User talk:JFPo42
Welcome![edit]
Hi JFPo42! I noticed your contributions and wanted to welcome you to the Wikipedia community. I hope you like it here and decide to stay.
As you get started, you may find this short tutorial helpful:
Alternatively, the contributing to Wikipedia page covers the same topics.
If you have any questions, we have a friendly space where experienced editors can help you here:
If you are not sure where to help out, you can find a task here:
Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date.
Happy editing! Heiro 18:03, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
Citations and formatting references[edit]
Please see here for a breakdown of how to format citations to make them appear correctly. Also included is a list of different citation templates for use with different kinds of sources such as news, journals, books, etc.( Help:Citation Style 1 )
But for your immediate first problem, for citations to appear correctly they must have this bit of code in front <ref> and this bit of code </ref> at the end to close. Everything placed between those two bits of code will appear in the references/footnotes/citations section as a numbered footnote/citation. For example, if you placed this in an article, <ref>[https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/polk/about "Polk-Pollock-Pogue DNA Project"]</ref> [1], you get this result (see list below). Which is usable, and within the rules here. But kind of bare.
Many, including myself, use templates like this one for a generic book cite: <ref>{{Cite book| title= YOUR Pollock BOOK |author= Name, Arthur | publisher = Generic Publisher Ltd| location = London |date = 2021 | page = 100 | url = https://www.familytreedna.com/groups/polk/about }}</ref> [2], which gets this result (again, see list). (in order for cites to show in the cites section, the page has to have this bit of code, {{reflist}} )
- ^ "Polk-Pollock-Pogue DNA Project"
- ^ Name, Arthur (2021). YOUR Pollock BOOK. London: Generic Publisher Ltd. p. 100.
There are many other fields you can add to the templates such as editors, multiple authors (say 6 individuals on a scientific paper), etc. And as I mentioned above you can find them for specific kinds of cites such as to a newpaper, scientific journal, website, etc. that each have their own additional add on fields specific to that kind of source. You can copy and paste the code for the cites, and then add in the specific information for the generic information in my example. It a takes a bit of time here to get some fluency with the markup code for such things, but it's not too bad after a little bit of messing with it.
A good place to play around with and experiment to learn how to do this, without breaking live articles, is your sandbox, which should be on the bar at the top right of your screen, look for the red word "Sandbox". You can play around with code there until you have figured out what configuration is the correct one to use, then copy and paste it into an article. (make sure to paste {{reflist}} somewhere on the page for the references to show up) You can also create whole articles that way, or rewrite sections and then copy and paste the finished result into live articles. Heiro 05:56, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
- And, just for clarity, even though I used the FTDNA link above for my examples on how to format citations, that link and all such links to groups at FTDNA should not be used as links within the body of an article at WP. To do so implies it is an WP:RS, and since it fails our policies for sources, it is not. A link can be included in the "External links" section at the bottom, but that is the only appropriate use for it in a Wikipedia article.Heiro 06:39, 16 October 2021 (UTC)