User:Trevor MacInnis/referencing for beginners
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As Wikipedia has grown in popularity, the number of casual readers who it use as their primary source of information has also grown. verifiability has therefore become an increasingly important core policy of the project. There is no original research in Wikipedia; any information added must be accompanied by reliable sources that are directly related to the topic of the article, and that directly support the information as it is presented. The burden of evidence lies with the editor who adds or restores material that all quotations and any material challenged or likely to be challenged must be attributed to a reliable, published source using an inline citation.
The are common ways of doing it are with footnotes, citation templates.
The easiest way to add a reference: <ref></ref> and <references/> wiki syntax. For example:
<ref>Excel For Dummies, First Edition, Hungry Minds, Inc., 1980.</ref>
The template {{Reflist}} can be used in place of <references/> if there are a lot of footnotes.
If you are using same reference or footnote several times, identify it using the name parameter of the <ref> tag.
<ref name="Perry">Perry's Handbook, Sixth Edition, McGraw-Hill Co., 1984.</ref>
Then at all the other citation points, just enter:
<ref name="Perry"/>
Once you are familiar with footnotes, you can try List-defined references.