User:Lhavelund/References

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General guidelines

The Official Team Fortress Wiki strives to be the primary information point for all things Team Fortress. It is therefore essential that information posted is relevant, and factual. It is for this reason it is encouraged (and required) to use references when making a statement that is obscure or ambiguous by nature.

Appropriate use-cases and exceptions

Due to the Wiki's nature of being game-centric, a lot of the information found is easily available in-game; these bits are not required to be sourced as anyone can simply check and most players will know the facts already.

In the meta-world of Team Fortress however, references can often be important; for example, when describing the relationship between characters as it was portrayed in the official comics released by Valve, it is appropriate to include a reference to the relevant comic. This is even more important when referencing non-game-related facts, such as information about a voice actor, which is still considered interesting and valuable information to a Team Fortress 2 player.

Application

The primary two tags used when adding references are <ref></ref> and <references />. The first is used whenever you add a reference; the latter is used to output a final list of references at the end.

<ref></ref>

The basic syntax for the <ref> is:

<ref name="name of reference">Reference</ref>

In this case, the name of reference can be substituted by a string of text, which can be used again if you wish to refer to the same source more than ones. A usage example:

The [[Killing Gloves of Boxing]] is a reference to the Russian intelligence agency, the Комитет государственной безопасности​.<ref name="kgb reference">[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KGB Wikipedia: KGB].</ref>

The Wiki now knows that that particular reference is to Wikipedia's entry for KGB. If you wanted to refer to that particular entry again, you could do something as simple as:

The KGB were bad people.<ref name="kgb reference" />

(Not the terminating /> in the tag).

<references />

Whereever <references /> is placed, all references found in the document will be printed. This is usually placed in its own section titled "References", and usually located after trivia, and before external links.

Templates

A number of templates have been written to ease the addition of references to an article, regardless of whether the source cited is a web page, a book, or an article in a journal or magazine. The templates are:

  • {{Cite web}} for web ressources, such as blog posts, online articles, official announcements, etc.
  • {{Cite article}} for articles in gaming magazines, newspapers or other publications.
  • {{Cite book}} is for actual printed books, including official strategy guides or development documentation.