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Tutorial/Citing sources

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For articles in the ISOGG Wiki we hope to provide references and footnotes wherever appropriate to support factual statements. References are particularly important for supporting potentially controversial statements. It is best to use inline citations so that other editors and readers can verify the information you add.

References/Footnotes

The easiest way to create an inline citation is with a footnote. You can create a reference or footnote with Wiki markup, by adding ref tags around your source, like this:

<ref>Your Source</ref>

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

{{Reflist}} or <references/>.

That text should be immediately below the section heading ==References==. If that section doesn't exist, you will need to add it (both the heading and either the "Reflist" or "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:

<ref>[http://www.nytimes.com/article_name.html Article in The New York Times]</ref>

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

<ref>Name of author, [http://www.nytimes.com/article_name.html "Title of article"], ''The New York Times'', date</ref>

It is not recommended to use bare URLs for your external link references, because if the link disappears it might be difficult to retrace the original article.

If you respond better to visual information, you may find the guide below useful (click show on the right hand side).