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If your knowledge of the source is secondhand—that is, if you have read Jones (2010), who cited Smith (2009), and you want to use what Smith (2009) said—make clear that your knowledge of Smith is based on your reading of Jones. When citing the source, write the following (this formatting is just an example): John Smith (2009).
If your work has been tagged, please provide a reliable source for the statement, and discuss if needed. You can add a citation by selecting from the drop-down menu at the top of the editing box. In markup, you can add a citation manually using ref tags. There are also more elaborate ways to cite sources.
Sources that are reliable for some material are not reliable for other material. For instance, otherwise unreliable self-published sources are usually acceptable to support uncontroversial information about the source's author. You should always try to use the best possible source, particularly when writing about living people.
The easiest way to start citing on Wikipedia is to see a basic example. The example here will show you how to cite a newspaper article using the {} template (see Citation quick reference for other types of citations). Copy and paste the following immediately after what you want to reference:
Citations are important in Wikipedia to ensure that information comes from actual, reliable sources (WP:V, WP:CITE). There are three preferred ways of citing sources: Footnotes; Footnotes with list-defined references; Shortened footnotes
For a citation to appear in a footnote, it needs to be enclosed in "ref" tags. You can add these by typing <ref> at the front of the citation and </ref> at the end. . Alternatively you may notice above the edit box there is a row of "markup" formatting buttons which include a <ref></ref> button to the right—if you highlight your whole citation and then click this markup button, it will ...
Inline citations, which link specific reliable sources with specific pieces of information in the article, provide practical support for these policies by making it easier to check the article content. This page applies the advice in the policies, and in the citing sources guideline, to referencing science and mathematics articles. The goal is ...
When you want to cite a source, you usually have to cut and paste various elements—one by one—from the Web page where you found the source into the edit box where you're assembling the citation. But sometimes, computerized tools can vastly simplify your work: You can simply cut and paste the whole citation, not its individual parts.