correctly.

• To format a subheading, click on the heading you want to change while in edit mode with Visual Editor. Then go to the box at the top that says "heading". Click on the arrow - this should bring up various options as far as headings go.

Here are a series of videos on editing with Visual Editor - they were absolutely helpful to me when it came to getting used to Visual Editor and should hopefully be helpful. This one in particular deals with sourcing while this covers headers.

I hope this all helps! ReaderofthePack(formerly Tokyogirl79) (｡◕‿◕｡) 06:20, 1 September 2020 (UTC)