User talk:DanielSlaughter

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[edit] Welcome!

Hello and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Where to ask a question, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome!  --Srleffler 04:21, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Referencing

"Harvard" referencing is when you refer to a work in the text by the author's name and the year, instead of using a footnote. So, for example, you might write "Therefore the orientation of the atom depends more generally on the frequency, intensity, polarization, spectral bandwidth of the laser as well as the linewidth and transition probability of the absorbing transition [Demtroder 1998]". The reader then manually looks up the name in the reference list. Wikipedia provides templates for Harvard referencing that make a clickable link. This is a different way of referencing than using footnotes, which is implemented with the <ref> tag.

If the referencing tools seem confusing, it's partly due to obsolete features. Wikipedia formerly didn't have a good way of handling footnotes, so there were several different incompatible and imperfect footnoting templates. The Harvard templates got around this avoiding numbered footnotes altogether. The <ref> feature was added not long ago, and is probably the better way to do references now.--Srleffler 04:38, 25 August 2006 (UTC)