sona pona:Citing sources

This is a wiki essay with advice from one or more contributors.

A citation or reference (ref for short) identifies where a piece of information comes from.

Source what you can

Unlike topics covered by Wikipedia, there aren't many public reliable sources for Toki Pona. (In fact, this very wiki was made to fill that gap!) As such, it's fine if an article doesn't have any citations, though they're always appreciated (and encouraged for lipu pona status). Primary sources are fine, and are even preferable in many cases, such as when tracking the history of a subject.

Potential resources include:

• The Official Toki Pona books (pu, ku, and su), if you have them
  • Freely available sections, such as the pu dictionary, or ku's "Notes on lipu pu" section
• Other materials by jan Sonja, e.g. the tokiponization guidelines
• Other source texts on the wiki
• Anything listed on the Recommended learning resources article
• The Toki Pona census
• Linku if necessary; it does not cite its own sources (such as nimi ale pona), so more direct citations are preferred. (Some other dictionaries like nimi.li are forks of Linku, and still lack sources regardless.)

When using a proficient speaker's thoughts as a source, remember to note whether they reflect consensus or are rather their personal style. This includes what you may consider "official" material:

This is the way I use Toki Pona.

—pu, p.Page 7

Resources with open submissions, such as Tatoeba and Glosbe, often attract overconfident beginners and so should be treated with care.

Formatting

Citations are wrapped in <ref>…</ref> tags. Any page with citations should have a references section at the end:

==References==
<references />

There are many citation templates for different media, sites, and even specific sources that are frequently cited. Most sources will probably be cited with Template:cite web and derivatives, Template:cite pu, and Template:cite ku.

Miraheze currently doesn't support Citoid, which automatically handles citation formatting on sites like Wikipedia. Instead, you can use an external tool, such as:

• Citer (simplest to use)
• reFill NG (good for mass conversion; add a dummy title, click "Use custom wikicode", paste links within <ref>…</ref> tags)
• See more at wikipedia:Help:Citation tools

Archiving sources

To prevent link rot, please consider archiving a source with the Wayback Machine or archive.is. This is especially necessary for Discord uploads; unarchived links will start to expire so that the files can only be accessed through Discord, which requires knowing where it was originally uploaded.

The Wayback Machine offers several browser extensions and other tools that can make it easier to archive sources.

Alternatively, you can add a JavaScript bookmarklet to quickly archive a webpage to the Wayback Machine. Create a bookmark and set this as the "URL":

javascript:void(location.href='https://web.archive.org/save/'+location.href);

Then, whenever you press the bookmarklet, a snapshot of the currently viewed webpage will be saved.