Fort Towson

Hello. This is a message to let you know that one or more of your recent contributions, such as the edit(s) you made to San Bernardino, California, did not appear to be constructive and have been reverted. Please take some time to familiarise yourself with our policies and guidelines. You can find information about these at our welcome page which also provides further information about contributing constructively to this encyclopedia. If you only meant to make test edits, please use the sandbox for that. If you think I made a mistake, or if you have any questions, you may leave a message on my talk page. Thank you. Binksternet (talk) 16:33, 3 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome to Wikipedia. It might not have been your intention, but you recently removed maintenance templates from Eritrean Americans. When removing maintenance templates, please be sure to either resolve the problem that the template refers to, or give a valid reason for the removal in the edit summary. Please see Help:Maintenance template removal for further information on when maintenance templates should or should not be removed. If this was a mistake, don't worry, as your removal of this template has been reverted. Take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia, and if you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Thank you. Gyrofrog (talk) 16:11, 6 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, and thank you for your efforts to improve Wikipedia, and in particular for adding references! 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. :Jay8g [V•T•E] 07:02, 5 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]