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User:EighteenFiftyNine

     ”The only thing any of us can do completely on our own is to have the start of a good idea”


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10 May 2024


Tip of the moment...
Main page - Did you know

Wikipedia:Did you know... is a section you can see on the Main Page. Wikipedia:Did you know (WP:DYK) is the project page for the "Did you know" section.

The DYK section showcases new or expanded articles that are selected through an informal review process. It is not a general trivia section. For the discussion page see WT:DYK.

Beginners should consult this Did You Know glossary if they don't understand any of the terms used. Beginners may like to start by looking at a summary of our many rules: this provides links to pages with more detailed explanations (which in turn may link to even more detailed pages).

Read more: Did you know/Onepage  
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- this is the tip of the moment template, which automatically displays a different tip every time you enter a page it is on (to a maximum of one time per minute). If it doesn't update, try clearing your browser cache.

General topics lists

There are two types of general topics lists: Outlines and Indexes. Outlines are arranged hierarchically, while the topics in indexes are presented alphabetically.

The vast majority of lists on Wikipedia present the items of a class of things – those are item lists. The rest are general topics lists which are different than item lists because they present the subtopics of a given subject – their scope is an entire subject.

For example, for sharks, the item list is List of sharks and it presents shark species. A general topics list on sharks is the Outline of sharks, and its scope is everything about sharks.

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- the main userspace version of the tip of the day template, with border, centered in the middle of the page. Complete with inspirational lightbulb.

Tomorrow's featured article

Leucippus

Leucippus was a Greek philosopher of the 5th century BCE. He is credited with founding atomism, with his student Democritus. Leucippus divided the world into two entities: atoms, indivisible particles that make up all things, and the void, the nothingness between the atoms. Leucippus's ideas were influential in ancient and Renaissance philosophy. They were a precursor to modern atomic theory, but the two are only superficially similar. Leucippus's atoms come in infinitely many forms, all in constant motion, creating a deterministic world created by the collisions of atoms. The soul is viewed as an arrangement of spherical atoms, cycled through the body by respiration and creating thought and sensory input. Little is known of his life, with a few scholars doubting that he existed, attributing his ideas purely to Democritus. Two works are attributed to Leucippus, The Great World System and On Mind, but all of his writing has been lost except for one sentence. (Full article...)

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Wikipedians


How to place an inline citation using ref tags

Shortcut: WP:CITEFOOT

To create a footnote, use the [1] syntax at the appropriate place in the article text, for example:

Justice is a human invention.[2] It...

which will be displayed as something like:

Justice is a human invention.[1] It...

It will also be necessary to generate the list of footnotes (where the citation text is actually displayed); for this, see the next section.

As in the above example, citation markers are normally placed after adjacent punctuation such as periods and commas. For exceptions, see the Punctuation and footnotes section of the Manual of Style. Note also that no space is added before the citation marker.

The citation should be added close to the material it supports, offering text-source integrity. If a word or phrase is particularly contentious, an inline citation may be added next to that word or phrase within the sentence, but it is usually sufficient to add the citation to the end of the sentence or paragraph, so long as it's clear which source supports which part of the text. If an infobox or table contains text that needs citing, but the box or table cannot incorporate an inline citation, the citation should appear in a caption or other text that discusses the material.

How to create the list of citations

The first editor to add footnotes to an article must create a section where the text of those citations appears. This section is placed at or near the bottom of the article and is usually titled "Notes" or "References." For more about the order and titles of sections at the end of an article (which may also include "Further reading" and "External links" sections), see Wikipedia:Footers.

Shortcut: WP:ASL

With some exceptions discussed below, citations appear in a single section containing only the

  1. ^ ...
  2. ^ Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 1.

tag or the

template. For example:

Notes edit

The footnotes will then automatically be listed under that section heading. Each numbered footnote marker in the text is a clickable link to the corresponding footnote, and each footnote contains a caret which links back to the corresponding point in the text. Scrolling lists, or lists of citations appearing within a scroll box, should never be used. This is because of issues with readability, browser compatibility, accessibility, printing, and site mirroring.[1]

If an article contains a list of general references, this is placed in a separate section, titled (for example) "References". This usually comes immediately after the section(s) listing footnotes, if any. (If the general references section is called "References", then the citations section is usually called "Notes".)


Piped Links

Piped links

Main page: Wikipedia:Piped link

You may want to display a text for a link that is different from the linked article title. This can be achieved with what is called Piped links. Example: Henry II, which displays as Henry II. However, make sure that it is still clear what the link refers to without having to follow the link. Think about what the reader will believe the link is about. Example: When you use a link such as Archery (which displays as Archery), the reader will expect this link to go to a general article on archery, rather than Archery at the 2008 Summer Olympics. The exception is when it is clear from the context that links go to specific articles, as in template:2008 Summer Olympics calendar, where all links go to the article about these specific games.

Plurals and other derived names. When forming plurals, you can do so thus: apples which includes the final "s" in the link like this: apples. This is easier to type and clearer to read in the source text than apples. This works not just for "s", but for any words that consist of an article name and some additional letters. For details, see Help:Link. (This does not work for affixes beginning with hyphens, apostrophes, or capital letters.)

Case sensitivity. Links are not sensitive to initial capitalization, so there is no need to use piping where the only difference between the text and the target is the case of the initial letter (Wikipedia article titles almost always begin with a capital, whereas the linked words in context often do not). However, links are case-sensitive for all but the initial character.

Shortcut: WP:EGG

Intuitiveness. Keep piped links as intuitive as possible. Per the Wikipedia:Principle of least astonishment, make sure that the reader knows what to expect when clicking on a link. You should plan your page structure and links so that everything appears reasonable and makes sense. If a link takes readers to somewhere other than where they thought it would, it should at least take them somewhere that makes sense. For example, do not write this:

Richard Feynman was also known for work in particle physics.

The readers will not see the hidden reference to the parton model unless they click on or hover over the piped particle physics link; in hard copy, the reference to partons is completely lost. (Such links are sometimes called Easter eggs.) Instead, reference the article with an explicit "see also" or by rephrasing:

Richard Feynman was also known for work in particle physics (he proposed the parton model).

Piping and redirects. Per Link specificity above, do not use a piped link where it is possible to use a redirected term that fits well within the scope of the text. For example, let's assume the page A Dirge for Sabis is a redirect to the page The Sword of Knowledge, and while you're editing some other article, you want to add a link to A Dirge for Sabis. You may be tempted to avoid the redirect by directly linking to it with a pipe like this: A Dirge for Sabis. Instead, write simply A Dirge for Sabis and let the system handle the rest. This has the added advantage that if an article is written later about the more specific subject (in this case, A Dirge for Sabis), fewer links will need to be changed to accommodate for the new article.

Piped links to sections of articles

Linking to particular sections of articles can be useful, inasmuch as it can take the reader immediately to the information that is most focused on the original topic. If you decide not to use a redirect, you have to use a piped link, because the format "Article name#Section name", is not good enough for display in an article. The format for a subsection link is name of link. Please note, section name is case sensitive. For example, to link to the "Culture" subsection of the Oman article, type culture of Oman (which displays as culture of Oman). As noted above, when doing this, add a hidden comment to the target section such as so that someone changing the title of that section can fix the incoming links. (Alternatively, use in case of a large number of links to the section.)

History of Topic: #REDIRECTTopic#History history of Topic

history of Topic

Among topics useful for linking to, there are many which Wikipedia currently implements as article sections, but which are potentially notable enough to become standalone articles. For example, the article Eastern Anyshire can have a small ==History== section, but this does not preclude an article on the History of Eastern Anyshire to be eventually written. Usually, a redirect page from a sub-topic to a general topic already exists, or should be created on demand. It is bad practice to make such links as Article#Section links explicitly, because navigation becomes inconvenient after the section is replaced by a summary of a new article. Instead, link through redirects, as it costs little and makes improvements easier.

Create links faster

1. Pipe trick: Many article titles are disambiguated with parenthetic qualifiers, like this: Self (psychology). But when you want to include such a link in the body of an article, this would look rather awkward. So all you have to do is use the "pipe trick", like this: Self. Notice the "|" character stuck in there at the end of the link? That makes the link look like this: Self, without having to type the name of the link after the pipe! This trick also works with namespaces, so that Tip of the day (again notice the pipe character) displays like this: Tip of the day.

2. Plural trick: While editing, you'll often need to make a link to a plural. For example, suppose you wanted to link "Fred Foo was famous for his study of puddles" to puddle; you could link it like so: puddles. However, you can save time by instead writing puddles. This also works for adjectives (Japanese), verbs (danced), and any other suffixes or prefixes. It does not, however, work for some irregular verbs. For example, (tryied does not work; you have to do tried).

Piped link

A piped link is an internal link or interwiki link where the link target and link label are both specified. This is needed in the case that they are not equal, while also the link label is not equal to the link target with the last word extended. This allows linking a word or phrase within the text of a page rather than using "see also", even if the wording does not exactly correspond with the name of the target page. With a suitable browser and depending on the preferences set, one can still see the link target: when you point at the link, the name shows up in a hover tooltip and is also shown in the status bar.

For instance:

How to set up a coffee house will show: How to set up a coffee house

Another example would be station rendering as station. This is useful where the word "station" is used in an article on trains; from the context, it would be clear that a train station is meant. The piped link is more convenient to the user than a link to station which might be a disambiguation page.

The word piped refers to the use of the pipe character "|" used to separate the good description from the actual link. This character is named after an other use of it; see Pipe (computing).

Read more: Wikipedia:Links and URLs

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