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Help:Introduction to referencing with Wiki Markup/3

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Verifiability
Why references are important

Inline citations
How to add them

RefToolbar
Citations the easy way

Reliable sources
Which sources are good enough?

Summary
Review of what you've learned


This screencast walks through how to use RefTools (5 mins.)

Manually adding references can be a slow and tricky process. Fortunately, there is a tool called "RefToolbar" built into the Wikipedia edit window, which makes it much easier. To activate it, simply click on "Cite" at the top of the edit window. Position the edit window cursor after the fact or sentence you wish to reference, and then select one of the templates from the dropdown menu. There are different templates suitable for different types of sources:

  • {{cite web}} for references to general websites
  • {{cite news}} for newspapers and news websites
  • {{cite book}} for references to books
  • {{cite journal}} for magazines, academic journals and papers

This will pop-up a window, where you fill in as much information as possible about the source, and give a unique name for it in the "Name" field. Then click the "Insert" button and it will add the required wikitext in the edit window.

Often you will want to use the same source more than once in an article to cite multiple facts. In this case, you can click the clipboard labelled "Named references" in the toolbar, and select a previously added source to re-use.

Don't forget to add a "References" section if there isn't one already (see the previous page if you've forgotten how).