User talk:Ancient Gardener
Welcome!
Hello, Ancient Gardener, and
- The five pillars of Wikipedia
- Tutorial
- How to edit a page and How to develop articles
- How to create your first article (using the Article Wizardif you wish)
- Manual of Style
I hope you enjoy editing here and being a
{{helpme}} before the question. Again, welcome! Everard Proudfoot (talk) 21:32, 30 June 2010 (UTC)Recipes
Please don't add recipes to Wikipedia articles, especially if they come from copyrighted books. If the recipe is not copyrighted, Wikibooks would be a more useful location. Everard Proudfoot (talk) 21:32, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
Plant article conventions
Hi Ancient Gardener, It's nice to see some new plant articles being created, with references yet! I've formatted a few of the recent Thymus articles you've written, using some of the standard Wikipedia guidelines for references, and for putting taxoboxes in plant articles. You can see
Editing Instructions
I am ashamed to admit that, despite having spent hours poring over the instructions for adding footnotes and references to a Wiki article/article edit, I still keep getting it wrong. <sob> Ancient Gardener (talk) 19:21, 13 October 2010 (UTC)
Adding references to an article has two main steps. The first is adding the reference after the sourced statement. It always includes the tags (without the quotes) "<ref></ref>" which enclose the reference. There are some fancy ways of doing references, but the most simple is in the format "<ref>Smith, Jane. ''Name of Book''. Cambridge University Press, 2010. p. 1.</ref>". An ISBN number is also handy, but not absolutely required.
- Then, you need to add a section at the end of the article that looks like this:
- ==Notes==
- {{reflist}}
- That 'reflist' template automatically places the reference in the article under the "Notes" section, and adds a footnote number where you placed the reference in the article. You can see all of this explained simply at Wikipedia:Citations#A quick how-to.
- If you want to use the same reference later in the article, then in the first instance of the reference you make the first half of the 'ref' tag read <ref name="Smith">name of book, etc.</ref>. Then later in the article you simply have to add "<ref name="Smith" />" and it will duplicate the footnote # of the first instance. Also, with references, you only need to add the reference at the end of a sentence of even the entire paragraph if it's all supported by the reference.
- By the way, HTML tags can be very unhelpful, because it makes it hard to edit someone else's work. For example, typical HTML italic tags are <i></i>. They work on wikipedia, but nobody uses them. Instead they use two apostrophes before and after the word, so that ''italic'' is changed to italic by the wiki software. Three apostrophes before and after a word or phrase make it bold. Five apostrophes before and after a phrase make it bold italics.
- In future, if you have a question, it's better to ask at someone else's talk page, since not many people would be Help:Wiki markup explains wiki markup at more length. Good luck! First Light (talk) 02:30, 14 October 2010 (UTC)]