Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Help desk/Archives/2015 October 28

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October 28

01:39:01, 28 October 2015 review of submission by RDbassK

• RDbassK (talk · contribs)
  • Draft:Robert E. Kohn (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

I am creating an article for the very first time. I have many internal footnotes to add in, but I am unable to understand the instructions or mechanisms for adding them in.

The article I am working is at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Robert_E._Kohn

Can someone please send me to plain, clear instructions on how to create the footnotes / references section?

Thank you!

RDbassK (talk) 01:39, 28 October 2015 (UTC)

Hello @RDbassK:, you are very close to getting it right; your coding is correct, but what you need to notice is that when you put material between the "ref" tags, it forms a footnote, which then displays at the end. Since right now all your "ref"-bracketed content is at the very end of the draft, all your footnotes, the little blue clickable numbers, are all just piled at the bottom of the "Writing on the fine arts" section, instead of being next to the specific fact they support which is the idea of footnotes. So if you have, for example, a newspaper article that documents that Kohn got his PhD in 1969, you need to take that reference, within its "ref" tags, and paste it at the end of the sentence. Then it will appear as a little clickable blue number at the end of the sentence, and automatically list itself under References at the bottom of the page. The guideline WP:Referencing for beginners helps explain this.

The larger issue though, works by Kohn himself are not "references". Those are primary sources, but what a reference is is a secondary source which proves a fact about Kohn. An encyclopedia is a Tertiary source, a compilation of Secondary sources organized for a reader. An encyclopedia is not breaking research based on the original raw documents (such as Kohn's own work). So there should be little/no footnotes to Kohn's own works, because there's not any doubt he wrote them, but what we do need footnotes to is articles, books, etc that discuss Kohn from an outside expert's perspective". The guideline WP:Reliable sources and WP:Secondary sources are worth a quick glance there. You simply can't publish an encyclopedia article largely cited to the subject himself. MatthewVanitas (talk) 09:49, 28 October 2015 (UTC)