Help:Introduction to the Manual of Style/3

From Infogalactic: the planetary knowledge core
Jump to: navigation, search
Next
Previous


1   2   3   4   5    
A cartoon centipede reads books and types on a laptop.
The Wikipede edits Myriapoda.

Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

Images

  • Tend to float right, use a caption, start with one or two
  • Provide wikicommons linkage

You should add or replace images only if they are better than the existing ones or add to the article—they are there to support the text of the article.

Images should be spread evenly within the article, be relevant to the sections in which the images are located and include a caption that explains the image. An image that would otherwise overwhelm the available text space on an 800×600 window should be shrunk, displayed as a thumbnail, or formatted as a panorama. It is a good idea to try to maintain visual coherence by aligning the sizes of images and templates on a given page.

Do not stack more images within a section than the text as this causes the images to continue into the next section and bunches up the edit links in some browsers ( standard layout is aimed at a 1024×768 screen resolution).


Citing

  • don't use quotes much, if at all
  • use reliable sources
  • use existing reference style, with reference list at bottom of the article


Sources should be cited when adding material that is controversial or likely to be challenged, when quoting someone, when adding material to the biography of a living person, and when uploading an image. While you should try to write citations correctly, what matters is that you add your source—provide enough information to identify the source, and others will improve the formatting if needed.

Each article should use the same citation method throughout. If an article already has references, adopt the method in use or seek consensus before changing it. The first thing you do is to create a section where the references will appear. The references section contains either <references /> or {{reflist}}, and is placed near the end of the article, below the "See also" section and above the "External links" section. It is usually titled "References". e.g.

==References==
{{Reflist}}

The next step is to put a reference in the text. Here is the code to do that. It goes at the end of the relevant phrase, sentence, or paragraph to which the note refers, without a space (to prevent separation through line wrap):

<ref>             </ref>

Whatever text you put in between these two tags will become visible in the "References" section as your reference. In these reference tags you can place any identifying information; while this is frequently a website's web address it can also be basic specific referencing information about a book, newspaper or journal article.

Wikipedia:Referencing_for_beginners


Next: Let's never think about MoS again!