Talk:Bianca Giovanna Sforza

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Can someone tell me how to cite sources, thank you!

Hey, my name's Hector! And I've recently made my account today, I'm just confused about some aspects. How can I cite sources without getting termed or banned. I just want to figure out my way around here. I've been working on this article for quite some time, just getting busy, can anyone tell me how I can improve, etc. That's all I ask for and thank you! Hectorvector7 (talk) 08:33, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Finding reliable sources

You can use Template:Find sources to give you several search links to start. For example, using it on Bianca Giovanna Sforza gives us: Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL
Books: The Commons, Project Gutenberg, Archive.org, and Google Books will have full books that are in the public domain like A history of Milan under the Sforza[1][2], Italian Gardens of the Renaissance[3], Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 [4] and Isabella of Milan [5]. Because of their age, these books are best used to cite hard facts, and should be avoided for anything where there is any kind of debate or controversy. Depending on where you live/work/learn, you may be able to get more recent books through your library and through inter-library loans. Online, Archive.org has Leonardo's Lost Princess; making an account to borrow books for an hour at a time from there is free and quite useful.
News sources: Ideally, you'll want to find more recent sources. Searching across major news outlets yields plenty of hits mostly related to da Vinci: [6][7] There are several options if you run into paywalls on news sites. Scholarly journals can be harder to access though.
Scholarly sources: Even for papers that you may not have access to, the abstract is often available freely online like here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24595928 And you can also search those papers to see if anyone is hosting the whole thing online, which in this case is here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303400858_La_Bella_Principessa_-_Arguments_against_the_Attribution_to_Leonardo

Writing citations in the Visual Editor

Check out this page first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:VisualEditor#Using_standard_cite_templates The Visual Editor lets your fill out citation templates like a form. These templates have a vast amount of parameters, but the only ones you'll really need are: title, date, last/first name, publisher, and page.

I hope this helps. Feel free to ask anywhere things gets confusing, Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 13:42, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you so much! I was a little confused. Hectorvector7 (talk) 16:55, 21 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Hectorvector7: Yeah, it's a confusing system. I've cleaned up the first citation in the article as an example: [8]

When an online source doesn't give a date, you can fill out the access-date (when you checked it out) in case the URL goes dead or the content changes. I filled out the publisher, but for better known websites (New York Times, etc.) the website itself is fine and the publisher isn't needed. FamilySearch seems to accept user-submitted info, so I wouldn't lean on it as a reliable source in the future (see discussion at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 115#familysearch.org).

The second citation links to search engine results. For that one, you'll want to fill out the parameters for the result you are using. The search results will actually be a little different for everybody. On my laptop the top result is a Britannica article which is totally fine to cite for hard details like Ludovico's titles, but on my cellphone the top results are an AI response, wikipedia, and a fact box which aren't really citable. Good luck, Rjjⁱⁱⁱ (talk) 13:49, 22 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]