Project:References

References, citations, or sources are unique sources of information meant to give credence to statements in an article. On para.wiki, it's hard to find sources in support of the paranormal, particularly phenomena and practices which are neither validated by science nor urban legends, which tend to have "objective" information describing what people claim to experience.

Reliability
With citations there's the concept of reliability, the level of confidence assigned to the veracity of a source by most people. Events, phenomena, and concepts which haven't been christened by the body of modern scientific knowledge tend to lack sources of information that are traditionally considered "reliable" simply for the fact that it doesn't take them seriously. The few examples there are of paranormal phenomena being scientifically tested by a reliable source have a very high tendency of being extraordinarily unscientific in how they're carried out, making them practically useless.

It's for this reason that the ideas of "reliability" and truth have to be smudged somewhat by para.wiki articles. In essence, references aren't proving a statement, but supporting it with evidence, leaving the readers to decide the veracity of the statement for themselves. This makes para.wiki less a source of knowledge than a source of ideas and areas of research into little known topics, at least for the moment. In an ideal world, this would result in more people being capable of providing something closer to actual evidence, allowing the paranormal to get enough respect for actual experimentation and consideration.

Technical Usage
References for a statement are produced by surrounding text in the APA format with . The cite template should almost always be used within a ref tag, as it provides an easy-to-use, consistent citation style which can be changed at any point to reflect a different citation style.

To use a citation multiple times, use the format  for the first occurrence, then for any subsequent usages of that reference. This becomes useful when information from a single source becomes split across the article, and the references list at the bottom will group duplicate references together.

At the end of an article (before categories and end-of-article cleanup messages like stub) there should be a References second-level section (anything of the form == ... == ) containing just. This will output a formatted list of all references used by the article.

If a tag is used but no  tag, or vice versa, para.wiki will automatically give you an error at the bottom of the page (though the edit will still go through). This ensures that neither can be in an article without the other.