Guidelines for Creating Citations

An important thing to consider when discussing history is references and sources. When making pages about historical happenings, please try to insert references to sources whenever possible. Detailed instructions on citations can be found here.

Some basic guidelines are below.

Inserting a Reference

The easiest way to insert a reference is to click the bookmark icon on the editing bar. It will insert the <ref></ref> bookends. Then type your reference between the bookends. An example of the reference should look like this:

The Sun is pretty big.<ref>E. Miller, ''The Sun'', (New York: Academic Press, 2005), 23-5.</ref>

Here's what that would look like in your article:

The Sun is pretty big.

Creating a References Section

Once you have citations in your article, you will need to create a references section at the bottom of your page to store them. This process is quite simple. Simply copy this text to the bottom of your article:

==Notes==
<references />

This will create a section at the bottom of your article which will contain the full text of your references. Whenever someone clicks the number reference in your article, it will take them to this section. An example of this section can be found at the bottom of this article.

Multiple Uses of the Same Footnote

If you have multiple pieces of information from a single source that you want to include in your article, you can have them all use the same reference. Instead of displaying as references 1, 2, and 3, all of these references will display as reference 1. So if you type this code in your edit:

This is an example of multiple references to the same footnote.<ref name="multiple">Remember that when you refer to the same footnote multiple times, the text from the first reference is used.</ref>

Here's what it would look like:

This is an example of multiple references to the same footnote.

Such references are particularly useful when citing sources, if different statements come from the same source. Any reused tag should not contain extra content, that will spawn an error. Only use empty tags in this role.

A concise way to make multiple references is to use empty ref tags, which have a slash at the end. Although this may reduce redundant work, please be aware that if a future editor removes the first reference, this will result in the loss of all references using the empty ref tags.

As was stated, when using multiple references to the same source, your <ref> tags need to include a name, something to signify that these references all go together. So, instead of your reference looking <ref>like this</ref>, it would look <ref name ="example">like this</ref>. Please remember that when using this method for citations, all the reference tags after the first don't need any reference tags, and should look like this:

<ref name="example"/>