Forum:Reference Formatting and Timeline

I'd be happy to help you with the Timeline project. What do you mean about references not being well thought out? You mean you don't quite know what the proper format for material is? Usually I goto Wikipedia for inspiration in this regard, but I guess they usually reference publications, while ours go back to computer programs. It's probably not practical for us to follow their example precisely. A few things come to mind: After your reply, we should probably take this to forums. AngusM 19:31, August 17, 2010 (UTC)
 * 1) Is the reference technology a new thing? For how long have you been at it?
 * 2) How much do you know about the technology? It seems to me that there's just a computer-read label, then some text that contains the reference material (or a reference to the reference material). Does it have any other features?
 * 3) Since many other wikis on Wikia are computer games, whatever we should be doing is whatever others should be doing. Do you know of any? If no one uses reference anymore than we have, we'll never find them :(


 * About the references not thought out, I was refering mainly that I quickly decided a formatting style for the references, but I haven't spent much time thinking about or discussing if it is the proper one. I took some basic formatting from Wikipedia, and tried to merge it with what we have in our style guide regarding quotes. But the formatting I'm using should be discussed, and the definitive one should be in the style guide. For example, I'm not so sure I like putting quotes inside references with italics only, as I think they may not be very readable. But as the style guide indicated only italics for quotes, I didn't spend much time fixing that.


 * 1) About the ref tags, as far as I know they are a standard MediaWiki feature. It has always been in this wiki, but nobody had used it before. In general, I always try to add references to all the Wikis I contribute to. This wiki is the only one I contribute to that had no references at all, so I have started adding them some months ago. But I haven't added too many references yet, mainly to Ophidian related articles and the Timeline (which is where I started, as I hate exact years stated with no sources).
 * 2) About the tags themselves, in their most basic form, you just put a, so if you want to use the same reference again in the same article, you just put instead of copying the whole thing. That's basically it. It's up to the user to decide how to format the info inside the ref tag. Wikipedia has also a fancier template, "cite" or something I recall, which, as a template, is used inside a ref tag, and you add info to the defined attributes of the template, to help mantain consistency. I'm not sure if Wikia has that template, and I'm not sure if it is that useful to as, as it is better suited for publications and the like.
 * 3) Another wiki I sometimes contribute to is the Warcraft Wiki, which uses references. I'm not sure I like their style much, as they are in the process of chaning some of the book references they use, but we could borrow some ideas from that wiki.
 * And yes, we should continue this, starting but how to use and format references, in a forum.--Sega381 01:14, August 18, 2010 (UTC)