Forum:Editing difficulties

Can someone please explain how to edit references? The help page that came up was full of jargon and I barely understood a word of it.

I tried to edit the Kir-lanan page to add Silver Marches to the list of appearances, and to add Kzntharris from that book (in the Blood and Gold mini-adventure at the end) to the list of notable Kir-lanan. It seemed to be going ok until I got to the references part, when I tried to add the reference it instead added some mangled text to the existing Silver Marches reference, and for some reason also deleted reference 4. So I decided I'd better stop and get some advice before I did any more damage...

So, my apologies, and also could someone could restore the references to their previous state if possible? – Special:Contributions/82.22.244.78


 * You doesn't look like you saved any changes to the kir-lanan page, so there's no need to to correct it. I'll give some general tips. We strongly recommend you use the Source Editor (from the drop-down menu under the Edit button), because the VisualEditor and its variants are garbage we're all saddled with. The Source Editor will show you the raw code, but it's fairly easy to pick up. Have a read through to get familiar, then type out something similar to what's already there.


 * I've added Silver Marches and what's-his-name to Silver Marches (sourcebook). You can see the necessary changes here . Wrapping with double-square brackets makes a basic link, wrapping with double-apostrophes creates italics.


 * The footnote reference is created in two parts: make a footnote, loads a separate citation template (original is at Template:Cite book/Silver Marches) with page 159 set, and name="RefName" gives it a name for later reuse. Put it together for and it can be reused with . That will create:


 * at the bottom of the page where appears.
 * at the bottom of the page where appears.


 * Feel free to experiment and use Preview to see what works and how. Don't be afraid to make an error, as one of us will soon fix it for you. I hope that helps. — BadCatMan (talk) 05:28, August 5, 2020 (UTC)