User talk:Cateau63

March 2023

Hello, and thank you for your efforts to improve Wikipedia, and in particular for adding references, as you did to Qinetiq! However, you should know that adding a bare URL is not ideal, and exposes the reference to linkrot. It is preferable to use proper citation templates when citing sources. A bare URL is a URL cited as a reference for some information in an article without any accompanying information about the linked page. In other words, it is just URL copied and pasted into the Wiki text, inserted between <ref>...</ref> tags, without title, author, date, or any of the usual information necessary for a bibliographic citation. Here's an example of a full citation using the {{cite web}} template to cite a web page:

Lorem ipsum<ref>{{cite web |title=Download the Scanning Software - Windows and Mac |publisher=Canon Inc |work=Ask a Question |date=2022 |url=https://support.usa.canon.com/kb/index?page=content&id=ART174839 |access-date=2022-04-02}}</ref> dolor sit amet.

which displays inline in the running text of the article as:

Lorem ipsum^[1] dolor sit amet.

and displays under References as:

1. ^ Download the Scanning Software - Windows and Mac". Ask a Question. Canon Inc. 2022. Retrieved 2022-04-02.

If you've already entered one or more bare urls to an article, there are tools available to expand them into full citations; try the reFill tool, which can resolve some bare references semi-automatically. Once again, thanks for adding references to articles, and to avoid future link rot, please consider supplementing your bare URLs—creating full, inline citations with title, author, date, publisher, etc. More information can be found at Wikipedia:Inline citations. Thank you. Dormskirk (talk) 14:19, 24 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]