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Citations linked to the article are those references whose wikicode was built during
the edition session of the current article. Every citation or reference you create is, by
default, linked to the current article. When you eliminate an article, the linked citations
are automatically eliminated as well. But you can also copy or move citations from one
article to another with the help of this assistant. A special protected record named
!Citations not linked to any article was implemented to let the user save references for
future editions, so you do not loose these citations when you delete the articles from
which these citations were built.
If you've read many Wikipedia articles, then you've seen plenty of inline citations.
These are usually small numbered footnotes like this: [1] They are generally added
either directly following the fact they support, or at the end of the sentence they
support, following any punctuation. When clicked, they take the reader to a full source
in a reference section of the article.
When editing a page using the popular (most common) footnotes style, inline citations
are usually between <ref> and </ref> tags.
The information within references is displayed together in one place on a page,
wherever the {{Reflist}} template is present. This will usually be in a section titled
"References". If you are creating a brand new page, or adding references to a page
that didn't previously have any, don't forget to add a references section like the one
below. If you don't, the citations you added won't be visible to readers. Such section
should be placed at the end of the article and before the Categories:
== References ==
{{Reflist}}
This is by far the most popular system for inline citations, but sometimes you will find
other styles being used in an article, such as references in parentheses. As a general
rule, the first major contributor to an article gets to choose the referencing system used
there. If an article uses a different system than the one you're used to, just copy an
existing reference when adding any new reference, then modify it appropriately; don't
mix styles.
Manually adding references can be a slow and tricky process. But Offline MediaWiki
Code Editor offers an offline way to perform this operation quick and safe through this
assistant although you do not know the sintax. The assistant is based on the templates
{{Cite book}} , {{Cite journal}}
and {{Cite web}} which are also included among the
templates stored in the database (see: Templates).
The Citations linked to the article are those citations tied to the active article. To be
linked to an article does not mean that the citation is included into the the article, not
appear in the reference list at the end of the article. For a citation to be actual part of
an article it must be inserted into the text with the help of this assistant.
The purpose of this assistant is to help you to build the wikitext of the citation, saving
you all the efforts to learn the sintax nor building the wikitext by yourself. This assistant
offers you the options to:
1. Build citations to be inserted into the active article
2. Move a citation to another article
3. Link a copy of a citation to another article.
4. Eliminate citations
5. Rebrand citations
Every citation must be identified with a unique name. Try to give them short and
informative names to handle them better. During the edition of an article you may
declare all necessary citations or references you need. The citations so declared will
be automatically linked to the active article. There are several types of citations you
can built with the help of this assistant:
1. Citations of web pages or news.
2. Citations of books.
3. Citations of journal articles.
Each basic type has its own sintax. Note that some data are required, while other are
not. If you fill all the required parameters of a citation you may insert the citation into
the article clicking the command button <Insert citation>.
Citations of web pages
For web citations or news, it is required the URL of the page and its title. Other data
are optional, but it is recommended to include also the date of publication and the
name of the website.
Citations of books
For citations of books it is only required the title, although it is recommended to include
authors' names, year of publication, ISBN, page and place of publication.
Citations of journal articles
For citations of journals it is required to enter the authors' names, year of publication,
article title and name of the journal, but it is also recommended to include data of
consultation, publisher, volume, number and pages.
The citations are kept linked to the article, until they are eliminated or moved to other
article.
First appearance of a citation in an article
Often you will want to use the same source more than once in an article to cite multiple
facts. In this case, Note that when the wikicode of a citation is generated prior to
insertion, the assistant builds two versions of the same citation: One 'long' and another
'short'. For the first insertion of a citation into an article the assistant uses the 'long'
(full) version.
When you insert a citation into an article, the text of the citation will not be shown in the
site of the insertion in the browser window, but a numbered link instead. Don't forget to
add a "References" section at the end of the article.
Additional appearances
To all additional appearances of the same article the assistant will insert the 'short'
version which does not contains all data, but only the identifier of the citation.
Citations are saved
The application stores the wikicode relative to all citations linked to the article, although
some of them may have not been inserted into the article. In other words, what is
saved is only the wikicode generated by the assistant, but no the individual data
employed to build the wikicode. Both long and short codes are saved, so you can
reutilize this code for future articles.
Limitations of the assistant
This assistant does not cover all possible kinds of citations. So if you need to cite some
other kind of source you may turn to the repository for templates and choose the type
of citation you are interested in. The repository contains templates for citing
conferences, encyclopedias, court decisions, radio or TV episodes, maps, patents,
audio-video media and video games.
In interest of simplicity, the assistant for citations does not consider all parameters of
the different templates involved, but only the most commonly used parameters. If you
need to include more parameters in any of your citations, open the Repository of
Templates and select the Citations or references group of templates. Then choose
the template of your interest and insert it in the Edit Window. Finally fill the data
manually.
List of authors
For the sake of simplicity the assistant was designed to list authors without credit. If
you need to cite a credited author you should manually change the parameter |authors
= for the parameters |last = and |first = (for the last name and the first name of the
author) in the generated code. For several credited authors you should then use the
parameters |last =, |first =, |last2 = and |first2 = and so forth. But you have to
change these parameters manually (see the repository of templates for more options).
Common errors in citations
Dates
The |access-date= (or its alias, |accessdate=) is the date that the online resource
addressed by |url= was added to the article. If |access-date= has been included in the
citation without |url= then this message appears. If the citation does not use a web link,
then |access-date= is redundant and should be removed. Without |url=, |access-date=
is not considered useful. To resolve this error, provide a value for |url= or remove
|access-date=.
URL value
The URL parameter must begin with a supported URI scheme. The URI schemes
http://, https:// and the protocol relative scheme // are most commonly used; irc://,
ircs://, ftp://, news:, mailto: and gopher:// are also supported.
Invisible character errors
An error is reported for citations with parameter values that contain invisible or non-
printable characters known as control characters; the error includes the position at
which the character can be found. For example: Line feeds U+0010 (LF) and carriage
returns, U+0013 (CR) are common errors.
To resolve invisible-character errors, remove or replace the identified character.
Because these characters are mostly invisible, the error message identifies the
character's position in the parameter value counted from the left.
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