SmashWiki:Citation

This page is a SmashWiki guideline, a principle that suggests how users should contribute and conduct themselves. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. If in doubt, consider discussing changes on the talk page.

SmashWiki encourages editors to provide citation to reference their article content and corroborate it with another source. However, we recognize that much of the information found on SmashWiki can be extremely difficult to source, or demands an impractical amount of effort on the part of an editor.

Use discretion in deciding whether or not the information requires a reference--if it is basic smash knowledge (i.e. Mario is a playable character in SSB), you don't need a link to another website to confirm that. However, if you make a claim like "Mewtwo was originally playable in SSB, but was replaced by Captain Falcon", you'd better be able to link to a website with a game developer interview or something to confirm that! Any disputes over whether an article should be properly cited or not can be resolved on the talk page.

What is citation?

Citation is the process by which an article references information found at another location (usually the internet in SmashWiki's case). They appear at the bottom of articles under a level 2 header called External links (i.e. ==External links==).

Provide a link to the website where the information was found in a bullet point under the External links header, preferably with the title of the target page and/or what information is being referenced (i.e. [http://www.source.com/mariosfinalsmash.html Source.com - Mario's Final Smash]). If there are multiple sources of information, each link should get its own bullet point.

On another note, you should generally archive any cited links through the Internet Archive, and cite the archived link instead of the direct link. All too often, web pages being cited are deleted or otherwise become inaccessible to the public, leaving the wiki with invalid citations, and making the sources impossible to retrieve if no one else archived it prior. This is especially important with citations of social media posts, which are volatile and frequently become inaccessible from a cited post being deleted, the user who made the cited post deactivating their account, or said user being banned from the site the cited post was on.

Examples

Here are some examples of well-referenced articles:

• Final Smash
• Washington Power Rankings
• ChuDat
• Cruel mode