WikiQueer:Referencing for beginners with citation templates

Please see citing sources. When possible, please use the reference method others have used in an article. There are many choices. Please don't change an article from one citation format to another. Try to use the format used by the first contributor.

This is one reference method, for news sources only -- that is, where you have found the reference in a newspaper or magazine, or their online equivalents. (Do not use "cite news" for press releases, or for ordinary web pages that are not news items.) Copy and paste the following immediately after what you want to reference:

Simply put as much information as you can to the right of the equal signs. Example: Inflation seems unlikely in 2010.

Reporter Patricia Sabatini goes to the right of the "author =". Put the newspaper's name in "work" or "newspaper", so that it automatically appears in italics (do not use "publisher" for the name of the source; "publisher" is not usually needed in news citations). Leave fields like "pages =" blank if it doesn't apply. The accessdate is when you fetched the reference (relevant only to references on the web; delete it in the case of printed sources); the date (essential information - much more important than access date) is when the article was published. The url is the line like http://www.etc ; copy and paste the url in if available.

Try not to make arbitrary changes to the words left of the equal sign ("author", "title", "url", etc) because by and large any variations will cause those elements of the reference to be unrecognized and omitted. There are more fields possible like ISBN, co-authors which you can add; see citing sources.

When editing, you'll see your reference next to the text; but after saving, readers will only see a reference number there; your reference should appear below. Like this:

That's it! You're done. Good luck!

If you get a warning about a missing "References" section at the end of the page, just add it:

== References ==

Experiment on sandbox pages or your user talk page.

Caveat: while this reference method is popular, some editors prefer alternatives (see below). It varies by article. When possible, use the citation style already used by others in the same article. See Citing sources for further discussion.