Help:Contributing/citations

ronzz-wikibase has a custom citation mechanism. It is different from those on vanilla wikibase instances, such as Wikipedia.

Why a custom citation mechanism?

On a vanilla wikibase, citation is cubersome: You need to write citation text manually or generate it via a 3rd-party app, then paste it between <ref></ref> tags to create a citation item. Therefore, if you cite the same source on multiple pages, the way to go is to copy and paste the citation text multiple times.

The most scary part comes when you later updates the citation (e.g., because you made a typo). You will need to manually update each one, unless you have a bot account setup and know MediaWiki APIs well enough to do some batch text-op scripting.

To eliminate all the complexity, we purpose-built our custom entity-based citation mechanism.

A citation starts with a citable entity

To create a citation on ronzz-wikibase, you first need a citable entity, which can be a book, a newspaper article, or whatever source you would like to cite.

First search via Special:ItemDisambiguation page by title if the source you would like to cite exists already as an entity on ronzz-wikibase. If so, note its entity number (the number starting with "Q"). If it does not yet exist, you can create it. The entity number will be shown at the end of the guided creation process. Note it. This magic number represents the citable entity across ronzz-wikibase

A citation is declared with <ref>{{#cite:Qxx}}</ref>

You type	You get
Ada was first.<ref>{{#cite:Q96}}</ref>	Ada was first.

That's it. The ronzz-wikibase render engine takes care of everything.

If you ever need to cite multiple sources in one place, simply repeat the entire syntax multiple times. Each source needs its own <ref></ref> wrapping.

Create bibliography with <references/>

This part is exactly the same as on vanilla wikibase instances such as wikipedia. You simply type at the end of your article:

<references/>

and everything you have cited in the article will be automatically included:

To edit citations, edit simply the citable entity

If you ever need to update a citation, because you spotted a typographic error, etc., you simply update the citable entity it refers to at https://wikibase.ronzz.org/wiki/Item:Qxxx, where xxx stands for the citable entity's serial number. Use the in-page edit buttons to update relevant fields, and all citations referring to that citable entity will be updated automatically across ronzz-wikibase.

Do NOT delete citable entities, even if you delete your citations

It may be counter-intuitive, but in this case you should NOT cleanup after yourselves. Even if you delete all the references to one citable entity you created, you should not delete the citable entity itself, ever. The possibility that someone else is citing it on another page ranges from high (for popular sources) to possible (for niche sources), in all cases never zero. Deleting a citable entity saves less 1 kB of memory, at the risk of breaking an unknown number of pages. It is NEVER worth the risk.

See also

For further info on the semantic data model behind the citation mechanism at ronzz-wikibase, see Help:Contributing/entities.