Help:Citations
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Providing Citations
Providing proper citations or references for content on Open Energy Information is fundamental to the core content policies of the site. Since content must contain no original research and any sources must be verifiable, all articles must have at least one citation.
Entering References in a Form
When contributing a new page (or editing an existing page) that uses a form, you are asked to provide references for the information in the form.
Simply fill in the Title and URL for the reference. The reference is automatically appended to the page when you save the page. You can enter multiple references by choosing "Add a reference". Each reference fields can be updated in the form and these changes are submitted when you save the page. You can also remove references by choosing the "X".
For each of the fields, here is a brief description:
- Title - The title of the web page being referenced.
- URL - The url of the web page being referenced. (Include full url, e.g. http://site.com)
- Name- (Optional) The name to give the reference wikitext tag. Can be used for future references within the wiki article.
In some cases, when editing an existing page, the reference helper may not be able to parse the references and will present a default text area instead. In this case you will have to manually enter your references using the advanced syntax described below (#Entering References in Wikitext). You can always choose to manually enter you references simply by clicking on "Use advanced syntax".
Entering References in Wikitext
When entering references in the main article content of a page, you have to use the advanced syntax to manually specify the reference details.
Online Sources
Since Open Energy Information is an online platform, many of the citations will be for online sources and the {{cite web}} template can be used.
For example:
* {{cite web|title=About NREL|url=http://www.nrel.gov/about/}}
Will render like so.
Other Forms of Citation
For other forms for citation for other sources, please refer to Wikipedia's documentation on citing sources.[1]
Specifying References with the <ref> Tag
To make a reference to a particular citation, you use the <ref> tag in line with their content. The tag will insert a superscript to a footnote that is automatically numbered appropriately and links to a References section at the end of the document. The footnote numbers are automatically calculated for each <ref> tag included in the article.
The <references> tag is then included in a section at the bottom of the document and all the reference content is automatically listed there.
The <ref> and <references> tag
Below is an example of how the <ref> and <references> tags can be used with the {{cite web}} template.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is based in Golden, Colorado.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://nrel.gov/about|title=About NREL}}</ref>
The U.S. Department of Energy is based in Washington, DC.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://energy.gov/about|title=About DOE}}</ref>
==References==
<references/>
Mulitple uses of the same footnote
When you are making use of a footnote multiple times within the same document, it would be useful to not have to repeatedly enter the reference tag and citation of that footnote. In this case, the name attribute of the <ref> tag can be used to give the reference a unique name that can then be later referenced elsewhere in the document. A named reference is specified like so, <ref name="unique"> and can then later be referred to by specifying <ref name="unique"/> later in the document.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is based in Golden, Colorado.<ref name="about-nrel">{{cite web|url=http://nrel.gov/about|title=About NREL}}</ref>
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy.<ref name="about-nrel/>
==References==
<references/>
Separating references from text
Including all references in line with the content of the article can make it difficult to edit the article content. For this reason wikitext supports including all of the named references within the <references> tag at the bottom of the article.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is based in Golden, Colorado.<ref name="about-nrel"/>
The U.S. Department of Energy is based in Washington, DC.<ref name="about-doe"/>
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory is a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy.<ref name="about-nrel/>
==References==
<references>
<ref name="about-nrel">{{cite web|url=http://nrel.gov/about|title=About NREL}}</ref>
<ref name="about-doe">{{cite web|url=http://energy.gov/about|title=About DOE}}</ref>
</references>
For more information about using specifying references, please see the Mediawiki documentation.[2]