Help:Cite

The cite extension allows you to add citation footnotes to articles.

See mw:Extension:Cite/Cite.php for extension info.

Footnotes in action

The introduction line of this article reads:

"The cite extension allows you to add citation footnotes to articles.<ref>Like this!</ref> or <ref>Source name, access date, etc.</ref>"

The section in the <ref> tags is created as a footnote.

At the end of the page is a section called references which includes the code <references/>. The footnote text is placed here, and the texts are linked.

Named references

To give a footnote a unique identifier, use <ref name="Here be dragons">footnote text</ref>. You can then refer to the same footnote again by using a ref tag with the same name. The name cannot be a number, or the extension will return an error.

Only the first occurrence of text in a named ref will be used, although that occurrence may be located anywhere in the article. For legibility, putting the full footnote first is recommended.

For subsequent identical references, use a terminated empty ref tag that looks like this: <ref name="Here be dragons" />.

When deleting content with footnotes, make sure you do not delete the named citation which holds all the reference information. This will result in an error for all the other footnotes depending on it. Remember to copy the <ref name="Here be dragons">Beware!</ref> to one of the identical references.

Citation needed!

Many wikis use a template to flag up phrases or sentences that need citations. Normally, that means adding {{fact}} just after the text in question.

However, not all Wikia wikis have a fact template, so if you need to create it the code for the Template:Fact page is basically just:

<sup><span title="This claim needs references to reliable sources" style="white-space: nowrap;">[''citation needed'']</span></sup>

...which creates ^{[citation needed]}.

You may wish to link the 'citation needed' text to a help page on the wiki.

See also Template:Fact on Wikipedia, though this specific version is much more advanced than almost any other wiki needs.

More fun with citations

Eventually, you may want to create templates specifically for use in references to keep order - for example, a template for web addresses, another for book references.

Finally, you may wish to customize the references list design itself, such as giving it two columns or reducing the text size slightly. See Template:Reflist as an example.

See also

• Footnote guidelines on Wikipedia