Wookieepedia:Sources

The Sources Project is a large project by the Wookieepedia community and led by Cade Calrayn to develop and maintain a centralized, comprehensive database of all items that could be listed in the Sources and Appearances of articles on Wookieepedia. These pages also serve as the basis for C4-DE Bot's Source Engine, which reads in the contents of these subpages and uses the data there to standardize & fix the formatting of both Appearances and Sources sections, as well as reorder the Sources section by release date. A command to generate an Index page for a given article is also available in Discord.

The project is spread out across many subpages, which can be found below:

Canon:

Legends:

Other:

The Project

The Sources Project endeavors to be the master record (or Masterlist) for all applicable Star Wars media that can be listed on Wookieepedia articles, serving as a centralized standard for how to format a link or citation to a given piece of media as dictated by Wookieepedia's Manual of Style. Some general notes before you start that apply to most or all subpages:

The Sources Project is, in general, self-updating and self-sustaining. C4-DE is responsible for automatically adding any new web article or video to the Web Sources subpage through monitoring of the various official Star Wars websites, and each morning it scans Category:Future products for new articles and changes to publication dates. Cade also monitors these changes and resolves any issues that come up. However, this in no way means that other editors cannot edit the subpages; manual additions and fixes are absolutely welcome.
The Appearances and General Sources subpages, along with most of the Masterlist subpages, use publication year as section headers, and their contents are sorted by publication date according. Canceled media is listed at the bottom of the subpage with #Canceled: instead of a publication date, and future media with no specified publication date (or the rare media with a completely unknown publication date) are listed in an "Other" subsection above Canceled and #Future: or #Unknown: in place of dates.
Please note that while the Layout Guide and Manual of Style require the story= parameter of {{StoryCite}} and other similar templates to be listed before the book= parameter, the Masterlist lists them in the opposite order, as it aids in sorting. Worry not, C4-DE will automatically swap the parameter order to the established ordering when running source analysis.
Future products' publication dates are subject to change, and thus C4-DE will update the Masterlist accordingly each morning when it detects a change in publication date on that media's respective article. For future comic issues with no announced publication date, these are placed with an estimated month date based on their publication schedule, as these dates do not actually carry over to the Appearances sections of articles.

Appearances

The Appearances subpages contains all narrative media that can be listed in the Appearances of an in-universe article. The two primary subpages, Canon and Legends, are synchronized with the corresponding timeline of media to enable for timeline sorting. It is sorted by real-life publication date, and each item's listing is considered the master formatting for that given piece of media when listing it in an article's Appearances, Sources, references or body. Thus, it follows the Manual of Style in how it formats links.

The primary subpages are the following:

Wookieepedia:Appearances/Canon — all officially-licensed narrative media that qualifies as canon per Wookieepedia's canon policy, or non-canon but based on the canon continuity.
Wookieepedia:Appearances/Legends — all officially-licensed narrative media published as part of the Star Wars Legends continuity.
Wookieepedia:Appearances/Unlicensed — tracks the various roleplaying game magazine articles and adventures that were released outside of Lucasfilm branding and thus are not considered fully-canon to the Legends continuity. Media on this list will be denoted with {{Un}} when placed by C4-DE in an Appearances or Sources section.

Notes:

For books with a corresponding audiobook, the {{Ab|<audiobook name>}} template should be listed after the link to the primary media. C4-DE will attempt to link them on the Masterlist when it performs its regularly-scheduled scans in the morning, but it's not always foolproof.
Similarly, {{Reprint|<book or story name>}} should be placed after the article link (and the {{Ab}} template if present) to display the other material that the target has been reprinted in. For media that uses citation templates instead of plain links, such as {{InsiderCite}}, a reprint=1 should be used instead.
Non-canon material should be denoted in the Masterlist with {{C|non-canon}} at the end of the line. This notation is exclusively for C4-DE's benefit, and will not appear in actual articles, as C4-DE will include {{Nc}} or place the media in the appropriate non-canon section.
C4-DE continuously tracks additions to both the Appearances subpages and the media timelines, and will report any items missing from the timelines on User:C4-DE Bot/Legends Missing and User:C4-DE Bot/Canon Missing.

General Sources

The General Sources subpages—Wookieepedia:Sources/Canon/General and Wookieepedia:Sources/Legends/General—are the primary Sources equivalent to the Appearances lists, and serve to document the vast majority of reference material. Basically, if a Source item isn't a web source and doesn't fit into one of the other specialized Source subpages, it belongs on that continuity's General page. Just like Appearances, the Sources subpages serve as the master formatting record for the sources listed on them, providing a definitive example on how to cite a given source using the appropriate citation template and formatting.

The same rules regarding non-canon material applies to the Sources subpages as well; namely, {{C|non-canon}} should be used to denote non-canon reference works such as the LEGO Star Wars Visual Dictionary Updated Edition.
Differentiation between the Canon and Legends subpages is done according to the in-universe Layout Guide's Sources rules; namely, reference material and other non-narrative media published prior to April 25, 2014 should not be listed in the Sources sections of canon articles, and thus is excluded from Sources/Canon/General. Conversely, reference material and non-narrative media published after April 25, 2014 is, in general, listed only on the Canon Sources page and is excluded from the Legends subpage. There are some exceptions and notes to this rule:
- While Canon sources cannot be listed in the Sources sections of Legends pages and vice versa, this does not preclude them from being used in references on articles from the opposite continuity. C4-DE will still standardize a source in a given reference regardless of continuity, and will only report continuity mismatch for items in the Sources and Appearances lists.
- As the Star Wars: The Clone Wars television series is considered the bedrock of the canon continuity along with the original films, the behind-the-scenes featurettes for the series released in home video collections can be listed on both Canon and Legends pages.
- Magazine articles and other reference works that were published after April 25, 2014 but specifically focus on the Legends history of a topic or the production of Legends media, such as the "Jedi Toy Box" department in Star Wars Insider or the article "Of Rebel Dreams and Dark Empires: The Making of a Star Wars Legend", are considered Legends sources and thus are listed on the Legends subpage.
- If a source references both the Canon and Legends histories of a given topic from an out-of-universe perspective, then it can be listed on both Canon and Legends articles, though it may not currently be listed on both continuity subpages as such cases remain a work in progress. In these scenarios, C4-DE's continuity-mismatch warnings can be ignored.
- Per Wookieepedia's canon policy on Fantasy Flight Games products, a number of roleplaying game sourcebooks and miniatures games freely mix both Canon and Legends content, and thus qualify as Sources for both continuities and are listed on both pages.
Like all pages in the Masterlist, the Sources pages should list each item's publication date and is sorted by that date. For sources released on the same date, the sorting hierarchy is then by media type (i.e. comics or magazines), and then alphabetically within that media type. However, for magazine articles in the same issue, the individual issue should be listed first, and then the articles should follow in the order in which they appear in the magazine itself.
- Note: I originally denoted recurring magazine departments with a "D:" prefix to help track them and so that the Source Engine could handle the duplicate listings of that specific department, but I ultimately abandoned this practice after some refinement. As a result, many early magazines are not necessarily sorted in the correct order as presented within the magazine, and the "D:" prefix is still present on early listings.
Like the Appearances subpage, the reprint=1 parameter and {{Reprint}} template should be used to display that a source (most often a magazine article) has been republished in another source. For further information about reprints, see the tutorials section below.

Web Sources

Web Sources are a large portion of the Sources Project, and is the part most closely maintained by C4-DE. These subpages aim to list all web-based sources, such as official websites, videos, web articles and the like, that qualify for listing in an article's Sources section. Due to MediaWiki's size constraints, the Web Sources are split into separate subpages for each year of publication, and the {{DB}}, {{SWBoards}}, {{SWE}}, and {{Databank}} templates each have their own subpage as well.

Web media that is considered "current" media that is subject to modification at any time, like the StarWars.com Databank is, is listed on Wookieepedia:Sources/Web/Current, which causes C4-DE to list them at the end of the Sources list.
Web media with currently-unconfirmed publication dates are listed in Wookieepedia:Sources/Web/Unknown. If you can find a publication date for any of these items, please move the listing to the appropriate year's subpage with that date!

Web media that qualifies as an Appearance are not listed in the Web Sources subpage, but are instead tracked on the Appearances subpage for the relevant continuity.
The ordering of articles listed on a given subpage with the same publication date is also the ordering that C4-DE will use when organizing an article's Sources section. Since roughly 2022, C4-DE has been responsible for tracking and archiving web articles on the majority of official Star Wars sites as they are published, and thus the ordering of the articles on pages since then has been dictated by the real-life publication time on a given day. For 2021 and earlier, the sorting for articles on the same day is primarily alphabetical, although with corrections made by Cade and users (i.e. hierarchy of Episode Guide subpages).
If a web article has an alternate URL that is or was viable at one point, it can be denoted with {{C|alternate: <URL path segment>}} at the end of the line, which enabled C4-DE to match any listing of that alternate URL.
YouTube videos that are directly republished on StarWars.com do not receive a second listing for that StarWars.com article; instead, the appropriate YouTube video listing should be updated with the sw_url=<URL> parameter.

Other Sources

Wookieepedia:Sources/Canon/RefMagazine and Wookieepedia:Sources/Legends/RefMagazine — tracks the individual sections of various reference magazines such as The Official Star Wars Fact File and the Star Wars Helmet Collection, maintaining the proper order and formatting for each issue's recurring sections.
Wookieepedia:Sources/Canon/Miniatures and Wookieepedia:Sources/Legends/Miniatures — these subpages attempt to comprehensively document all individual cards from the various Star Wars miniatures games. Though not all miniatures games have been fully tracked, it serves as the standard for all miniature citations. Reissues and reprints of cards do not receive their own line, but are instead tracked via the reprint= parameter and Module:CardMiniDB.
Wookieepedia:Sources/Canon/CardSets and Wookieepedia:Sources/Legends/CardSets — tracks all card game and trading card sets, as well as miniature game expansions. Card games are not comprehensively documented on a card level at this point in time, but this subpage provides the Source Engine with the release dates for each card set and thus allows for their correct placement in Sources lists. These subpages originally also served to standardize the correct set-text for cards and game citations, but the set-text parameter has since been deprecated by Module:CardSetText; you can add new card sets to Module:CardSetText/data.
Wookieepedia:Sources/Canon/Toys and Wookieepedia:Sources/Legends/Toys — these subpages track all relevant Star Wars action figures and toys that can be listed in the Sources sections of articles. However, as this is a broad classification with inconsistent data, the Toys subpages are not entirely comprehensive at this point in time, and are subject to major expansion and overhaul often.
Wookieepedia:Sources/Soundtracks — tracks Wookieepedia's articles for soundtracks, serving as the master record for publication date and formatting. Soundtracks are not typically listed in Sources lists, but the Masterlist tracks them anyway.

Other Subpages

The following subpages document other media that, in most cases, does not belong in the Appearances or Sources section. Aside from those exception cases as noted below, C4-DE will flag items from these lists with {{SeriesListing}} when it finds them during source analysis, rather than flagging them with the more serious {{UnknownListing}}. These pages also serve to record the master formatting for the items, so that C4-DE can accurately format them when constructing Index pages.

Wookieepedia:Appearances/Reprint and Wookieepedia:Sources/Reprint — these subpages serve as a master record of all reprinted publications and the Masterlist's representation of the contents of Module:Reprint/data. Module:Reprint and its data subpage are the Lua backbone of the reprint=1 parameter and {{Reprint}} template, generating the reprint text automatically given the title of a story or article, without needing to manually list them yourself in an individual article. The Appearances/Reprint and Sources/Reprint pagse, meanwhile, gives C4-DE the ability to recognize reprints that are incorrectly listed in Sources or Appearances, and also gives it the data needed to list reprints on Index pages. For instructions on updating these with new reprints, see the tutorials section.
Wookieepedia:Appearances/Audiobook — tracks articles for individual audiobooks, separately from the use of the {{Ab}} template on the primary Appearances pages. This list does not include original audio dramas, such as Dooku: Jedi Lost, as those are the primary media; instead, the corresponding script should be listed on the Audiobook subpage. Like the Reprint subpages, this page's primary purpose is to provide data for index page generation.
Wookieepedia:Appearances/Series — tracks Wookieepedia's articles on series of media, such as television series, comic series, comic story arcs, and book series. Per the Layout Guide, these should not be listed in Appearances unless it is not currently possible to list the individual media within that series; the primary case for this is when an article's topic has been confirmed to appear in a yet-to-be-released series and we do not yet know which individual episode or issue of the series they will appear in.
Wookieepedia:Appearances/Collections — tracks Wookieepedia's articles on collections of previously-published material, such as book collections and comic trade paperbacks. These should not be listed in Appearances or Sources, with the exception of those collections that include exclusive content, such as Star Wars Omnibus: X-Wing Rogue Squadron Volume 1. For such cases, (content) should be appended to that item on the list, which will cause C4-DE to treat it as a proper source and not flag it.
Wookieepedia:Appearances/Extra — tracks pretty much every other piece of media that doesn't fall into any of the above classifications. Primarily, this means the following:
- Comic anthology issues like Star Wars (2020) 25 and the two Star Wars Adventures comic series (2017 & 2020), which should not be listed by themselves in Appearances. Instead, they should use {{StoryCite}} or the relevant specific citation template to list the specific story that an article's topic appeared in. Please note that some anthology issues do contain a framing story, in which case the framing story uses the issue itself as its Appearance item and the issue is then excluded from this list.
- Short story anthologies, such as Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina and the From a Certain Point of View series. These are treated the same as comic anthologies.
- Combined episodes of television series that present two different stories in the same episode, like most episodes of Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures. These are equivalent to short story anthologies and comic anthologies, and are subject to all the same rules and restrictions.
- Individual issues of multi-issue short stories; a number of short stories have been published in parts across multiple issues of their parent magazine, such as "Side Trip" in the Star Wars Adventure Journal and "Blade Squadron" in Star Wars Insider. The proper citation of these short stories use the issue1= and issue2= parameters, and thus the list on the Extra subpage allows C4-DE to detect and flag these invalid listings with {{SeriesListing}} instead of marking them as entirely unknown.
- Media that reprints previous-published material under different titles but do not qualify as proper comic or book collections. This classification primarily refers to comic book reprints, where a comic book publisher republishes one or more comic story in an individual comic book issue under a different title. Like collections, these should not be listed in Appearances or Sources, and the (content) flag can be used to denote special cases as well.
- DVD and home video collections (TBD)
- Miscellaneous magazine issues
Wookieepedia:Appearances/Remap — a special mapping matrix that allows the Source Engine to correct common misspellings and incorrect linking, such as linking to an IU article instead of OOU (i.e. Black Fleet Crisis instead of The Black Fleet Crisis). This was primarily used during the original Source Engine sweep back in 2023 to correct a lot of very old errors, and while it's not really as useful nowadays, it's kept around for special fixes, like remapping the Star Wars Galaxies commercial releases to their appropriate expansion pack.

The Source Engine

The Source Engine is a fancy name for the other half of the Sources Project; namely, the actual application of all the information gathered in the project's subpages. It is an extensive library of Python code written and maintained by Cade, and its application—Source Analysis—is invoked for large-scale sweeps across the entire mainspace run by Cade at irregular intervals, or in response to specific commands issued by users in Wookieepedia's Discord. Additionally, all new status article nominations are subject to source analysis automatically upon being reported to the Discord by JocastaBot, as are all status articles brought up for review.

Source analysis is an extremely complicated process that ultimately boils down to the following steps:

Fixing all redirects present on an article (except for links to disambiguation pages) and initial cleanup of common/simple formatting issues, such as spacing, misspellings and template formatting problems. If the article has an infobox, the fields will also be sorted to match the infobox's preload.
All references in the article are standardized according to the Masterlist's formatting, unless the engine detects extraneous text. It also attempts to provide a "name" value for a reference if one is not present.
Each of the five main sections—Appearances, Non-canon appearances, Sources, Non-canon sources, and External Links—are parsed, and C4-DE attempts to match every item listed in each section to the appropriate Masterlist record. Unmatched items will be flagged with the {{UnknownListing}} template.
Any items listed in the wrong section (i.e. narrative media in Sources, cards or reference works in Appearances, official Star Wars websites in External Links) are moved to the correct section.
The items are sorted according to the Masterlist's data; Appearances are sorted according to each item's placement on the corresponding timeline of media, while Sources and both non-canon sections are sorted chronologically by real-world release date, and the External Links section is sorted according to the hierarchy defined in the Layout Guide.
Each of the sections are rebuilt using the new ordering, and relying upon the Masterlist's formatting for each item. Each item in the Sources section will also feature the release date in a comment, which allows future sources to be placed easily by editors without needing to check the dates on each item in the list.
Final cleanup and fixes, such as adding {{Mediacat}} and {{Reflist}} if needed but not present, sorting categories alphabetically, and moving categories in which the article is listed as the parent (i.e. ) to the {{RelatedCategories}} template underneath the other categories.

The "mainspace sweep" is the term for the semi-regular instances were Cade runs source analysis across all (or most) articles in the entire mainspace; this is typically done in two stages, firstly against all articles in Category:Legends articles and then against all articles in Category:Canon articles. As this is an incredibly lengthy process—each stage takes multiple days at minimum—it is not performed very often, and we attempt to complete major standardization projects and changes prior to starting a sweep. (Note: At this point in time, source analysis does not work optimally on all real-world articles, and thus they are exempt from mainspace sweeps; individual source analysis of real-world articles should be undertaken at your own risk.)

Any user can request source analysis for any article at any time in Wookieepedia's Discord. Simply visit the #other-commands channel and ping C4-DE in the following format: @C4-DE analyze sources for Corellia. C4-DE will respond with a timer emote while it is running and will remove that emote when it completes; if changes are made, it will respond with a diff link to the changes made, otherwise it will indicate no changes were necessary. The source analysis command will also report the following:

Unknown sources that could not be identified by the engine; these will be flagged with {{UnknownListing}} within the article itself. See the tutorials section for how to resolve these.
Abridged audiobooks that are not listed on the target article; unlike unabridged audiobooks, abridged audiobooks are not listed in the {{Ab}} template and are instead listed on their own line, and cannot be automatically added by the engine as the topic's inclusion in the abridged audiobook is not guaranteed by its inclusion in the novel. This only affects Legends articles, as Star Wars novels stopped receiving abridged audiobooks around 2008.
Appearances and Sources that are classified as Legends but are listed on a canon article, and vice versa. Like abridged audiobooks, these are not acted upon nor flagged on the article itself, as they require manual validation and action if any changes are necessary.

C4-DE features a number of other commands as part of the Source Engine, including:

@C4-DE reload data — forces C4-DE to immediately reload its in-memory database from the site-side Sources Project subpages. C4-DE checks all projects in Category:Wookieepedia Sources Project for changes at regular 30 minute intervals and will reload its entire in-memory database after changes are detected; however, if you've noticed a problem on a subpage and fixed it, and need to rerun analysis but don't want to wait, use this command.
@C4-DE create/generate index for Corellia
@C4-DE archive URL <insert URL here> — archives the given URL in the Wayback Machine and then updates the appropriate Module:ArchiveAccess subpage with the archivedate, making it available to all usages of that URL and citation template sitewide without it needing to be manually included on each article.
@C4-DE record URL <insert URL here> — an augmented archival command that, after archiving and recording the archivedate, reports the URL to the #star-wars-news channel in Discord and updates Wookieepedia:Sources/Web/2025 (or the appropriate year) with the URL's citation.
@C4-DE check target URL <insert URL here> — an advanced archival command that invokes C4-DE's sitemap traversal logic on the given URL. This command is a backup to force C4-DE to check a StarWars.com episode guide and record (and archive) all of the guide's subpages, as well as each new Databank entry listed on the page, and re-archive each old Databank entry listed on the page as well in case of changes. This command should only be run by Cade or another admin on the day that an episode guide premieres.

Administrative note: during the sitewide mainspace sweeps performed by C4-DE, if an error occurs and Cade cannot be reached to stop the sweep from continuing, User:C4-DE Bot/Kill Switch exists as an emergency kill switch; the sweeper will continuously check this page after every few hundred pages and will immediately stop operation if it detects the word "stop" in the contents of the page.

Wookieepedia:Sources

Contents

The Project

Appearances

General Sources

Web Sources

Other Sources

Other Subpages

The Source Engine

Other documentation and tutorials

Resolving a {{UnknownListing}}

Resolving a {{SeriesListing}}

Adding a new reprint:

Updating Lua Datasets