Forgotten Realms Wiki:Help-Citing sources

This page is an official policy on the Forgotten Realms Wiki. It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

Citing sources is important to the reliability of the information present in this wiki because it enables each statement's truthfulness and accuracy to be verified. It also allows the reader to use the wiki as a searchable, cross-referenced index and encyclopedia to the vast collection of source material that makes up the Forgotten Realms universe.

General citation format for books

Although it is possible to cite other sources, the majority of citations will concern books. A set of citation templates based on the {{Cite book}} template are available. If you find that a citation template for the book you wish to cite does not exist, see Template:Cite book for guidance on how to create it, or ask a fellow editor for assistance.

Citation without a page number

Written as:

{{Cite book/Monster Manual v.3.5}}

Appears as: Skip Williams, Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook (July 2003). Monster Manual v.3.5. (Wizards of the Coast). ISBN 0-7869-2893-X.

Citation with a single page number

Written as:

{{Cite book/Monster Manual v.3.5|45}}

Appears as: Skip Williams, Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook (July 2003). Monster Manual v.3.5. (Wizards of the Coast), p. 45. ISBN 0-7869-2893-X.

Citation with a page range

These are usually used where the text to be cited spans a page division. It should not be used to provide a vague area of a book spanning many pages on which to cite a statement. Written as:

{{Cite book/Monster Manual v.3.5|45-46}}

Appears as: Skip Williams, Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook (July 2003). Monster Manual v.3.5. (Wizards of the Coast), pp. 45–46. ISBN 0-7869-2893-X.

Citation with a page combination

Comma-separate your list of page numbers. This should only be used where it is immediately obvious how the individual pages relate to one another. If this is not clear, you should consider using individual citations instead.

{{Cite book/Monster Manual v.3.5|45,86,119}}

Appears as: Skip Williams, Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook (July 2003). Monster Manual v.3.5. (Wizards of the Coast), pp. 45, 86, 119. ISBN 0-7869-2893-X.

Citation with a chapter number

Some books are published in multiple formats (e.g., hardcover, paperback, Kindle) and the page numbers may not be the same across formats. In this case, you can either use a citation template that is specific to the format or edition of the work, such as {{Cite book/The Adversary/Hardcover}} or you can specify the chapter number (which should be consistent across all formats) like so:

{{Cite book/Darkwalker on Moonshae/Paperback 1987|chapter=3}}

which appears as: Douglas Niles (May 1987). Darkwalker on Moonshae. (TSR, Inc.), chap. 3. ISBN 0-88038-451-4. See {{Cite book}} for further details.

Page numbers not appearing

If you find that the page numbers don't appear as part of your citation, despite following the instructions above carefully, the citation template you are using is probably flawed. Compare it with other citation templates and see if you can spot an error yourself, or report it to an administrator if you feel you need help.

==Appendix==
===References===
* {{Cite book/Monster Manual v.3.5|45}}

Using ref tags

To accurately cite an article, which applies unless all of the text can be attributed to a single continuous passage in the source material, you can use <ref> tags.

General format

In general, you will use the citation templates discussed above, enclosed within the <ref> tags, and positioned in the exact location where the citation should be positioned. For example:

A dragon is a scaly, winged creature.<ref name="MM-p45">{{Cite book/Monster Manual v.3.5|45}}</ref>

Appears as: A dragon is a scaly, winged creature.

The wiki will take care of numbering for you. The exact number applied to each citation is not important, merely that the citation number relates to the correct source in the references section. When using citations in this format, you must add a special tag in the References section of the article which informs the wiki where to display the citation details. Although you can use the <references /> tag for this, it is recommended you use the {{Refs}} template, which takes care of extra formatting details for you:

==Appendix==
===References===
{{Refs}}

For an example of how this will appear, please see the end of this article.

Reference Names

Give each reference a sensible name. In the example above, the cited book was Monster Manual, the cited page was 45, and the name of the reference was MM-p45, a combination of book acronym and page number. If you wanted to use the same book and page number later in the article to cite another statement, you could write it in shortened format:

<ref name="MM-p45" />

This will work as long as the full citation appears somewhere in the article, and you may use the shortened format as many times in one article as necessary. Please do not use any special characters in the name except the period, the dash, or the underscore. Characters like the hash mark (#) or the colon prevent the reference popups from working.

Section-wide citations

If an entire section of an article can be attributed to one continuous passage in the source material, it is sufficient to provide a citation at the end of the section. It is assumed that all text in the section is cited by the reference provided.

Individual citations

Most articles will contain references to more than one (and often many) sourcebooks or novels and mostly, the statements in the article are not ordered by source. Each significant statement should have a citation attached, so that the reader is able to find out exactly which book and which page number to view in order to check the statement, or to find out more on the subject. For an example of an article that is comprehensively cited as of 30 March 2007, please see Cormanthor. Each statement can be attributed to a certain page in a specific sourcebook.

Rationale for providing page numbers

On other wikis such as Wikipedia, it is sufficient to provide the details of the book without the page number. The reason for providing page numbers on this wiki is so that the viewer can determine exactly where in a book to start reading. It would be unreasonable to expect a viewer to read through an entire sourcebook in an attempt to find the reference to the statement they are looking for, especially since we as editors are easily able to provide specific page numbers. Also, it is a useful DM tool to be able to use the references section of an article to create a set of bookmarks in specific sourcebooks which she can then read later on, in order to gain the most information possible on a subject.