[Foundation-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Fae]

Hi,

Making referencing easier on Wikipedia with optional tools is a good thing,
but there is a parallel activity of educating old hands to be aware that
there is no requirement or policy for ref tags to be used in an article. If
a new user wishes to stick sources as plain text at the bottom of an
article, this is not actually a failure against the manual of style or our
verification policy. So long as the user is adding verifiable and reliable
sources they can do this in any format they prefer and in fact our policies
encourage a discussion and local consensus rather than forcing standard but
arbitrary styles and templates onto such an article.

This should be kept in mind (particularly for bot design) when many new
articles such as biographies are *incorrectly* tagged for speedy deletion
or as unsourced when sources are present in the article, they just do not
use the citation template or ref tag.

By the way, many of us old hands routinely give simple advice on footnotes,
I have <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fae/help/refs> which explains the
ref tag in a very simple way, and points to other help including a
demonstration video I prepared some time ago.

Cheers,
Fae