Help:Citing sources

Citing sources is important to the reliability of the information present in this wiki because it enables each statement's truthfulness and accuracy to be verified. It also allows the reader to use the wiki as a searchable, cross-referenced index and encyclopedia to the vast collection of source material that makes up the Forgotten Realms universe.

General citation format for books
Although it is possible to cite other sources, the majority of citations will concern books. A set of citation templates based on the Cite book template are available. If you find that a citation template for the book you wish to cite does not exist, see Template:Cite book for guidance on how to create it, or ask a fellow editor for assistance.

Citation without a page number
Written as:

Appears as:

Citation with a single page number
Written as:

Appears as:

Citation with a page range
These are usually used where the text to be cited spans a page division. It should not be used to provide a vague area of a book spanning many pages on which to cite a statement. Written as:

Appears as:

Citation with a page combination
Comma-separate your list of page numbers. This should only be used where it is immediately obvious how the individual pages relate to one another. If this is not clear, you should consider using individual citations instead.

Appears as:

Page numbers not appearing
If you find that the page numbers don't appear as part of your citation, despite following the instructions above carefully, the citation template you are using is probably flawed. Compare it with other citation templates and see if you can spot an error yourself, or report it to an administrator if you feel you need help.

Article-wide citations
This type of citation involves providing a single reference for the entire article. This is only suitable for articles where all of the text can be attributed to a single, continuous section of source material. If this is the case, you can make a citation in the references section of the article, which should come towards the end, although before any external links.

==References==



Using ref tags
To accurately cite an article, which applies unless all of the text can be attributed to a single continuous passage in the source material, you can use tags.

General format
In general, you will use the citation templates discussed above, enclosed within the

Appears as: A dragon is a scaly, winged creature.

The wiki will take care of numbering for you. The exact number applied to each citation is not important, merely that the citation number relates to the correct source in the references section. When using citations in this format, you must add a special tag in the Notes section of the article which informs the wiki where to display the citation details. Although you can use the tag for this, it is recommended you use the refs template, which takes care of extra formatting details for you:

==References==

For an example of how this will appear, please see the end of this article.

Reference names
Give each reference a sensible name. In the example above, the cited book was Monster Manual, the cited page was 45, and the name of the reference was MM-p45, a combination of book acronym and page number. If you wanted to use the same book and page number later in the article to cite another statement, you could write it in shortened format:

Note that this will only work if the full citation appears before any shortened ones, although you can use the shortened format many times in one article if necessary.

Section-wide citations
If an entire section of an article can be attributed to one continuous passage in the source material, it is sufficient to provide a citation at the end of the section. It is assumed that all text in the section is cited by the reference provided.

Individual citations
Most articles will contain references to more than one (and often many) sourcebooks or novels and mostly, the statements in the article are not ordered by source. Each significant statement should have a citation attached, so that the reader is able to find out exactly which book and which page number to view in order to check the statement, or to find out more on the subject. For an example of an article that is comprehensively cited as of 30 March 2007, please see Cormanthor. Each statement can be attributed to a certain page in a specific sourcebook.

Rationale for providing page numbers
On other wikis such as Wikipedia, it is sufficient to provide the details of the book without the page number. The reason for providing page numbers on this wiki is so that the viewer can determine exactly where in a book to start reading. It would be unreasonable to expect a viewer to read through an entire sourcebook in an attempt to find the reference to the statement they are looking for, especially since we as editors are easily able to provide specific page numbers. Also, it is a useful DM tool to be able to use the references section of an article to create a set of bookmarks in specific sourcebooks which she can then read later on, in order to gain the most information possible on a subject.