User talk:Anonymouslyanonymous001

Hello Anonymouslyanonymous001, and Welcome to Wikipedia!

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Sorry to have rather clobbered your early and well-intentioned contribution to the article on geisha, Anonymouslyanonymous001. The article has on occasion been rather a battleground among proponents of different ideas about the subject, some of these ideas derived from silly books and thus rather nutty. Don't get dispirited; enjoy yourself editing further. -- Hoary (talk) 01:19, 14 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

No problem, Hoary. I know more about sourcing because of you and thank you for that :)

Sourcing mechanism

Hello again Aa001. You say: I still don't really understand the reference name and ref group as well as the web access date. I don't blame you.

I'd start with "Help:Footnotes". You can see both named references (which are commonplace) and groups (which are much less so) in operation within the article "Toyoko Tokiwa": see how this has six "notes" (one of them very long) in addition to a greater number of "references". Try "editing" this article about Tokiwa just to see how it all works. (But [cough] please don't save your changes unless you can actually make a well-informed improvement.)

If you're (very reasonably) wondering how the hell the same one footnote (or indeed "reference") can be referred to from more than place, see "Vancouver system". -- Hoary (talk) 04:46, 14 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for all the info, Hoary. Now I understand the named references, although not so much about the group one still. But it's alright for now I guess. I will try to contribute more to wikipedia and thanks for your time :)

First, there are many ways in which the better Wikipedia articles cite their sources. (The particular way tends to depend on how the first conscientious contributor to an article cited sources, or how the most [tediously] persistent of competing contributors did so.) Among these are what look like footnotes but are more often titled "references" and each of which can be cited from any number of points in the text.

Well, footnotes can be used in printed works for various functions. There's a traditional division in explanations of academic writing between "source footnotes" and "content footnotes". The simple references (<ref>...</ref> plus <references />) of Wikipedia correspond to the former. You may want to set off the second separately (as has been done in the Toyoko Tokiwa article). Wikipedia calls these "notes", and uses (<ref group="n">...</ref> plus <references group="n" />) for them. (I now notice that somebody has switched the "references" tag in the Tokiwa article to the "reflist" template.) -- Hoary (talk) 08:40, 15 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]