Wikipedia:Citing sources
You also help users find additional information on the subject; and by giving attribution you avoid plagiarising the source of your words or ideas.
But the need to cite sources is not limited to those situations: editors are always encouraged to add or improve citations for any information in an article.
Material (e.g., the fact that elephants are mammals) that is repeated multiple times in a paragraph does not require an inline citation for every mention.
[a] Inline citations allow the reader to associate a given piece of material in an article with the specific reliable source(s) that support it.
As in the above example, citation markers are normally placed after adjacent punctuation such as periods (full stops) and commas.
When an article cites many different pages from the same source, to avoid the redundancy of many big, nearly identical full citations, most Wikipedia editors use one of these options: The use of ibid., id., or similar abbreviations is discouraged, as they may become broken as new references are added (op.
Listed below is the information that a typical inline citation or general reference will provide, though other details may be added as necessary.
But Wikidata's statements can be directly transcluded into articles; this is usually done to provide external links or infobox data.
When you specify a page number, it is helpful to specify the version (date and edition for books) of the source because the layout, pagination, length, etc.
Be as precise as possible about the version of the source that you are citing; for example, movies are often released in different editions or "cuts".
However, many government agencies do not publish minutes and transcripts but do post video of official meetings online; generally the subcontractors who handle audio-visual are quite precise.
For example: Retrieved 15 July 2011 or you can use the access-date parameter in the automatic Wikipedia:refToolbar 2.0 editing window feature.
It may be possible to format these so that they are automatically activated and become clickable when added to Wikipedia, for example by typing ISBN (or PMID) followed by a space and the ID number.
If a citation without an external link is challenged as unavailable, any of the following is sufficient to show the material to be reasonably available (though not necessarily reliable): providing an ISBN or OCLC number; linking to an established Wikipedia article about the source (the work, its author, or its publisher); or directly quoting the material on the talk page, briefly and in context.
For example, using https://www.domain.com/document.pdf#page=5 as the citation URL displays page five of the document in any PDF viewer that supports this feature.
Name of Encyclopedia I Have Seen, Oxford University Press, p. 29.Or if you are using short citations: Smith (2009), p. 99, cited in Jones (2010), p. 29.The same principle applies when indicating the source of images and other media files in an article.
Other options in diminishing order of popularity are, "Notes", "Footnotes", or "Works cited", although these are more often used to distinguish between multiple end-matter sections or subsections.
With some exceptions discussed below, citations appear in a single section containing only the
Although nearly any consistent style may be used, avoid all-numeric date formats other than YYYY-MM-DD, because of the ambiguity concerning which number is the month and which the day.
If all or most of the citations in an article consist of bare URLs, or otherwise fail to provide needed bibliographic data – such as the name of the source, the title of the article or web page consulted, the author (if known), the publication date (if known), and the page numbers (where relevant) – then that would not count as a "consistent citation style" and can be changed freely to insert such data.
The following are standard practice: When an article is already consistent, avoid: Since September 2020, inline parenthetical referencing has been deprecated on Wikipedia.
As part of the deprecation process in existing articles, discussion of how best to convert inline parenthetical citations into currently accepted formats should be held if there is objection to a particular method.
Embedded links to external websites should not be used as a form of inline citation, because they are highly susceptible to linkrot.
If a citation without an external link is challenged as unavailable, any of the following is sufficient to show the material to be reasonably available (though not necessarily reliable): providing an ISBN or OCLC number; linking to an established Wikipedia article about the source (the work, its author, or its publisher); or directly quoting the material on the talk page, briefly and in context.
Some journal articles have a digital object identifier (DOI); some online newspapers and blogs, and also Wikipedia, have permalinks that are stable.
If you encounter a dead URL being used as a reliable source to support article content, follow these steps prior to deleting it: When using inline citations, it is important to maintain text–source integrity.
[2] Y John Rawls argues that, to reach fair decisions, parties must consider matters as if behind a veil of ignorance.
[2] Y John Rawls argues that, to reach fair decisions, parties must consider matters as if "situated behind a veil of ignorance".
[3] Simple facts such as this can have inline citations to reliable sources as an aid to the reader, but normally the text itself is best left as a plain statement without in-text attribution: Y By mass, oxygen is the third most abundant element in the universe after hydrogen and helium.
Metadata such as this allow browser plugins and other automated software to make citation data accessible to the user, for instance by providing links to their library's online copies of the cited works.
