User:Goodraise/Referencing web pages

The aim of this essay is to help avoid some mistakes that are commonly made when referencing web pages; mistakes in that they violate Wikipedia guidelines or simply go against common practice at the featured content level.

The grand majority of references to web pages include the title of the web page, its Uniform Resource Locator (URL), the date on which the page was last accessed, the website's name and/or the website's publishing entity. The date of access is not strictly required, especially if the source is dated and that date is already given in the reference, but the overwhelming majority of references on Wikipedia provide it anyway. The URL is arguably the most useful part of a reference to an online source, yet it is not strictly required. An otherwise complete reference does not become incomplete or invalid if the URL is missing. Still, an URL is almost always given.

The title. This is where a lot of mistakes are made. Keep in mind, the title of a web page (or any other document for that matter) is quoted text. It is placed in quotation marks for a reason. That means if the title of a web page is not apparent or is ambiguous (which is often the case on non-scholarly websites), do not just make one up, for example by describing the page's content. Instead copy text directly from the web page. In difficult cases, use your own good judgment to piece together the title and subtitle(s) using (a) colon(s), as is common practice in English. Along the same line, reduce all-capitals to title case (see MOS:ALLCAPS) and convert other style related idiosyncrasies, like separating title and subtitle with characters like greater than (>), to common English practice (using a colon). Also, if the page is in another language, give the original title in the original language. If possible, provide a translation of the title immediately following the title within its quotation marks, surrounded by brackets (like this: "Zum Beispiel [For Example]").

At the very least the website's name or its publishing entity should be included in any reference to a web page on that website, preferably both. It is important to understand the difference between the name of a website and its domain name. Some websites are named. The name of the website this page is part of is Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Every website has a domain name. The domain name of the English language Wikipedia is en.wikipedia.org. A website's domain name and its name are not the same. For some pages, however, they are identical. If a website is named and that name is given in the reference, that name should generally be italicized if that name is also the name of an item listed at WP:ITALICS. For example, the name of http://www.nytimes.com is The New York Times, which is also a newspaper and should therefore be italicized. (Mind that WP:CITE also allows for citation styles to be used which generally italicize website names, such as the APA style.) For a well known website, giving its name is usually enough. Also use good judgment to avoid redundancies, such as in "The New York Times is published by The New York Times Company." On the other hand, when citing a less well-known website, giving the publishing entity becomes more important. Usually, the name of the publishing entity of a website can be found at the bottom of the page or on the website's "about us" page, if such a page exists. The harder a website's publishing entity is to identify, the less likely it is that the page qualifies as a reliable source.