Forum:SH Archive/Sourcing guideline draft

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This guideline should not be viewed as a rigid, "legally" binding set of rules. Instead, it is a flexible collection of tips on sourcing.

Use cases

 * Steve is an average Wookieepedia visitor. One day, he discovers in interesting fact in the Luke Skywalker article - that Obi-Wan sold his starfighter on Nar Shaddaa to buy passage to Tatooine with baby Luke. He wants to know what Star Wars work this event is described, and once he does know, he may possibly buy it.
 * Amanda is a KOTOR player, and she's constantly replaying the game to see any bits of dialogue she may have missed. While reading the Wookieepedia article on Juhani, she notices that it mentions her growing up on Taris. She never encountered that information in the game and wants to know who says this and at what point in the game, so she can hear it all for herself.
 * Judith is a skeptic, and she believes that Wookieepedia is ridden with fanon at every corner. She constantly rants on talk pages about every questionable factoid she finds, asking to the source, and constantly writes on TFN that Wookieepedia is unreliable.
 * Roy is tired of having to constantly put up with people like Judith. Unfortunately, he doesn't have the resources to answer to every challenge about every fact, he wants a way to preemptively tag unsourced and disputable pieces of information as needing references, so they can be noticed and sourced by someone else.

What to reference
Anything that could be potentially disputed, or could interest trivia collectors. It is hard to give any clear recommendations, but usually, the bolder the claim, the more badly it needs sourcing.

There is usually no need to insert many references into articles that have only one major source (and possibly a few secondary sources). For example, character articles following the narrative flow of a single book, or a single video game, usually don't need references at all; if it's a comic series, some references may be necessary when the article lists facts in an out-of-print-order manner (for example, backstories revealed in later issues).

Articles based on books and video games can usually benefit from extended references, used to precisely pinpoint the scene where a particular fact is revealed. In case of video games, extended references are usually not necessary for scenes the player is likely to encounter during the normal playthrough &mdash; as opposed to something the player is likely to miss unless specifically informed, like obscure dialogue options, optional quests or bonus levels.

How to reference
A typical reference to a Star Wars work includes only the name of the Star Wars work in question, written in full, as it would be if used in the Appearances or Sources section. Unlike them, it is not necessary to link to them if they are already present in one of these sections. However, sometimes sources not present in any of these sections can be referenced, and those should be linked. The rationale behind not including extended publisher info is the same as for the Sources section: our goal is verifiability, not formalism for the sake of it, and all the publisher info is available in the article about the source.

External links to official Star Wars web sources should be handled as they are in the Appearances and Sources sections.

External links to outside sources not affiliated with Star Wars canon (these include any unofficial articles, interviews, blog posts, forum posts, and other web sources) should include a link to the source whose text is the title of the article/blog post/forum thread in question, followed by the name of the website (linked if we have an article about it, such as TheForce.Net), and the URL access date.

Extended information
Sometimes, in case of large works, it may make sense to include more information than just the name of the work. It is optional.

The goal of extended information is to identify a particular scene within the source itself. Its exact nature depends on the media and is probably left unspecified. However, some recommendations can be made.

For books, a page number will usually suffice, with a clarification if there is more then one edition of the book. For example: The New Essential Chronology (paperback), page 146.

The same is true for comics, which often have a trade paperback version. Examples: Star Wars Legacy 1: Broken, Part 1, page 2; Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic: Commencement (TPB), page 56.

Video games are perhaps the most ambiguous media in this respect, and if a referencer wants to include extended information, it is usually left to their judgment how to unambiguously identify a scene in a video game. Sometimes, the name of the level will suffice; sometimes, more detailed instructions may be needed, like talking to a specific NPC as a character of a specific gender, or looking at a specific item description.

Special cases
Quotes cannot benefit from the reference system due to the MediaWiki bug that causes the &lt;ref&gt; tag to work incorrectly in templates. At this point, the best thing that can be done is probably the [src] link, however annoying it may be. It should be noted that the popup alone is not sufficient: not only isn't there a clickable link pointing to the source, but the W3C standards do not require browsers to display the span title as a popup, meaning that such behavior cannot be counted on.