Gamepedia Help Wiki:Tutorial/References

This is an encyclopedia, so remember that it's a necessity to include references listing websites, newspapers, articles, books and other sources you have used to write or expand articles. All additions and corrections should be based on reliable, third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. These sources should verify the information but you must not copy and paste text you find anywhere, except for short quotations. New articles and statements added to existing articles may be deleted by others if unreferenced or referenced poorly or if they are copyright violations.

Manually typing references
The most usual way to create an inline citation is with a footnote. You can create a footnote with Wiki markup, by adding ref tags around your source, like this:



If you are adding the first footnote to an article, you also need to make sure that there is text that tells Gamepedia's software to display footnotes. That text will look like this:



That text should be immediately below the section heading  == References == . If that section does not exist, you will need to add it (both the heading "references" text above). Place the new section near the bottom of the article, just above the "External links" section (if that exists).

Once you have saved your edit, the ref tags will convert your citation of a source into a footnote reference (like this one [1] ), with the text of the citation appearing in the References section at the bottom of the article.

If the citation you are placing between the ref tags as your source is a link to an external website, place the website address (URL) within single square brackets along with some text, which the reader will see as a link. For example:

Though it is not required, it is highly recommended to provide more information than that in a footnote. Here is a more complete footnote:



It is not recommended to use bare URLs (URL with no other information about the source) for your external link references, because of link rot.

Although material that is from external websites is a common reference source, Gamepedia has no preference for online sources. If your source is a book, journal, magazine, newspaper article, documentary or other source, then you would place identification information about that source between the ref tags.

For a more visual summary, see the guide below.

{| class="wikitable" ! style="width:400px" | Inline citation code; what you type in 'edit mode' ! What it produces when you save
 * + Formatting references using inline citations
 * - valign="top"
 * - valign="top"
 * Two separate citations.
 * Two separate citations.
 * Multiple citation   use.
 * Multiple citation use.
 * == References ==
 * == References ==
 * == References ==