Comrade:General-KJ/sandbox/Sourcing guide

WIP!

Since January 2024, ProleWiki has become much more strict in regards to sourcing, this guide is intended to fully explain our sourcing policy and methods of citation. Now, edits which are not properly sourced will be reverted. In that case, you will be notified by the patrol team (see users with delegate role). Any reverted edit is still accessible from the "View History" button so you can find it again when you're ready to add sources.

There is no such thing as adding too many sources so please source every claim you make (with more than one source even)!

Remember we are writing for the reader and so pages should make sense to them.

What to source

As mentioned we should strive to source everything. The only claims you don't have to source are "common sense" claims: things which we can reasonably expect people (not communists but anyone) to be familiar with. For example, names and dates of birth don't need to be sourced. Vague, general claims that are made to introduce a subject don't need to be sourced either. For example, writing "The revolution brought many changes to the country" ought to be considered common sense: obviously, a revolution brings many changes. However, specifying "The revolution brought many social changes to the country such as: ..." would require a source for the specific claims.

Finding sources

When finding sources you should aim to only use communist sources where possible but sources written by communists will not always be available for every subject so it will be necessary to use sources by non-communist authors. When evaluating whether to use the source you must be very careful to be aware of the bias of the source being used as well as its factual accuracy. For example, sources from the far-right should usually only be used when sourcing what that far-right organisation says about itself and other topics.

If you need help finding trustworthy sources or communist to use then look over our non-exhaustive list of media sources:

Comrade:Ledlecreeper27/sandbox/Media sources

Visual editor

To add a citation in visual editor you need to go to the bar at the top of the editor and click the cite option. This will then bring down a list of options which are self explanatory for you to use depending on what kind of source you are using. The "Book or scientific article" option brings up the Citation template, the "Website or newspaper article" option brings up the Web citation template and the "Online video" option brings up the Video citation template. The "Basic" option brings up a way of citing without a template, this should only be used for the creation of notes rather than for making references. The final option, "Re-use", is for adding citations of references that have already been used in the page, you should aim not to reuse the same citation too much but there is no limit on the amount of times it can be used and sometimes a single source is the best option available which justifies its overuse.

Ordering citations

1. Avoid placing a citation after a space

Jeff Bezos is a parasite.^[1] (do)
Jeff Bezos is a parasite. ^[1] (don't) Avoid placing a citation before punctuation

II. Avoid placing a citation before punctuation

Without revolutionary theory,^[1] there can be no revolutionary movement.^[2] (do)
Without revolutionary theory^[1], there can be no revolutionary movement^[2]. (don't)

Placing more than one of the same citation in the same paragraph is unnecessary unless it is intercepted by a different citation. In a paragraph it is assumed that all text before a citation up until the previous citation is either covered by that citation or is common sense.

References list

At the end of an article we put the references list, as the name suggests all references will be automatically compiled here in the order in which they were first used in the article. You can click the blue arrow at the beginning of a reference to jump up in the article to where this source is used. If there are numbers at the start of the reference going x.0 x.1... etc. then this means that this reference is used more than once and each number can be clicked on individually to jump to where it is used.

If an article does not yet have a reference list and you are adding a reference to it, for example in the case of you creating a brand new page, then you will need to add the reference list to the article yourself. This is done in visual editor by clicking the insert option on the top bar of the editor and then pressing the more option at the bottom of the list to reveal all options, the references list option will be at the bottom of the list. In source editor this is done by simply adding <references /> to the bottom of the page.