Neil Wheatley

On a mission to create a free archive of verifiable gaming knowledge for everyone.

2 minute read

Summary: Dbljump articles now feature references in the widely-used APA style of academic citation. As an editor, it’s easy to reference many kinds of resources and add multiple sources for each part of your article.

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Good referencing is really important to us here at Dbljump, so I’m really happy to announce that articles on games, people, and companies now feature APA-style referencing.

Why is referencing important?

We’re striving to build something important for gaming with Dbljump - a resource you can trust, which honours and respects creators, and keeps high standards for compiling and presenting information.

Referencing is really important in achieving these goals because:

  • It makes the information in Dbljump articles verifiable.
  • It allows you, the reader, to easily find and read sources yourself. A Dbljump article should provide a comprehensive summary on its topic. With good referencing, you can dive further into the details.
  • It enables us to credit the primary sources used by Dbljump - the journalists, the researchers, the archivists - and help they reach a wider audience.

What is APA referencing?

We’ve chosen the APA (American Psychological Association) citation style for Dbljump. Although it was designed for the field of psychology, it’s used today in many fields of science and humanities.

APA references look like this:

McWhertor, M. (2020, December 10). Capcom’s making a new
    Ghosts ’n Goblins. Polygon. Vox Media, LLC.
    https://www.polygon.com/some-uri.

Our APA styling is based on Purdue University’s guide to APA 7. We don’t have a perfect implementation yet, but we’ll improve it over time.

How do you add references to an article?

As part of the move to support APA, we’ve revamped Dbljump’s tools for creating and editing encyclopaedia-like content.

When adding or editing an article paragraph, you can now use a simple form to add multiple sources:

  1. Choose from six currently-supported media types: web article, website, web page, YouTube video, book, or print article.
  2. Check the URL. If it’s already referenced by another article, you can link it to the article you’re working on.
  3. Fill in a set of form fields appropriate to the type of source you’re referencing.
If the resource you’re citing is already on Dbljump, just link it
You can easily add information for each kind of reference

How can we improve this?

We’ve just launched this feature and we’d love for you to try it and let us know what you think.

In the future, we plan to:

  • Validate URLs before saving, to make sure they’re loading
  • Check source URLs against a deny list of websites before saving, to reduce spam and poor-quality references
  • Support more kinds of media, like non-YouTube videos
  • Support page numbers for print media

You can let us know what you think via Twitter or our Facebook page.

You can create well-cited gaming articles with Dbljump now!

Slowly but surely, Dbljump is becoming a unique platform for organising and sharing video gaming knowledge.

We can only achieve our mission with your help. Register now to join the community and try these new features!

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