Communpedia:Citing sources

A citation is a line of text that uniquely identifies a source. For example:

When and why to cite sources
Cite sources when:


 * Adding material that is likely to be challenged by other communists and/or capitalists. See Communpedia:We are all leftists and Communpedia:Common point of view.
 * By doing this, we tell readers that we are not a propaganda website, but an informative encyclopedia where leftists share their point of view backed up by historical and present facts.
 * Writing about a specific variant of communism/socialism, e.g. Trotskyism, Stalinism, Social democracy. Unlike Wikipedia, here on Communpedia sources such as forums (Yahoo answers, etc.) may be used to back up sentences related to a specific variant of communism/socialism. There must be at least two contributors in cited forums, and they should not the only sources cited if posting potentially controversial content.
 * See Communpedia:We are all leftists.
 * Quoting someone, with or without quotation marks, or closely paraphasing a source.
 * Summarizing source material in your own words.
 * In order to give credit to the source of your ideas.

When this is not necessary
Citing sources is not needed when:
 * Writing non-controversial sentences on non-controversial issues. E.g. the date of establishment of a political party, if the date is certain, then citing is not necessary.

Inline citations
An inline citation is a line of text—such as —that identifies a source, and which is added close to the material it supports, offering text-source integrity. If a word or phrase is particularly contentious, an inline citation may be added next to that word or phrase within the sentence, but it is usually sufficient to add the citation to the end of the sentence or paragraph, so long as it's clear which source supports which part of the text.

Two styles of inline citation are clickable footnotes ( tags, as above) and parenthetical references; the latter would involve adding (Smith 2011, p. 1) in round brackets within the sentence. Both are used on Communpedia.

A quick how-to
Most editors add inline citations inside footnotes; see below for more details. One easy way to write them is to add this to the end of the relevant phrase, sentence, or paragraph:

Then add this to the end of the article:

Shortened footnotes
Many articles use short citations in footnotes, giving the author, year, and page number, such as As before, the list of footnotes is automatically generated in a "Notes" or "Footnotes" section. A full citation is then added in a "References" section.

This is how short citations look in the edit box:   The sun is pretty big, &lt;ref> Miller 2005, p. 1.&lt;/ref> but the moon is not so big. &lt;ref> Brown 2006, p. 2.&lt;/ref> The sun is also quite hot. &lt;ref> Miller 2005, p. 3.&lt;/ref>

&#61;= Notes ==

 

&#61;= References ==

* '''Brown, Rebecca (2006). "Size of the Moon," Scientific American, 51(78)'''.

* '''Miller, Edward (2005). The Sun. Academic Press'''. 

This is how they look in the article:  The sun is pretty big,[1] but the moon is not so big.[2] The sun is also quite hot.[3]

Notes

^ Miller 2005, p. 23. ^ Brown 2006, p. 46. ^ Miller 2005, p. 34. 

References


 * Brown, Rebecca (2006). "Size of the Moon", Scientific American, 51(78).
 * Miller, Edward (2005). The Sun. Academic Press.

Shortened notes using titles rather than publication dates would look like this in the article:  Notes

^ Miller, The Sun, p. 23.</li> ^ Brown, "Size of the Moon", p. 46.</li> ^ Miller, The Sun, p. 34.</li> </ol>

Template

 * Unreferenced - template used to warn of unsourced potentially-controversial content.