Help:维基百科编辑手册/编辑、创建与维护条目/列明您所引用的来源

维基百科编辑手册讨论

在校时,您很可能已經知道如何将脚注和尾注添加到随笔和试卷上。如果您没有添加这些内容,那么试卷或许会得到不及格的评分。

维基百科与不及格评分的相同点是其他编者会回退您的编辑(即把条目准确恢复到您修改之前的样子)。如果您想要在文章中添加能持续存在的新内容,则需要了解维基百科的编辑规则。本章说明了这些规则。若您遵循它们,将有助于确保维基百科条目的准确性和可靠性。

添加来源时(维基百科中称为“引用”),您还需要了解一些技术事项—— 维基百科处理外部链接的方式及创建脚注的过程。本章包括两个教程,向您展示如何创建链接和脚注。

文档指南 编辑

维基百科不是收集未收录文件、报告新发现、发布新理论及记录可能有新闻价值的亲历探察事件的地方。这些内容也许是真实的,但就维基百科方针而言,真实是不够的。信息必须可供查证,这是说必须在维基百科之外已经发布过。简单的说,维基百科不能是事件的第一手来源。如果森林里的一棵树倒下了且别处没报道过,那么维基百科也不会去报道它。

备注:
网络上一些地方欢迎原始的创作和报告。您可以在Wikipedia:Alternative outlets页面看到列表。其中一些,如维基新闻,是维基百科的姐妹项目。

以下是维基百科的文档规则:

你所描述的是准确的(或者说,你的认知是准确的)并不是你在维基百科上断言什么的标准。这些必须有可靠的来源。

理想情况下,如果你添加了一个新内容,或者你添加了一些可能会受到挑战的东西,你绝对必须引用一个已发布的且可靠的来源。

维基百科有以下核心内容:

第一,编辑第一次讨论其中一个中立的观点。其他两项政策主要是关于新内容:没有原始研究和可验证性。在任何维基百科页面上,只需在左侧的搜索框中键入其中一个,然后单击Go。对这些政策的误解比比皆是。本节的其余部分将专门说明一些最大的。

以下为英文原版

Here are Wikipedia's documentation rules in brief:

  • What you know is true (or, more accurately, what you think is true) isn't a criterion for what you can assert on Wikipedia. Information must come from a published, reliable source.
  • Ideally, always cite your source when you add new information to Wikipedia. If you add a quotation, or if you add something that is likely to be challenged, you absolutely must cite a published, reliable source.

Wikipedia has three core policies for content. Chapter 1, Editing for the First Time discussed one of them—Neutral point of view (see the section about content). The other two policies are mostly about new content: No original research and Verifiability. You can (and probably should) read those two policies yourself. The shortcuts are WP:NOR and WP:V; on any Wikipedia page, just type one of those into the search box on the left, and then click Go. Misunderstandings of these policies abound. The rest of this section is devoted to clearing up some of the biggest.

并非所有来源都等同 编辑

只有可靠的信息来源能经受住维基百科社区的审查。但是,是什么使信息源可靠呢?

维基百科《确定可靠来源指南》:“文章应以可靠的第三方来源、准确性、可验证性而著称。”

大多数国际和国家的报纸、杂志和科学期刊都竭力避免错误,维护他们的信誉和读者群体及他们在舆论中的生存。

但另一方面,一名匿名用户可以在网上发布任何东西而不计后果。

一般规则是:“个人出版的书籍、开设的网站和拥有的博客在很大程度上不能作为可靠来源。

Only reliable sources hold up to the scrutiny of the Wikipedia community. But what makes a source reliable? To quote from Wikipedia's Identifying reliable sources guideline (shortcut: WP:IRS): "Articles should rely on reliable, third-party published sources with a reputation for accuracy and for checking the facts." Most international and national newspapers, magazines, and scientific journals put significant resources into avoiding mistakes, to maintain their credibility and readership (and their survival in the face of libel and other lawsuits). On the other hand, an anonymous blogger can feel pretty free to post anything on the Web without worrying about the consequences. The general rule is: "Self-published books, personal Web sites, and blogs are largely not acceptable as sources." (Wikipedia:Verifiability)

链接到支付网站 Linking to pay sites

“我正在写一篇关于约翰尼·雷的文章,我已经找到了关于他早期职业生涯的确切信息。问题是,在一个报社网站上,要求你在阅读他们的档案之前进行注册。如果我链接到那个网页,其他编辑和读者只会得到一个通知页面,要求他们注册。我该怎样引用这些信息呢?” 有时您会找到一个需要注册才能查看其内容的源。例如,报纸通常需要注册,甚至是支付费用,无论是一次性的还是通过订阅的,才能看到内容。在线医学期刊通常也需要付费。 首先,您自己必须能够访问这个源;否则您不应该引用它(除非您正在查看它的纸质版本)。所以,当你必须注册或付费时,你不能期望你的读者这样做。不过,只要你提供一个完整的引文,你就可以链接到这样一个来源,你可以在[35;引文来源引文来源部分]中学习如何做,而不仅仅是链接。 当然,如果你能找到一个同等质量的免费在线资源,那就使用这个资源,而不是限制访问的资源。 如果有免费来源的摘要(并且有一个链接指向完整的访问受限内容),可以链接到所有读者都可以查看的较短的免费信息。 "I'm working on an article about the late Johnny Ray, and I've found the exact information I need about his early career. Trouble is, it's on a newspaper site that requires you to register before you read their archives. If I link to that Web page, other editors and readers will just get a notification page asking them to register. How can I cite that information?"

Sometimes you'll find a source that requires registration to view its content. For example, newspapers often require registration or even payment, either one-time or via subscription, to see content. Online medical journals usually require payment as well.

First, you yourself must have access to this source; otherwise you shouldn't cite it (unless you're looking at a paper version of it). So while you must register or pay, you can't expect your readers to. Still, it's okay to link to such a source as long as you provide a full citation—which you can learn how to do in the section about citing sources—and not just a link.

Of course, if you can find a free-access online source of equal quality, use that source instead of one that restricts access. (The section about writing resources discusses what free resources in general are available to you for writing articles.) And if there's a summary or abstract of the source that's free (and has a link to the full, access-restricted content), it's okay for you to link to the shorter, free information, which all readers can view.

如果在阅读本章之后,您仍然不确定某个源是否可靠,请务必阅读识别可靠源指南。如果你仍然不确定,试着在“可靠消息来源公告板”上询问。

If after reading this chapter you are still unsure whether a source is reliable, be sure to read the Identifying reliable sources guideline. If you remain unsure, try asking at the Reliable sources noticeboard (shortcut: WP:RS/N).

某些源仅适用于特定及有限的情况 编辑

Now that you've got the concept of reliability drilled into you, you should know about two situations where otherwise "unreliable" information can appear in Wikipedia articles:

  • Material from self-published and questionable sources may be used as sources in articles about themselves. You should phrase such information as an assertion. For example, say, "According to Elsbeth Wainwright's personal Web site, she was born on a mountain," not simply, "Elsbeth Wainwright was born on a mountain." The fact that a Web site says something is undisputable, and that's the fact you're asserting in this case.
  • Editorial opinions in newspapers aren't the same as news articles, and you should treat them differently. For example, you can say, "The Catfish Gazette opposed the destruction of the historical courthouse," if you read that opinion on the Gazette's editorial page. But you must not use wording that makes it look like opinions are facts. You can't, for example, use an editorial opinion to put something like this into a Wikipedia article: "The destruction of local landmarks in Catfish township in the past 20 years has been a tragedy and a travesty." (Notice also the violation of Neutral point of view.)

无需为有源信息提供引证 编辑

In four situations, you can put specific information into an article without citing a source. Mind you, the information must still be verifiable; you simply don't need to accompany it with a citation in these situations.

  • In the lead section. The initial section of an article should be a concise overview of the article, establishing context, summarizing the most important points, and explaining why the subject is interesting and notable. Citations aren't generally appropriate in the lead section; they belong in the body of the article. (Sometimes you do have to provide citations, if other editors insist.) Figure 2-1 is a good example of a lead section. (Lead sections are discussed in more detail in the section about lead sections.)
 
Figure 2-1. This example is a good lead section. It hits the highlights, so the reader can decide whether to continue reading the article. The citations for this information come in the body of the article.
  • If a section of an article summarizes what is in another, more detailed article. In Wikipedia, such a section is called summary style, and should be a few paragraphs long. Immediately below the heading of the section is a link to the main article, which contains all the sources. Figure 2-2 shows a section of an article that demonstrates summary style.
 
Figure 2-2. Shown is the "Law" section of the Wikipedia article titled Canada. This section is a summary of a separate, more detailed article, Law of Canada. Citations of sources don't need to be in the "Law" section; they're in the article Law of Canada.
  • If there's an internal link to another article. For example, suppose you add this to an article: "Name of person, a historian who has written extensively about this period, said quotation." You don't have to document who this person is, because the reader can follow the internal link to the Wikipedia article about the person. That article, of course, should support your phrase, "a historian who has written extensively about this period." Note that you do have to add a source to document the quotation.
  • If the information in an article is documented in a section at the bottom of the article. Consider an article that is based primarily on books, like George Washington in the American Revolution. In such cases, you can document most of the information by simply listing those books in a "Bibliography" section at the end of the article (Figure 2-3).
 
Figure 2-3. Here are the sources for the article George Washington in the American Revolution. These two sections appear at the bottom of that article. The "Bibliography" section lists six books. By contrast, there are only four footnotes—only four cases in this article where text is footnoted to show exactly where it came from.

必须为争议内容提供来源 编辑

If you add potentially contentious information to an article, you absolutely must add a citation immediately following that information, so others can verify it. If you're the one who adds information to an article, the burden of proof rests on you. If another editor questions you about a specific phrase, sentence, or paragraph, the correct response is to cite your source, as a footnote, rather than say, "Find it yourself—I'm sure one of the sources in the article supports what I put in."

Wikipedia considers anything negative about a person or organization to be controversial or contentious. Editors also often challenge causal statements. ("Because the president vetoed the tax cuts, the country went into a recession.") If you add such a statement, it had better come from a reliable source, not your own opinion. When the topic of an article is controversial, other editors may interpret almost any information you add to that article as controversial. But if you always cite a good source that supports the information you're adding, then you can defend yourself if you're accused of adding original research or your personal point of view.

引用源并不能证明版权侵犯 编辑

Say you've come across an online newspaper article with lots of information you want to add to a Wikipedia article. That's great, but don't just copy and paste large amounts of text—that's a copyright violation. Stick to the facts (facts can't be copyrighted), and recognize that newspapers don't object to small percentages of a story's text ending up in Wikipedia if the newspaper gets credit (via citation), particularly if you provide a link to the full story online. (For a discussion about what you can legally copy in large amounts, see the section about copying other material.)

添加外部链接 编辑

Much, if not most, of the information in Wikipedia is documented by online sources. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create a link to such a source. Links to Web pages outside Wikipedia are called external links.

备注:
You need to know how to create an external link if you want to do a proper citation, but the external link itself isn't enough. In the steps in the section about creating footnotes, you'll learn the other parts of a proper citation.
  1. On any Wikipedia page, in the search box on the left, type WP:SAND.
  2. You're editing in the sandbox (see the section about the sandbox), so you can play around without damaging anything if you make a mistake.
  3. At the top of page, click the "edit this page" tab.

    You're now in edit mode. Note the edit box, the Summary box, and the various symbols and markup below the warning that begins "Do not copy." (To double-check whether you're in edit mode, look at Figure 2-4.)

  4. Delete all the text in the edit box.

    At the end of this tutorial, you're not going to be saving your edit, so it's okay to delete text such as "Please leave this line alone".

  5. Type the following three sentences into the edit box:

    Here's how to create an external link in Wikipedia. [http://www.slate.com/id/2654/]

    Always put brackets around a URL. Here's the URL without the brackets, so you can see what it would look like (remember, this is wrong): http://www.slate.com/id/2654/

 
Figure 2-4. The edit box shows the text for the external link example described on these pages. Notice the edit toolbar just above the edit box—that's a standard landmark when you're in editing mode. As discussed in the section about your first edit, the triple apostrophes around the word "wrong" are wiki markup; they make the word appear in boldface.
  1. Press the Tab key to go to the "Summary" box. (It's just above the bolded warning, "Do not copy text from other websites ...") Type a few words explaining your edit into that box. Then, just below that box, click the "Show preview" button. (See Figure 1-5 if you need a refresher.)

    You see the link you just created, as shown in Figure 2-5.

 
Figure 2-5. This preview shows how to create an external link in Wikipedia—by surrounding a URL with single square brackets. When you preview the page, you see the linked text but not the URL it takes you to. If you forget the brackets, then you see the whole URL when you do a preview. If you see a naked URL in preview mode, fix it.

Wikipedia software automatically numbers external links when they're URLs surrounded by brackets: [1], [2], and so on.

That's all there is to creating external links. If you're going to continue working in this chapter, just keep the sandbox as is; you'll use it again in the footnotes tutorial. Otherwise, close or exit the sandbox page without saving your edit.

引用来源 编辑

Inserting an external link into an article to show where you got information is better than nothing, but by itself it's not the proper way to cite a source. An embedded link (an external link in the middle of an article) isn't a proper citation because links, like milk, have a tendency to go bad over time. Links can stop working when a Web site goes out of business, someone moves or deletes a Web page you linked to, or a URL changes for any number of reasons. When links go bad, so does any substantiation of the sentences that the links were supposed to support.

备注:
The general problem of links going bad is called link rot. A non-working link without any other information is almost worthless. The section about fixing bad URLs discusses some ways to try to fix a bad link.

The best way to reduce the impact of bad links is to fully cite your source, to include more information than just the URL.

引用来源的三种方式 编辑

Currently, Wikipedia lets you use one of the three different methods for a proper citation. All three use a "References" section at the bottom of the article.

  • Embedded citations. You put an embedded link into the article (as described earlier), and then put the same URL, plus additional information about the source, into the "References" section. For details on this method, go to WP:ECITE.
  • Footnotes. You add all the source information into the body of the article, plus special footnote markup. When the Wikipedia software displays the article, it puts a footnote number in the body of the article and the citation information in the "References" section at the bottom. When readers click a footnote number, it takes them to the footnote information at the bottom of the article. (You can learn exactly how to create footnotes in the section about footnotes; also check out WP:FOOT.)
  • Harvard referencing. You put the citation's cross-reference information (author, year of publication, and page number) into the body of the article, and also put that information, plus the title of the article or book, the name of the publisher and other publication information into the "References" section. If you use templates (which isn't required), then the information in the body of the article is linked to the information in the "References" section. If you use only plain text, then the two aren't tied together by the software. (For details, go to WP:HARV for an example.)

How do you choose among the three citation methods? If you're working on a new article, or expanding an article that uses none of these methods, that's easy. Use footnotes for the following reasons:

  • The embedded citations approach can't handle offline sources—those for which there's no URL, even though offline sources are perfectly acceptable in Wikipedia. Don't use it.
  • Harvard referencing, in the format described above, is used in only a very small percentage of Wikipedia articles—well under five percent. Moreover, there are a number of variants of Harvard citations, both for the way text shows in articles and for the underlying templates of the system, so learning this method takes more time. Plus it's often mixed with regular footnotes, as in the article Dionysus.

If an article already uses a method other than footnotes, you have two options:

  • If the article has embedded citations, convert them to footnotes. Embedded citations are a legacy from before Wikipedia had footnotes. It's actually less work for an editor to do a regular footnote than to do an embedded citation, so if you do the work of converting to regular footnotes, other editors will be happy to do footnotes thereafter.
  • If the method is Harvard referencing and you want to add information to the article, you must use that method. Don't get into a fight about footnotes being better—once a style is in place in an article, leave it as is.

脚注的两种风格 编辑

As you'll discover as you edit Wikipedia, getting all editors to do everything the same way is like trying to herd a group of cats. It's best to take what the cats prefer to do into account. Wikipedia has policies, which everyone must follow; guidelines, which sometimes provide multiple options; and some things on which there's never been general agreement, so there aren't even guidelines. In practical terms, footnotes fall into that last category.

For example, a survey of 28 Main Page articles in October 2007 found that 12 articles used only regular footnotes, while five used only Harvard-style footnotes. The other 11 articles used a mix of the two. Even then, there wasn't just one style: eight of the 11 used two sections, but three combined the two different footnotes into a single section.

In general, you'll find footnotes appearing in two different ways in fully developed articles:

  • Regular footnotes. A footnote number appears in the body of the article, and the full citation information for that footnote appears at the bottom of the article, in a section usually (but not always) called "References."
  • Harvard-style footnotes. A footnote number in the body of the article links to a brief citation (author plus page number, or author plus date plus page number) in a "Notes" section. Then full citation information goes in a second section called "References." There's no automated connection for the reader between text in the two sections.

Since Harvard-style footnotes are a variant of regular footnotes, once you've learned regular footnotes, you'll have no problems with the variant. Don't get into a fight over the "right" way to do footnotes. If you're creating or building an article, you can pick a style that suits you; if you're adding to an article with an established style, follow that style.

创建脚注 编辑

If you've been paying attention in this chapter so far, you know that if you want to add information to a Wikipedia article, you need to have a reliable source, and you need to cite that source in the Wikipedia article. In the previous section, you also learned that footnotes are the most reliable way to provide your readers with documentation.

Wikipedia has two ways to create footnotes: freeform and citation templates. Citation templates take longer to learn upfront, but they have advantages, as discussed in the section about citation templates.

创建简单的脚注 编辑

  1. Open the sandbox for editing.

    If you're not there already, on any Wikipedia page, type WP:SAND into the search box, and then, at the top of page, click the "edit this page" tab. (And if you're in preview mode, that's fine too.)

  1. In the sandbox, delete all the text, and then type the following text (see Figure 2-6):

    == Body of the article ==

    In 1997, Chrysler was more profitable, with earning of $2.8 billion, than Daimler, which earned $1.8 billion.<ref>Surowiecki, James. [http://www.slate.com/id/2654 "The Daimler-Chrysler Collision: Another Merger in Search of That Elusive Synergy"], ''Slate'' magazine, May 15, 1998, retrieved September 12, 2007</ref>

    == References ==

    <references/>

     
    Figure 2-6. You'll recognize some of the wiki markup that you used in the tutorial in Chapter 1, Editing for the First Time, like the headings for the two sections and the italicizing of the title of the publication (the magazine Slate). The footnote begins immediately after the sentence it documents—there's no space between the period and the <ref> tag. You must both create a heading for the "References" section and add the <references/> tag to tell Wikipedia where to put the footnotes.

    As shown in Figure 2-6, Wikipedia's footnote system has two distinct parts:

    • Footnote information appears in the body of the article. It must have a ref tag (<ref>) in front and the companion closing tag (</ref>) at the end, to tell the Wikipedia software to treat it like a footnote.
      提示:
      You don't have to type these two tags. Instead, highlight the text to go in the footnote, then click the "ref" icon on the far right of the edit toolbar (see Figure 2-6 for example).
    • There must be a "<references/>" tag somewhere on the page to tell the software exactly where to display all the footnotes. (Notice the ending "/" that is part of this tag is necessary for the footnotes to work correctly.)
      备注:
      It doesn't matter if you call the footnotes section "References" (the most common) or "Notes" or "Footnotes" or even "References and Notes." The software doesn't depend on the section name. It's the <references/> tag (or as you'll often see, a {{reflist}} template) that tells the software where to put the footnotes. The citation information you type into the body of the page (Figure 2-6) stays put, and you can still see it in edit mode; but until you add the <references/> tag, your footnotes won't be visible to readers.

  2. Type a few words explaining the edit into the Summary box, and click the "Show preview" button.

    If you see what's in Figure 2-7, your footnote is complete.

 
Figure 2-7. At top, you can see how the page will look when you save it. The bottom shows the text entered into the edit box, with the two parts of the footnote system (the footnotes themselves, and where they're displayed).

Now that you know how to create a footnote, remember three points before you head off to start adding citations to articles:

  • When you want to edit an existing footnote, remember that the text of that footnote goes in the body of the article, even though Wikipedia displays it in the References section. So don't open the References section to edit that footnote: All you'll see is the section heading and the <references/> tag (or its variant, the {{reflist}} template). To edit an existing footnote, either go into edit mode for the entire article, or preferably go into edit mode for just the section where the text for the footnote is located.
  • The footnote number ([1]) and the displayed footnote are linked. If you click on the upward caret (the "^") in footnote 1, the cursor moves to the [1]. (When you do so, the page may jump around a bit; scroll so you're back to seeing the whole page.) Similarly, if you click on the [1], the cursor moves to the text for footnote 1 (and shades the whole footnote in light blue). (Try it, using either your preview or any article with footnotes.)
  • Near the middle of Figure 2-7, the external link in the references (the title of the referenced article) isn't numbered by the Wikipedia software the way the external link is in the body of the Wikipedia article in Figure 2-5. The reason is that there is both a URL and some following text within the square brackets, so the Wikipedia software creates a link out of the text. External links that have only a URL within brackets, however, are numbered.

脚注中使用引用模板 编辑

Creating a freeform footnote, as described in the previous section, is pretty easy, but in articles that contain many footnotes, editors usually use one of Wikipedia's citation templates. Citation templates are big, ugly chunks of text that you'll run across when editing Wikipedia articles, but they have a definite purpose. They organize the internal structure of a footnote by delimiting (that is, defining) each part of the note. It's sort of as if a sentence came with descriptive markings: "This is an introductory phrase. This is the subject of the sentence. This is the verb. This is the object." A citation template defines the parts of a citation—author's name, document title, and so on, by using what Wikipedia calls parameters.

Figure 2-8 shows you three different ways an editor could use a citation template to create the same footnote that you created in the previous section. How an editor uses a template is entirely up to that editor, so you could see any—or all three, mixed together—in a given article. As long as what's displayed is accurate, the templates don't need to be consistent.

 
Figure 2-8. Here are three variations of the same citation template for the same footnote. The difference is in the spacing. Top: Each parameter (author's last name, first name, and so on) has been entered as a separate line. Middle: The four unused parameters have been deleted. Bottom: There are multiple parameters on a single line. This third variation could have been even shorter: The blank spaces before and after the vertical line ("|") symbols, and the spaces before and after the equal signs aren't required. Of course, removing those 28 blank spaces would make the template even more difficult to read.

Not only can the same citation template look different (Figure 2-8), but there are more than a dozen footnote citation templates. Figure 2-8 shows the cite news template, which is perhaps the most common. It's designed to cite newspapers, magazines, journals, and periodicals. There are specialized templates for books, Web sites, court cases, and so on. You can see all of these—in a form that makes it easy to copy a template to a Wikipedia article you're editing, by the way—at Wikipedia:Citation templates (shortcut: WP:CITET). (For a quick reference guide with details about the most common templates, go to WP:CITEQR.)

Since you can cite any kind of source using a freeform footnote, as you learned earlier in this chapter, why use standard citations templates at all? There are a number of reasons, some of which you may find compelling:

  • A citation template is like a handy form. Just fill it out, and the template takes care of the formatting. When you enter text into a template, you don't have to know what goes first, what goes where, and so on. The template takes care of displaying the citation for the reader.
  • Changing the template automatically updates every citation that uses it. For example, if the Wikipedia community decided that the first name of an author should come first, followed by the last name, instead of the current approach, you could change every display of every footnote created with a particular template simply by changing the template itself. This automatic updating is the true power of templates. (But to prevent tampering, high-use templates are protected so that only administrators can change them.)
  • Templates may make future automated features possible. Citation templates make it possible (in theory) to do automated searching across articles to find, say, all the referenced articles written by the same author, or all cited articles published on a given date. For that to be valuable, of course, there would need to be many more footnotes in Wikipedia articles—you can help!—and a much higher percentage of citation templates, as opposed to freeform templates.
备注:
The automated tools for creating citations (see the section about automated citation tools) create citation templates, not freeform text. Of course, if you use these tools, you don't really have to understand templates; you just have to do a cut-and-paste of the text.

在多个脚注中使用相同源 编辑

If you use the same source to support a number of statements in an article, you don't have to (nor should you) type citation information multiple times. Instead, you use a name= parameter to tell the Wikipedia software that multiple footnotes use the same source. Figure 2-9 shows how it works.

 
Figure 2-9. The same source is cited thrice. In the body of the text, [1] occurs thrice, as a link. Clicking any of the three takes you to the same place: the text of footnote 1, in the "Notes" section. With footnotes, linking works both ways. For example, for footnote 1, instead of clicking on the upward caret ("^") to go to the footnote, you click the "a", "b", and "c" to go to the three places in the body of the text where the footnote number ([1], in this case) is located.

Multiple footnotes are marked up differently than singular ones. The second time that "Source1" is cited in Figure 2-9, it isn't between a pair of tags. Rather, this standalone tag looks like a hybrid: It had the name= part of a starting ref tag, with the slash ("/") of an ending tag (albeit at the end, not the beginning—in XML markup this is called a self-closing tag). When doing multiple footnotes for a single source, the format for all of the footnotes, except the one that actually has citation information in it, goes like this: <ref name="NameYouGiveToTheSource"/>. (For more details on what name to give to a source, see the box about the name= parameter.)

If you forget the ending slash, the software assumes it's a starting tag for a footnote. It then "swallows" all the following text, stopping only when it finds either a closing </ref> tag or gets to the end of the page. That's yet another reason to always preview your changes to an article. If you add one or more footnotes and notice that a chunk of text is no longer visible in the preview, or you have some garish red warning text where the reference link should be, chances are you didn't include a closing slash in one of your <ref> tags or you put the slash in the wrong place.

The name= parameter

The name= parameter defines the name you use to refer to a source used in an article, sort of like a nickname. When you name your sources, each one should be unique, meaningful, and fairly short. Figure 2-9 used "Source1", which is unique and short, but not very meaningful. Often you can just use the name of the author of the source you're citing (name="JPowells"). If you cite more than one source from the same author, you can use author and publication year (name="Chen-1976"). For newspaper articles, a good technique is to use an abbreviation plus the publication date (name="NYT-2007-06-22" or name="ST-12May2006"). For a Web page, you might make up a brief title (name="Congressional-bio").

When you cite the same source multiple times using just one footnote, you use the name= parameter to refer to the source. Before you head off to try this technique in a real article, here are two tricky things you may encounter:

  • Putting quotation marks around a name (in this example, "Source1") isn't required, but it's strongly recommended. If you don't use quotation marks, and you decide to use a name that has a space in it (say, <ref name=John Smith>, the Wikipedia software displays a glaringly red, enlarged font-size error message in the middle of the article. Hopefully, you'll see this in preview mode so you can fix it by adding the quotation marks before you save your edit. If you put quotation marks around every source, you'll never go wrong.
  • Perhaps surprisingly, when you have multiple footnotes for the same source, you don't have to put the text of the citation where that source is first cited. If you want to, you can put it at any place in the text where you footnoted the source. The first footnote would then look like this: <ref name="Whatever"/>. The reason for this is to allow subsequent editors to be able to refer to an existing source cited with a named reference tag from anywhere in the article.

高级的引用技术 编辑

With what you've learned so far, you now know how to document information in Wikipedia in just about any situation—you can create links, footnotes, and multiple footnotes, and use citation templates. The three techniques described in the rest of this chapter are completely optional. But if you spend a lot of time creating and editing citations, you may find a need for automated citation-creating tools, viewing footnotes for just a section of an article, and adding page numbers to footnotes.

自动引用工具 编辑

When you want to cite a source, you usually have to cut and paste various elements—one by one—from the Web page where you found the source into the edit box where you're assembling the citation. But sometimes, computerized tools can vastly simplify your work: You can simply cut and paste the whole citation, not its individual parts. Here's an assortment of tools to check out:

  • If you start a Google Scholar search with the Wikipedia {{citation}} Assistant at http://toolserver.org/~verisimilus/Scholar, you can just click the {{Wikify}} link that’s part of each search result. That link generates a citation for you.
  • For books, try OttoBib at http://www.ottobib.com/, enter an ISBN, click the Wikipedia button, and then click Get Citations.
  • If you have access to and use specialized databases, and know the DrugBank ID, HGNC ID, PubMed ID, or PubChem ID of a document, you can simply enter that ID into the Wikipedia template-filling page at http://diberri.dyndns.org/wikipedia/templates/. Click "Submit" to get a complete citation, ready to copy and paste.
  • If you use citation templates to create your footnotes, you might want to look at the Reference generator, a smarter version of the citation templates available in Wikipedia. It's at http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/makeref.php. You specify the type of citation you want (online news Web site, journal article, book, conference report, and so on), and the form then shows you the mandatory parameters (for example, the title and URL for online news), plus other optional parameters. It also shows you examples of each parameter that you might enter, so you get the format correct.

编辑条目中单个段落时预览脚注 编辑

When you open only one section of an article in edit mode (which is more convenient than editing the whole article, for reasons explained in the section about editing sections), you'll find that you can't see the text of footnotes when previewing your edit. For example, suppose you're editing a section of the article Encyclop?dia Britannica and you go into preview mode (see Figure 2-10).

 
Figure 2-10. When you edit just a section of an article, the footnote numbers are visible in preview mode, but not the text of the footnotes. Some experienced editors are comfortable saving their edits without previewing what their added footnotes look like, but if not being able to preview your footnotes makes you uneasy, see Figure 2-11 for the workaround.

The solution is to temporarily (note the emphasis) add a <references/> tag at the end of the section. Preview the section, and then delete the tag before saving your edit. Figure 2-11 shows another preview, this time with the temporary tag added.

 
Figure 2-11. With the <references/> tag added, the footnotes are visible in preview mode. Don't forget to delete the tag before you save your edit. If you forget, the software displays all the footnotes in the article, in two different parts of the article, not once at the bottom.


添加页码到脚注编号 编辑

If you're using a book as a source, you may cite information from multiple locations within the book. If so, creating footnotes can be a challenge, because you seem to have three choices:

  • You can create a separate citation for every page, leading to a lot of almost-duplicate entries in the "References" section. They'd be identical except for the page number cited.
  • You can create a single citation with multiple occurrences, using the name= parameter as discussed in the section about the name= parameter. You can then list, in that one citation, all the pages numbers where you got information. (It's better than omitting the page numbers, though not by much.)
  • You can use Harvard-style footnotes (see the section about ways to cite sources) instead of regular footnotes. (But you may be out of luck if the article already has a significant number of regular footnotes, because other editors may object to mixing the two styles.)

Fortunately, there's a fourth option, using a citation template called Rp. It lets you slot in the page number right next to the footnote number, where your readers can readily see it. Figure 2-12 shows how it works.

 
Figure 2-12. The Rp template lets you type page numbers when you insert multiple references to a source (bottom). They appear in superscript next to footnote numbers (top). So you can cite multiple pages from the same source without any of the problems mentioned in the section on adding page numbers to footnotes.
备注:
In Figure 2-12, the ISBN is an internal link to a specialized Wikipedia page called Special:BookSources. That page in turn has links to a large number of Web sites that offer information about the linked ISBN, like online databases, general search engines, libraries throughout the world, and booksellers.