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Getting involved with #1lib1ref

Mike Dickison

Digital Discovery Librarian

Westland District Library

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Westland District Library

Wikipedia projects

West Coast artists

The Luminaries

West Coast lizards

Hokitika street names

Citation needed

For quotations, or anything that might be challenged (or that isn’t “common knowledge”, whatever that is.

What you can cite

“Reliable sources”: independent, published, likely to be fact-checked and accurate.

Randall Munroe, XKCD, CC BY 2.5, Link

One-page instructions

Go to the Wikipedia page you plan to add your reference to.
Click the Edit link. Make sure you’re using Visual editing: if there’s lots of source code in the window, find the button with a pen icon (normally top right) and switch so you can edit the page as it looks on Wikipedia.
Put your cursor at the end of the sentence where you want to add your reference, after the punctuation.
Click the Cite link.
Under Automatic, paste a URL (for a website) or ISBN (for a book) or PMC/PMID or DOI (for a journal article), select Generate, then Insert. You should see your citation appear. You may want to Edit it if it’s not quite right.
(If automatic doesn’t work, you’ll need to add your citation manually; select the Manual tab in the Cite box.)
Now click the blue Publish changes and add a brief comment, like “#1lib1ref”, in the edit summary box. Then click Publish changes again. Your citation will now be in the References section at the bottom of the page!
(To add the same citation somewhere else in the article, select the Re-use tab in the Cite box and find it in the list.)