Help:Citing sources

References show where readers can verify claims in encyclopedia articles. Place the citation immediately after the relevant statement; do not put every citation only at the end of a long section.

Website or institutional publication

Use the wiki's existing PAI Cite web template directly after the supported sentence:

RFC 5280 specifies a certificate and certificate revocation list profile.{{PAI Cite web
|url=https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc5280
|title=RFC 5280 — Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Certificate and CRL Profile
|website=RFC Editor
|access-date=2026-10-09
}}

Change the date to the date when you actually accessed the source. Add author and publication date when known. Do not cite a link that does not support the statement.

Published book

Use PAI Cite book for real books that you have consulted. Its supported fields are author, title, edition, publisher, year, page and isbn.

{{PAI Cite book
|author=Kevin M. Lynch and Frank C. Park
|title=Modern Robotics: Mechanics, Planning, and Control
|publisher=Cambridge University Press
|year=2017
|isbn=9781107156302
}}

Use a page number if you have verified that passage in the specific edition.

Journal article

Use PAI Cite journal. Supported fields include author, title, journal, year, volume, issue, pages, doi and url.

{{PAI Cite journal
|author=Author names from the actual paper
|title=Exact published paper title
|journal=Exact journal title
|year=Publication year
|doi=Verified DOI, without https://doi.org/
}}

The journal example shows field positions only; its placeholders are not a real citation and must all be replaced before saving an article.

Plain reference tags

For special cases not covered by the templates, normal Cite extension syntax can be used:

A claim supported by the cited publication.<ref>Full bibliographic details of a real source.</ref>

You must supply a real, verified publication in place of the instructional text above.

References section

Add this once near the end of the article:

== References ==
{{PAI Reflist}}

Important: The {{PAI Cite web}}, {{PAI Cite book}} and {{PAI Cite journal}} templates already produce reference tags. Do not wrap them in another <ref>...</ref>. To reuse a reference, the standard MediaWiki Cite extension supports named references such as <ref name="source">...</ref> and <ref name="source"/>.

Source-quality checklist

Does the link or publication exist?
Does the cited passage support the exact claim?
Are dates, editions and statistics described accurately?
Is the claim presented at the appropriate level of certainty?
Is the source independent when the claim requires independent corroboration?

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