Help talk:Index/Formatting/References

Carry-over from sandbox draft version

This looks good so far. A couple of notes:

• It may be easier to start off with a simple example that does not use the cite template. For example: <ref>http://forum.citizendium.org/ - Citizendium Forums</ref>. Then introduce the idea of the cite template in the next section.
• Personally I would put the "Single insertion of a reference" section before the "Multiple insertion of the same reference", as the former is the simpler case. I find it always best to start with the easiest things, and work up to the more complex things.
• It may be worth mentioning that if there are a lot of references then {{reflist|2}} can be used.
• I'm not sure on this, and it is a matter of personal taste, but we could split the article up into three different articles in order to simplify the process of the user finding exactly what they want. The first section could be an introduction to what references are, the second could be instructions on inserting the embedded inline references, and the third could be about using the cite template.

Of course, all of these are just opinions and you don't have to follow them. --Chris Key 10:45, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

Chris, thanks for your review. I agree with your first three suggestions and will work them in. As for your last suggestion, I think it is better to keep the article as it is rather than splitting it into three articles. Milton Beychok 04:10, 2 August 2010 (UTC) (This was my response as best as I remember. History of discussion of the sandbox version got lost after the article was created in the namespace.)

Edits and revisions

Typo, spelling and grammar edits are welcome. However, it would be greatly appreciated if major or significant additions, deletions or revisions were first thoroughly discussed on this Talk page. Milton Beychok 03:49, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Broken references

This is a very informative page, and I found the instructions easy to use, thanks. The only thing not perfect is that at the bottom of the page it says:

• Cite error: <ref> tags exist, but no <references/> tag was found

and I am not confident what I should do to fix it. David Finn 01:58, 11 May 2011 (CDT)

Good pick-up, David. I fixed it. The problem was that I repeated the example a second time in the "How to place the reference insertion points" section which meant that another {{reflist}} was needed ... but two {{reflist}}s on one page really causes a mess. So instead of the <ref>..</ref> references in that second example, I used blue colored superscripts. Milton Beychok 11:58, 11 May 2011 (CDT)