User:Mr. Straub/multireference

How to use the same reference twice

Making a reference in wikipedia can be a lot of work because the reference is so long.

{{User Wikipedian For|year=2005|month=9|day=11}}

For example, if I want to make a reference for the following sentence ....

"Francis William Lionel Collings Beaumont was born on 6 August 1903"

You need to use the following code to make a reference from the website CHANNEL-ISLANDS-L Archives.

<ref name= Rootsweb >{{cite web | author= | publisher=Rootsweb | year= 1997 | url=http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/CHANNEL-ISLANDS/1997-06/0867496020 | title=CHANNEL-ISLANDS-L Archives | accessdate=5 June 2009 }}</ref>

A name for your reference

What if I want to use the same CHANNEL-ISLANDS-L Archives a second time? Do I have to use the same code?

No. You can use a much shorter tag.

The first thing to do is to add a name to your reference code. The name code looks like this: name= Rootsweb. You can make up any name you want. Rootsweb is an easy name to remember because it is the name of the website were the reference was found.

You then insert the name code at the beginning of the code into the <ref> tag so that it will look like this: <ref name= Rootsweb>

Now your reference will look like this:

<ref name= Rootsweb >{{cite web | author= | publisher=Rootsweb | year= 1997 | url=http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/CHANNEL-ISLANDS/1997-06/0867496020 | title=CHANNEL-ISLANDS-L Archives | accessdate=5 June 2009 }}</ref>

Using the reference a second time

Now, if you want to use the code to reference another sentence, you can use add the name code, but you have to change it by adding a hashtag, that looks like this / symbol, at the end of it. Your tag will look like this <ref name= Rootsweb/>. At this tag to the end of the second sentence.

Francis William Lionel Collings Beaumont was born on 6 August 1903.<ref name= Rootsweb >{{cite web | author= | publisher=Rootsweb | year= 1997 | url=http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/CHANNEL-ISLANDS/1997-06/0867496020 | title=CHANNEL-ISLANDS-L Archives | accessdate=5 June 2009 }}</ref>

He was the second child of Dudley John Beaumont and Sibyl Mary Collings, daughter of the Seigneur of Sark, the ruling family of the island of Sark.<ref name= Rootsweb/>

What will it look like?

When you press save your page will look like this.

Francis William Lionel Collings Beaumont article

Francis William Lionel Collings Beaumont was born on 6 August 1903

He was the second child of Dudley John Beaumont and Sibyl Mary Collings, daughter of the Seigneur of Sark, the ruling family of the island of Sark.

References

Explanation

Notice in the reference below that there is now an a and b next to your reference. These letters to you that you have used the same reference twice. The more letters you have, the more times the reference has been used. If a reference is used three times, you will see an a, b, and c in your reference section.

Also, did you see the number 1 at the end of each sentence? This means that this was the first reference used in the paper. When a reference is used again, the same number will appear.

I'm still confused!!!

Try looking at the full Francis William Lionel Collings Beaumont article. This might make it easier to understand (or maybe not... sorry!).