User:Plumitife/sandbox

<ref>Sullivan, Jennifer, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/author-richard-bach-recovering-from-plane-crash-returns-to-inspirational-tale,‘‘Seattle Times’’, USA, 19 January 2010, updated 21 January 2013. Retrieved on 17 April 2018.

Hi, there's only two small issues with the above. The reason that you are seeing <ref> at the beginning is because the corresponding closing tag is wrong; is needs to be </ref> not <ref/> The other is the url; as you correctly recognised the url on the JLS page is out of date and leads to a 404 error on the Seattle Times website. The url is actually https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/author-richard-bach-recovering-from-plane-crash-returns-to-inspirational-tale/ the difference from what you have typed above is the / on the end - very small but very significant.

There is nothing wrong with the way you have laid this out (I'm going to ignore the opening and closing <ref> tags from now on)

Sullivan, Jennifer, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/author-richard-bach-recovering-from-plane-crash-returns-to-inspirational-tale/,‘‘[[Seattle Times]]’’, USA, 19 January 2010, updated 21 January 2013. Retrieved on 17 April 2018.

but you will probably find more other editors would prefer to see it formatted using {{Cite news}} like this

{{cite news |last=Sullivan |first=Jennifer |title=Author Richard Bach, recovering from plane crash, returns to inspirational tale |newspaper=[[Seattle Times]] |date=17 January 2013 |url= https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/author-richard-bach-recovering-from-plane-crash-returns-to-inspirational-tale/ |accessdate=14 February 2013}}

producing

Sullivan, Jennifer (17 January 2013). "Author Richard Bach, recovering from plane crash, returns to inspirational tale". Seattle Times. Retrieved 14 February 2013.

This is only because of the amount of metadata in the citation which in the formatted structure is more easily machine read and/or reuseable elsewhere. Nthep (talk) 14:33, 17 April 2018 (UTC)