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Citations are crucial in Wikipedia writing. In other kinds of academic writing, citations are used mainly to give proper credit for the origin of an idea. In Wikipedia, citations can be used for this purpose, but more often they serve two other purposes: Verifiability. A reader with some level of lay knowledge (e.g., scientific literacy) but ...
Ease of use - Simply copy and paste a citation template from WP:CIT and fill in the values to create references. It is much easier than writing references by hand. Uniformity - Citation templates automatically format references uniformly. If consensus changes about the how the templates or references should look, those changes can be easily ...
adding citation templates to an article that already uses a consistent system without templates, or removing citation templates from an article that uses them consistently; changing where the references are defined, e.g., moving reference definitions in the reflist to the prose, or moving reference definitions from the prose into the reflist.
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 can also be placed as external links, but these are not preferred because they are prone to link rot and usually lack the full information necessary to find the original source in cases of link rot. In cases where citations are lacking, the template {} can be added after the statement in question.
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 ...
Template:Ref info, which can aid evaluating what kind of citation style was used to write the article; Based on Citoid: Cite templates in Visual Editor; User:Salix alba/Citoid a client for the mw:citoid server which generates Citation Style 1 templates from urls. Hosted on tools.wmflabs.org: Wikipedia:refToolbar 2.0, used in the Source Editor ...
Five references are provided early on: two textbooks, a specialized monograph on aldol reactions, and two review articles. Most readers would assume that the bulk of the statements in the comparatively short Wikipedia article could be verified by checking any of these references, and so it may only be necessary to provide additional in-line references for controversial statements, for recent ...