Citation

From GamefowlWiki, the gamefowl encyclopedia

This page is considered a content guideline on GamefowlWiki. It is generally accepted among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow. However, it is not set in stone and should be treated with common sense and the occasional exception. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on this page's talk page.

A citation or bibliographic citation is a reference to a book, article, web page, or other published item with sufficient details to identify the item uniquely. Unpublished writings or speech, such as working papers or personal communications, are also sometimes cited. Citations are provided in scholarly works, bibliographies and indexes. The word citation may also mean: the act of citing a work, that is, providing a reference to the work in the form of a bibliographic citation.

Ruminations are used in scholarly works to give credit to or to acknowledge the influence of previous works or to refer to authority. Citations permit readers to put claims to the test by consulting earlier works. Authors often engage earlier work directly, explaining why they agree or differ from earlier views. Ideally, sources are primary (first-hand), recent, with good ethos, credentials, and citations.

Varying rules and practices for citations apply in scientific citation, legal citation, the theology citation of authority (e.g. the isnad which "back" the hadith in Islam), the prior art that applies in patent law, and marks applied in copyright. Definitions of plagiarism, uniqueness or innovation, trustworthiness or reliability vary so widely among these fields that the use of citations has no simple common practice.

Citations may be made in the body of text as parenthetical citations, in footnotes at the bottom of pages, or in endnotes at the end of the document. They are generally also listed in a works cited page or section—also called the bibliography, source list or list of references. The recording, use and re-use of citations on computers is facilitated by reference management software, also known as citation management software.

Citation indices list published citations of a given work. In addition to being used for bibliographic discovery, they are used in bibliometrics for citation analysis and calculation of citation impact.

Why sources should be cited

The Gamefowlfacts.org Wiki is by its very nature a work by people with widely different knowledge and skills. The reader needs to be assured that the material within it is reliable: this is especially important where statements are made about controversial issues. The purpose of citing your sources is:

To improve the overall credibility and authoritative nature of Gamefowl and Cockfighting at GamefowlFacts.Org.
To credit a source for providing useful material and to avoid claims of plagiarism.
To show that your edit is not original research.
To ensure that the content is credible and can be checked by any reader or editor.
To help users find additional information on the topic.
To reduce the likelihood of editorial disputes, or to resolve any that arise.
To ensure that material about living persons complies with Biographies of Living persons.

When to cite sources

When you add content

All material that is challenged or likely to be challenged needs a source.

The need for citations is especially important when writing about opinions held on a particular issue. Avoid weasel words where possible, such as, "Some people say ..." Instead, make your writing verifiable: find a specific person or group who holds that opinion and give a citation to a reputable publication in which they express that opinion. Remember that Gamefowlfacts.org is not a place for expressing your own opinions or for original research.

Because this wiki is in English, English-language sources should be given whenever possible, and should always be used in preference to other language sources of equal calibre. However, do give references in other languages where appropriate. If quoting from a different language source, an English translation should be given with the original-language quote beside it.

When you quote someone

You should always add a citation when quoting published material, and the citation should be placed directly after the quotation, which should be enclosed within double quotation marks — "like this" — or single quotation marks if it is a quote-within-a-quote — "and here is such a 'quotation' as an example."

When you check content added by others

You can also add sources for material you did not write. Adding citations is an excellent way to contribute to the Gamefowlfacts.org wiki.

How to cite sources

Inline citations

Information can be supported with references in two ways: the provision of general references – books or other sources that support a significant amount of the material in the article – and inline citations, that is, references within the text, which provide source information for specific statements. Inline citations are needed for statements that are challenged or likely to be challenged, including contentious material about persons, and for all quotations.

Say where you got it

It is improper to copy a citation from an intermediate source without making clear that you saw only that intermediate source. For example, you might find some information on a web page which says it comes from a certain book. Unless you look at the book yourself to check that the information is there, your reference is really the web page, which is what you must cite. The credibility of your article rests on the credibility of the web page, as well as the book, and your article must make that clear.

Full citations

All citation techniques require detailed full citations to be provided for each source used. Full citations must contain enough information for other editors to identify the specific published work you used.

Full citations for books typically include: the name of the author, the title of the book or article, the date of publication, and page numbers. The name of the publisher, city of publication, and ISBN are optional. For journal articles, include volume number, issue number and page numbers. Citations for newspaper articles typically include the title of the article in quotes, the byline (author's name), the name of the newspaper in italics, date of publication, page number(s), and the date you retrieved it if it is online.

For two books by the same author, published the same year, using Harvard referencing, this might be:

Clancy, T. (1996a). Executive Orders. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. ISBN 0-399-14218-5
Clancy, T. (1996b). Marine. New York: Berkley Books. ISBN 0-425-15454-8

If the article in which the preceding examples appeared used footnotes rather than Harvard citations, the letter after the year would be omitted.

In the Harvard and embedded links citation systems, full citations appear at the end of the article in a section labeled "References." In the footnotes system, full citations may appear in a "References" section or may appear directly in the footnotes.

When citing books and articles, provide page numbers where appropriate. Page numbers must be included in a citation that accompanies a specific quotation from, or a paraphrase or reference to, a specific passage of a book or article. The edition of the book should be included in the reference section, or included in the footnote, because pagination can change between editions. Page numbers are especially important in case of lengthy unindexed books. Page numbers are not required when a citation accompanies a general description of a book or article, or when a book or article, as a whole, is being used to exemplify a particular point of view.

Various citation templates can be used to format full citations. Template for specific formats, such as ^{[citation needed]}, are common. The general ^{[citation needed]} template has additional functionality to support Harvard referencing.

Harvard referencing

Under the Harvard referencing system, a book is cited in the text in parentheses, after the section, sentence, or paragraph for which the book was used as a source, using the surname of the author and the year of publication only, with the parentheses closing before the period, as in (Author 2005). These citations can be generated by using inline ^{[citation needed]} templates.

A full citation is then placed at the end of the text in an alphabetized list of "References". If full citations use the Template:Tl template, the Harvard citation as above will include an automatic link to the full citation.

Page numbers must be included in a citation that accompanies a specific quotation from, or a paraphrase or reference to, a specific passage of a book or article. They usually follow the date in this way: (Author 2006:28).

Footnotes

A footnote is a note placed at the bottom of a page of a document to comment on a part of the main text, or to provide a reference for it, or both. The connection between the relevant text and its footnote is indicated by a number or symbol which appears both after the relevant text and before the footnote.

Place a <ref> ... </ref> where you want a footnote reference number to appear in an article—type the text of the note between the ref tags.
Place the <references/> tag in a "Notes" or "References" section near the end of the article—the list of notes will be generated here.

Example:

The Sun is pretty big,<ref>Miller, E: "The Sun", page 23. Academic Press, 2005</ref> however the Moon is not so big.<ref>Smith, R: "Size of the Moon", ''Scientific American'', 46(78):46</ref> == References == <references/>

Result:

The Sun is pretty big,<ref>Miller, E: "The Sun", page 23. Academic Press, 2005</ref> however the Moon is not so big.<ref>Smith, R: "Size of the Moon", Scientific American, 46(78):46</ref>

Section headings

Recommended section names to use for footnotes in Gamefowlfacts.org are:

==Notes==
==Footnotes==
==References==

Maintaining a separate "References" section in addition to "Notes"

It can be helpful when footnotes are used that a separate "References" section also be maintained, in which the sources that were used are listed in alphabetical order. With articles that have lots of footnotes, it can become hard to see after a while exactly which sources have been used, particularly when the footnotes also contain explanatory text. A References section, which lists citations in alphabetical order, helps readers to see at a glance the quality of the references used.

If such a section is included, the footnotes should be in a separate section entitled "Notes" or "Footnotes." Where an alphabetical list of references is provided, "short footnotes" may be used, where the footnotes contain only an author, perhaps title, and page number, without giving a full citation in the footnote itself.

Placement of footnote reference tags

Some words, phrases or facts must be referenced mid-sentence, while others are referenced at the end. Frequently, a reference tag will coincide with punctuation and many editors put the reference tags after punctuation (except dashes), as is recommended by the Chicago Manual of Style (CMoS).<ref>"Note reference numbers. The superior numerals used for note reference numbers in the text should follow any punctuation marks except the dash, which they precede. The numbers should also be placed outside closing parentheses." (The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th ed. 1993, Clause 15.8, p. 494)</ref> Some editors prefer the style of journals such as |Nature which place references before punctuation. Each article should be internally consistent, but editing solely to change from one style to another throughout an article is deprecated unless there is a consensus to make the change.

Notes

footnote examples

Embedded links

Web pages referenced in an article can be linked to directly by enclosing the URL in square brackets. For example, a reference to a newspaper article can be embedded like: [http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1601858,00.html], which looks like this: [1]

A full citation is also required in a References section at the end of the article.

*Plunkett, John. [http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1601858,00.html "Sorrell accuses Murdoch of panic buying"], ''The Guardian'', October 27 2005. Accessed October 27 [[2005]].

which appears as:

Plunkett, John. "Sorrell accuses Murdoch of panic buying", The Guardian, October 27 2005. Accessed October 27 2005.

Dealing with citation problems

Unsourced material

If an article has no references, and you are unable to find them yourself, you can tag the article with the template Template:Tl, so long as the article is not nonsensical or a BLP, in which case request admin assistance. If a particular claim in an article lacks citation and is doubtful, consider placing Template:Tl after the sentence or removing it. Consider the following in deciding which action to take:

1. If it is doubtful but not harmful to the whole article or to Gamefowlfacts.org, use the Template:Tl tag, but remember to go back and remove the claim if no source is produced within a reasonable time.

2. If it is doubtful and harmful, you should remove it from the article; you may want to move it to the talk page and ask for a source, unless you regard it as very harmful or absurd, in which case it should not be posted to a talk page either. Use your common sense.

All unsourced and poorly sourced contentious material should be removed from articles and talk pages immediately. It should not be tagged.

What to do when a reference link "goes dead"

When a link in the References section or Notes section "goes dead", it should be repaired or replaced if possible, but not deleted. External links/Further reading sections are not as important, but bad links in those sections should also be fixed. Often, a live substitute link can be found. In most cases, one of the following approaches will preserve an acceptable citation:

Some pages can be recovered from the Internet Archive or WebCite. Just go to http://www.archive.org/ or http://www.webcitation.org, respectively, and search for the old link by URL. Make sure that your new citation mentions the date the page was archived by the Internet Archive. In case of WebCite, any broken URL can be searched for and replaced using the format http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=URL&date=DATE, where URL is the URL that is broken and needs to be restored. The DATE variable is optional and indicates the (approximate) caching date. For example, http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Health_Report_July_2003.pdf&date=2005-12-31 retrieves a copy of the URL http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Health_Report_July_2003.pdf which is closest to the date of Dec 31st, 2005 (in this example the actual caching date was 21 days before the requested date). WebCite allows on-demand prospective archiving and is not crawler-based, i.e. pages are only archived if the author has requested archiving when he cited the piece for the first time, which is highly recommended.

If this was a non-blind citation of web-only material, it may be worth the effort to search the target site for an equivalent page at a new location, an indication that the whole site has moved, etc.
If the link was merely a "convenience link" to an online copy of material that originally appeared in print, and an appropriate substitute cannot be found, it is acceptable to drop the link but keep the citation.
If you cannot find the page on the Internet Archive, remember that you can often find recently deleted pages in Google's cache. They will not be there long, and it is no use linking to them, but this may let you find the content, which can be useful in finding an equivalent page elsewhere on the Internet and linking to that.

If none of those strategies succeed, do not remove the inactive reference, but rather record the date that the original link was found to be inactive — even inactive, it still records the sources that were used, and it is possible hard copies of such references may exist, or alternatively that the page will turn up in the near future in the Internet Archive, which deliberately lags by six months or more. When printed sources become outdated, scholars still routinely cite those works when referenced.

Tools

Template builder — Given an ISBN, a PubMed ID, etc., output a citation which can be pasted into a Gamefowlfacts.org wiki article.
Reference generator — generates wikicode for journals, webpages, and other commonly cited sources.

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