Help:Contributing/citations
RonzzWikiBase 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.[1] |
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.
The same source cited several times renders ONE footnote. Repeat
<ref>{{#cite:Qxx}}</ref>as often as you need — the render engine recognises duplicate sources and merges the footnotes into a single entry with one ↑ backlink per usage (identical to what a named<ref name="...">would give you). No manual de-duplication needed.
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:
- ↑ Lovelace, A. (1843). The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. In Notes by the Translator. R. & J. E. Taylor. https://doi.org/10.1000/notes
Copy a formatted citation from the item page
Every item page (/wiki/Item:Q1) carries a small toolbar under the title. The Copy citation button copies a ready-to-paste, formatted citation of that item — pick the format from the selector right next to it first:
- APA (the default) — author–date style, e.g. Lovelace, A. (1843). Notes by the Translator.
- Vancouver — numbered style.
- BibTeX — a
@book{...}entry for LaTeX bibliographies. - RIS — a tagged record for reference managers (Zotero, EndNote, …).
The citation text is generated from the item's statements at copy time, so the same source can be copied in any of the four formats. The toolbar also carries Copy embed code (for quotable content items) and, when the item can be edited with a form, Update basic information — see Help:Contributing/import#Re-editing an imported item.
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.