Pixar Cars Wiki:Citations

Citing a source means identifying where, and from whom, your information comes from. You've probably heard the following from your tenth grade English teacher: "Wiki isn't a reliable source. Anyone can edit it!" While not necessarily wrong, it falsely implies there's nothing we can do to change the quality of our content. We can avoid questions of legitimacy by proactively giving the answer.

This page details the purpose and how-to behind citations and references, and explain what policies the wiki has in place for them.

About

There are two ways to cite something:

• In-text: By incorporating the source into your writing itself. For most pages documenting the fictional Cars universe, you'll often be able to do this quite seamlessly: A good way to refer to the events of a story (such as in a film, book, game, etc.) is with "In The World of Cars Online..." or something to that effect.
• Parenthetical: However, the downside of the above option is that having to constantly credit every author and quotation may interrupt your writing. Similar to academic writing, wikis work around this using references. This adds a small, numbered link that, when clicked, brings you to a separate bibliography section at the bottom of the page.

Guidelines

When do you have to use citations? When don't you?

Like most things, this tends to be situational, and requires some critical judgment on your part. Generally speaking...

• If information is not widely known or accepted, and would likely be challenged despite its authenticity, citations should immediately come into play. See the Drifting Series page for an example: Many fans refer to this overall die-cast era by one highly popular sub-collection, even though all known first-party sources from Mattel have called it the "Drifting" motif. Immediately showing said instances to the reader both encourages and allows them to see for themselves.
• If it comes from a source that isn't identified elsewhere on the article. For instance, cars from the Car Finder Game have their bios transcribed under the "Profiles and statistics" section - When referring, you don't necessarily need to cite it, as the very nature of the page design already does so.
• Whenever information may vary or fully/partially contradict, particularly between reference sources like Meet the Cars or Pixarpedia. Often, the spelling or format of a character or model name differs across more than one - in cases where common name practices can't determine a clear choice, a reference should indicate specifically which source the respective piece originates from (i.e. within an infobox or intro paragraph).

How-to

While in-text citations are fairly self-explanatory, references (parenthetical citations) require a couple unique steps. Whenever you're ready to cite something, use <ref></ref>, putting your citation between them.

The citation itself can be formatted like this:

Author (Date). [Weblink-and/or-publication-name Title of work]. Retrieved Month DD, YYYY.

An example in code looks like:

Action Figure Insider (July 2007). [http://www.actionfigureinsider.com/tf2007/mattel.shtml#google_vignette "Toy Fair 2007: Mattel Gallery"]. Retrieved October 11, 2023.

Policy: At bare minimum, you should always provide a link (or book/page number) as well as the date of access. More is always better.

The second and final step is to add the "References" section where the bibliography will display. At the bottom of the page (though still above categories and navigation templates), insert the following code.

==References==
<references />

Additional formatting notes:

• Place <ref></ref> tags after the punctuation mark in a sentence.
• If a sentence has more than one clause, reference tags can go after any of them.

See also

• Wikipedia:Citing sources