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The idea of this and other quickie "how-to" guides is to help nooBs learn a skill. This article is designed to be SHORT, to the point, useful, un-intimidating guide. There are other guides out there which are cumbersome, laden with rules, complex to point of absurdity, which begin to look like the US tax code. The skill taught by this guide is merely: referencing without using templates. There is another quickie how-to guide which teaches referencing WITH using templates; it's here: Wikipedia:Referencing for beginners with citation templates. These pages are NOT places to argue about which referencing method is preferred or better, and it's not a place for extended rules or complex jargon; rather, it's a simple guide. Please keep these guides simple and helpful. The place to add extended variants of rules, discussion about the numerous possibilities of referencing, different formats is somewhere else.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 14:05, 22 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
