Citation

Rationale

When editing this wiki, it is important to keep track of the origin of the text that you add. Contributing from other sources, such as books, articles, and websites, is encouraged. However, you must be careful to cite the original source. Good citations allow users of this wiki to sort out information and opinions added to the wiki and decide how reliable that information is.

When gathering from books, articles, and websites, just jot down basic information about the source. Then add that to the wiki when you save your edit. It doesn't have to be very detailed, but more detail is always helpful. The important thing is that other users will be able to figure out where the text came from so that they can get to it if they want to.

General Guidelines

Books

If you grab text from a book, you can just keep track of the title, author, and page. The year the book was published is also helpful. A link to the book on Google Books, Project Gutenberg, Amazon, or somewhere else on the web is even more helpful. For help with creating links, click here.

Websites

If you grab text from a website, make sure you at least paste in the web address (URL) of the page you copied the text from. Other information such as the title of the web page, name of the author, and date that you accessed the web page should also be added if the information is available.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has a helpful section about citing its articles. Wikipedia also provides a tool to generate citations for particular articles. For the cite tool, see [[1]], or follow the "Cite this page" link in the toolbox on the left of the page in the article you wish to cite.

Print Articles

If you copy text from written articles or newspapers, include the name of the magazine or newspaper and the article date. In this case, it may just be easier to find the article online, since many magazines and newspapers have websites with the same information. If you can find it on the web, treat it like any other website and at least paste in the web address.

Inline Citation

For citing works inside of an article, using <ref>...</ref> tags is recommended. For more information about the different methods of inline citation, read Wikipedia's guide.

Using the ref tag

To create a footnote, use the <ref>...</ref> syntax at the appropriate place in the article text, for example:

• Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.<ref>Howard Zinn, Howard. [http://www.progressive.org/mag_zinn0308 ''Election Madness'']. The Progressive, March 2008.</ref>

....which will be displayed something like:

• Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.[1]

It will also be necessary to generate the list of footnotes (where the citation text is actually displayed); for this, see Wikipedia's footnote guide.

Lazy Examples

Some form of citation is better than none. Below are some examples of how to cite works within an article, the lazy way. Let's say I added this quote:

Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.

Here are examples of ways I could cite my work:

Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens. - Howard Zinn, "Election Madness" (The Progressive, March 2008)

Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens. Howard Zinn, http://www.progressive.org/mag_zinn0308

Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens. - Howard Zinn, The Progressive March 2008