Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-24036697-20160703190353/@comment-1757994-20160703235450

I'm uncertain if the version of Extension:Cite on Wikia supports it, but there are a few pieces you have to put in place to get non-decimal note indices.

The extension supports a few special-case group names (decimal, lower-alpha, upper-alpha, lower-greek, lower-roman, and upper-roman). The default is decimal, and it works without any special set-up.

First, there are MediaWiki: messages that correspond to each of the groups. For example, for lower-alpha you need to create  and put in it (one long string, no wrapping):  a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z You can extend the string as long as you like, with aa, ab, ac, ..., zx, zy, zz, aaa, aab, aac, ..., zzz, etc.

Considering the MediaWiki namespace is locked down, getting this message created could be a trick. I suppose you can file a ticket to get Wikia to do it for you. It'll probably be faster than waiting for them to whitelist the group messages.

[Aside: I suppose it's possible to use JavaScript to rewrite all the DOM links. Look for $('a.[href^=#cite_note-]') and change the link text 'lower-alpha 1' to 'a', 'lower-alpha 2' to 'b', etc. That seems to me more like a good reason to rage at Wikia for locking down something that doesn't need to be locked down, though.]

Next, these special-case group names correspond, not coincidentally, with more popular CSS list style types. You need some CSS. I'll give an example that's simpler than Wikipedia's. If you want to get more complex, you can do it on your own. Preferably put it in MediaWiki:Common.css so it applies to all skins.

Finally, when you cite some refs, you need to specify the special-case group name and wrap the reference list in a div with the special-case group name. For example:  Some text Some other text Yet more text &lt;references group="lower-alpha"/>

The ref tags pick up the group name and use the MediaWiki list to label the references in the text. If there's not a MediaWiki message, then they just prepend the string "lower-alpha," which is what you've seen. The ordered list generated by  uses the default list style of decimal, unless it's changed with CSS. Since you can't set an inline style or class on the  tag, you have to get tricky and wrap it with the div.