User talk:Wolfhound75

Just starting my page.--Crazyhorse75 14:34, February 18, 2010 (UTC)

Creating citation templates
Unfortunately it's a little complicated which is why the general advice is "ask for help", but if you're willing to get stuck in, that's great, and once you've done it a few times, I'm sure it will not be as confusing.

Here's an example for sourcebooks, of which there is usually only one edition. This would be at Template:Cite book/Serpent Kingdoms for example:

First note how the name of the citation template always starts with  because it's a subtemplate of Template:Cite book (which you can visit to see in detail how to use it). The subtemplate just calls the base template, with parameters like the author, year (which is actually month, in full, and 4-digit year), ISBN (which is an ISBN-10 in the example, but really should be an ISBN-13 since all books will move that way eventually).

The pages parameter is saying 'take the first parameter passed to this template and use it for pages. Basically it should always be as you see it in the example.

Note the position of the noinclude tags, which is important, because otherwise the whitespace is interpreted wrong which might lead to weird newlines when the template is used. The category here is sourcebook templates, but note that there is a category sort key on the end of it. In this case, it's just the name of the book again, but suppose that the book started with "the". In an alphabetical list, you wouldn't want it appearing in the T section, you'd want it in the S section, so your category sort key would be.

Works of fiction are normally published in various editions (paperback, hardcover, reprints, etc, etc) so it's necessary to have a template for each book. Suppose someone cites page 35 of The Lone Drow. You would need to know which edition because page 35 of the paperback might not be the same as page 35 of the hardcover. I'll try to cover how these are handled later, but for now, if you look at Template:Cite book/Night Masks and see how it's put together, you should get some idea.

Thanks in advance for any templates you do create! Fw190a8 (talk &middot; contr) 15:55, February 18, 2010 (UTC)