Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual/Editing, creating, and maintaining articles/Documenting your sources

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Back in high school English, you probably learned how to add footnotes and endnotes to essays and papers. If you didn't add information about your sources, your paper would get a very low grade.

Wikipedia's equivalent of a failing grade is to have another editor revert your edit, putting the article back to exactly as it was before you changed it. If you want to add new information to articles and have it stay there, you need to understand Wikipedia's rules. This chapter explains those rules. If you follow them, you'll help ensure the accuracy and credibility of Wikipedia articles.

To add a source (what Wikipedia calls citing a source), you also need to learn some technical matters—how Wikipedia software handles external links, and how it creates footnotes. This chapter includes two tutorials that show you how to create links and footnotes that would make your English teacher proud.