Destiny Wiki:Citation Policy

Citations are references used to validate information on the wiki. Information taken from sources such as games, books, videos, or articles should always be cited in order to both certify it's legitimacy and credit the original author, to avoid claims of plagiarism. This policy helps to dictate when citation should be used and in what format these citations should made; for a how to guide to citing please read the wiki's referencing help page.

When to Reference
Understanding when to cite information is down to personal preference, and may take time to gain the experience needed to know when citation is necessary. In order to help guide users of when to use citations this list of contingencies has been drafted of when a citation would be useful or necessary:


 * Information which stipulates an absolute fact - i.e. "Destiny will be released in fall 2013" or "Titan's specialize in the use of heavy weaponry".
 * Large edits - information over one sentence in length or over 40 characters.
 * 'Information from recognized sources - information taken from a reliable source recognized by the wiki, such as Bungie or IGN.
 * Information from copyrighted sources - information taken from a source which is protected by copyright, such as magazines or books.

Events which require citation is not limited to these situations. Therefore, the general rule of thumb is that all edits, no matter how small, can be cited - citations are easier to remove than to add.

Reference Templates
In order to preserve the consistency of citations, and therefore allow for clarity of reading reference lists, multiple pre-formatted reference templates exist. Editors need only fill out the fields of the templates with the relevant information pertaining to the source, such as the author or the title of an article. When citing a source editors should always use one of our pre-formatted templates which best reflects the nature of the source.


 * Game sourced citations should use RefGame.
 * Book sourced citations should use RefBook.
 * Video sourced citations should use RefVideo.
 * Online article sourced citations should use RefArticle.
 * Website article sourced citations should use RefWebsite.
 * Other sources, such as magazines, should be cited on instruction of an administrator.

Reference Names
Reference names exist for when a source may be cited more than once on an article, and defining attribute is required in order to relieve congestion of reference lists. Reference names may be added through adding name="Title" to the first reference tag (e.g. ). All citations should contain a reference name, even if the citation is only planned to be used once in an article.

The reference name of a citation should always follow selected citation type formats:
 * Games - Game Name: Mission/Quest (e.g. name="Destiny: Mission One")
 * Book - Book Name: Page(s) (e.g. name="Destiny Game Guide: Page 20-27")
 * Video - Host: Title (e.g. name="IGN: Destiny - Concept Art Analysis")
 * Online article - Website Name: Title (e.g. name="MTV: Bungie’s Destiny Revealed")
 * Website - Website Name: Webpage Title (e.g. name="Bungie: Well, that just happened… again.")

Reference List
The reference list is the area of the article where all the citations are organised numerically out of the text of the article, allowing for ease of reading. The reference list for an article should be placed at the absolute bottom of the article with the following code:

== Sources ==

For articles which contain over 10 citations, the reference should be split into two columns through replacing with RefList in order to aid clarity of reading.