MEpedia talk:Referencing for beginners

Revisions welcome

"Referencing for beginners" is a key topic but also not an easy one to sum up--I'm writing a draft but I really welcome input so this will be as concise and simple to understand to as many readers as possible. Lots of different folks will (hopefully!) read it, so we can use as many different eyes on as possible to catch anything that's unclear, too long, insufficiently explained, etc. from many different POVs. Thank you in advance for your help! Canele (talk) 20:35, 19 April 2019 (EDT)

Looks good so far! I’m still learning references, so I look forward to what people have to say. The only thing I would watch out for is to avoid duplicating information that already exists in the guidelines, or help reference pages. It’s fine to duplicate information that is in the tutorial since the tutorial is, by definition, a summary of the help reference pages.

Originally, someone planned on writing a “Citations guideline”, but never got around to it. Maybe this document can become it? I know User:Jaimes had some ideas for the “Citations guideline”...

Pyrrhus (talk) 21:13, 19 April 2019 (EDT)

More citation guidance would be so welcome--I actually think it'd be warranted as its own page, or, to have more thorough guidance on the Science guidelines (which I know Njt had suggested on that talk page--detailing how to evaluate different kinds of studies.)

Duplicative info is tricky. "Referencing for beginners" has traditionally functioned (i.e. the many links to it imported with WP templates that made it a "Wanted page") as a mini-tutorial specifically focused on referencing and therefore intentionally summarizes (repeats) the relevant reference pages and guidelines. Referencing tends to stymie folks enough that I tend to think that's worth having--one page where folks can get just that info (to the extent I was actually planning to copy in the reference formatting instructions too)--but I'm open to hearing other perspectives. For an alternative approach, we could rename this page "Referencing" (or References or whatever) and just have it be guidelines for sourcing and refer people back to the main tutorial for formatting. Canele (talk) 21:39, 19 April 2019 (EDT)

Makes sense. If it's a mini-tutorial then we can link the "main" tutorial to this page so that people can just use this page to learn referencing!

Pyrrhus (talk) 22:02, 19 April 2019 (EDT)

Ooh. That's a good idea! I won't split it out just yet, let's see if anyone else weighs in but for my two cents, I think that could make both pages seem more approachable to folks. Canele (talk) 22:09, 19 April 2019 (EDT)