User:TheMG/Citations

This is a policy being drafted by MarioGalaxy2433g5. It probably isn't finished, so yeah.

What are citations
Citations (or references) are when one cites where information comes from. On The BIONICLE Wiki, this should be done through code. Information about BIONICLE comes from a variety of sources, so fact and conjecture can be easily mixed. Therefore citations should be used whenever possible. This provides integrity and verifiablility to the articles.

Marking as needing citations
You can (and should) mark information as needing citations by adding templates. To mark a whole article as needing citations, add to the top of the page. To mark a certain piece of information as needing citations add after the information, in a format like this: First sentence. Sentence containing the information you want checked. Another sentence Note that the template goes after the punctuation ending the sentence in question, but before the spaces separating it from the next sentence. If you instead want to tag a particular word or phrase, place the template immediately after the (last) word (in the phrase) unless punctuation immediately follows it, in which case you would put the template after the punctuation.

Both of the templates above add the article to the category Articles needing verification.

Of course, when possible, one should find the citation itself instead of just tagging the page/sentence as needing a citation.

If something is outright ridiculous, purely speculative, or otherwise blatantly false, just remove it. You won't need to add a citation needed template in that case.

Citation Templates
Potential list
 * Cite book (for citing books, comics, etc)
 * Cite news (for citing newspapers)
 * Cite game (for citing video games)
 * Cite journal (for citing journals and magazines)
 * Cite web (for citing websites, except for the Official Greg Discussion)
 * Cite OGD (exclusively for citing the Official Greg Discussion)