User:TDang/tips on citations

Citations

Here's some material on adding citations. First, at the bottom of the page, there should be a "References" section. I've added this section to the main page. You should add a similar section to extra pages you create. See Template:Reflist for a little information on it.

One that's added, you can put references in the text of a page like footnotes.

I've formatted a reference on the main page in the Online business methods section. I used the Template:Cite_journal template to do so. You can see exactly what I entered by looking at the diff of the change I made. This template is aimed at academic journal articles, and would be useful for any magazine.

The {{cite ...}} part formats the text into a fairly standard bibliographic format. The <ref name=Mahadevan2000> and </ref> at the beginning and end tell the wiki software to create a reference which will be put into the "reflist" at the end of the article. By putting in "name=Mahadevan2000", this allows the reference to be re-used without re-entering the whole thing. Putting in just <ref name=Mahadevan2000/> in another place in the document will replicate the reference link.

Other templates can be found at Category:Citation_templates.

As another example, here's a reference to Information Rules.

And again

The minimum you should do

• Plagiarism rules apply to the Wikibooks project just as in any other writing assignment, so you should quote from or paraphrase sources in limited ways, and reference them as you do.
• Material from various sources should be referenced to those sources with "inline citations". That's even if it's not a quote or paraphrase, so that someone else can look up where you got the information. "Inline citations" are the ones that go in with <ref> ... </ref>, and will appear like footnotes. Eventually, it would be good if these footnotes are nicely formatted, but it's MUCH more important to have the footnotes in there, even if all you provide is a link to a web page or the book's title and author in an unformatted fashion. The format can be cleaned up later.
• If there is source material (such as the book Information Rules) that you use in a significant way, but not for specific items that would get footnotes, still list that in the "References" section.