Help talk:References

Unveiled

Okay, if I ever felt like I've put tons of effort into anything here, this ranks up in the top 5. The help sections get progressively detailed, assuming that Editors will choose to match the method that best fits their skills. And I love how Special:UserScore says I've only contributed 6 edits today, when I've easily saved 50x that number. --Revanche (talk|contribs) 03:54, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

References, Links and Bibliographies

I've been chatting with one of the new users here about the formatting of references because I'd noticed the sourcebook within reference tags appearing as a link. I was under the impression that making the sourcebook title within a reference was discouraged in favour of listing the various sourcebooks referenced as links within the Bibliography section of each article, but this help page doesn't say that - instead, it calls for sourcebook names within every reference to be a link. Is that still the current policy? If it is, then I've been getting it wrong for almost two years now. BrokenMnemonic (talk) 23:45, 9 May 2013 (PDT)

Saw that discussion. And I agree, the Help page is a bit outdated and doesn't seem to describe the most common procedure on BTW. To be honest, I never actually read it before. I think we should reword the Help page to reflect what we're actually doing: Put links into references only if the referenced source is not already covered in (linked from) a Bibiography or Sources section within the article.
There are cases where you need to reference a source that shouldn't appear in a Bibliography section for one reason or another (for example because it is only quoted on a tangential and has nothing to do with the article's subject, or because there is only a single reference and this wouldn't warrant a Bibliography section in the first place). In that case, putting the link into the reference proper is okay. At least that's how I'm going about it. Frabby (talk) 03:58, 10 May 2013 (PDT)