Help:Cite

Cite makes it possible to add footnotes to a page.

See for technical details.

Usage
The basic concept of the tag is that it inserts the text enclosed by the ref tags as a footnote in a designated section, which you indicate with the placeholder tag. This format cannot be used interchangeably with the older format—you must pick one or the other.

Additional placeholder tags can be inserted in the text, and all  tags up to that point, in that group, will be inserted there.

If you forget to include in the article, the footnotes will not disappear, but the references will be displayed at the end of the page.

This page itself uses footnotes, such as the one at the end of this sentence. If you [ view the source] of this page by clicking "Edit this page", you can see a working example of footnotes.

{| class="wikitable" ! width="50%" | Wikitext ! Rendering The Sun is pretty big. The Moon, however, is not so big.

Notes This is an example of multiple references to the same footnote.

Such references are particularly useful when citing sources, if different statements come from the same source Any reused tag should not contain extra content, that will spawn an error. Only use empty tags in this role.

A concise way to make multiple references is to use empty ref tags, which have a slash at the end. Although this may reduce redundant work, please be aware that if a future editor removes the first reference, this will result in the loss of all references using the empty ref tags.

Notes On wikis with the default configuration, this will happen on every page; on others, you need to activate it.
 * attribute is used to configure that behavior.

In some language editions of Wikipedia, long reference lists may be placed using the template, which incorporates. It provides an optional parameter to display the reference list in multiple columns. For instance, the Hindi and Interlingua Wikipedias use the CSS selector to make the reference text smaller than normal text.

Using templates in this way is strongly discouraged, for compatibility, performance, and functionality reasons.

If a page includes more than one list, each list includes the  tags defined after the previous references list. If these references lists are produced by templates, each one lists the ref tags defined before the first references list, and there is an error message saying that there is a ref tag but not a references list.

Grouped references
This may be disabled by if desired.

The following example generates separate reference lists for citations and miscellaneous footnotes:

{| class="wikitable" ! width="50%" | Wikitext ! Result
 * According to scientists, the Sun is pretty big. In fact, it is very big.
 * According to scientists, the Sun is pretty big. In fact, it is very big.
 * According to scientists, the Sun is pretty big. In fact, it is very big.

Notes renders [a], the second one renders [b] , and so on, the 26th renders [z]. It is an error to use more footnotes in a custom-rendered group than the number of signs defined, so the 27th footnote in this group causes an error.

The following group names are often defined as custom groups by the following messages respectively:

Citing different parts of the same source
When several parts from the same work are used as references in an article, you can cluster them in the reference section. This gives readers a way to identify which references originate from the same source. It also allows you to cite different parts of the same source without repeating the entire source every time.

Separating references from text
In-text references make it easy to copy the text to another page; on the other hand, they make it hard to read. References containing a lot of data, quotes or elaborate citation templates can make up a significantly larger fraction of the source than the text that will actually be visible. To avoid this, recent versions of the extension allow moving some or all of the references into the section, to the place where they will actually appear to the reader.

Thus, the code above will have the same output as the first example above, although the numbering and order of the references will not in general be the same.

Substitution and embedded parser functions
Since Cite's tag is parsed before MediaWiki's parser functions (e.g.  ) or variables (e.g.  ) or before , these will not work inside of citation references. Instead, you have to use the magic word.

{| class="wikitable" ! width="50%" | Wikitext ! Result Foo bar baz… Foo bar baz…

to define a wiki-wide heading which would be automatically inserted before each references list. In MediaWiki 1.29, this system message was removed. A hacky way to enter a headline now is to add the following code to :

If you only need a text heading (no link or other active elements) you could add the following to (Chrome 4, IE9, FF 3.5, Safari 3.1, Opera 7):

Merging two texts into a single reference
A typical Wikisource issue are references that span multiple pages in the source material. These can be merged using a tag for the first part of the reference, and tagging the following parts with a tag  using the same name.

Example:

{| class="wikitable" ! width="50%" | Wikitext ! Result This is an example of merging multiple texts into the same footnote.
 * - valign="top"

 References 
 * key
 * num
 * ref ID
 * backlink ID
 * count to display
 * Used to format the source list that
 * backlink ID
 * list of links
 * text of note
 * ref ID
 * numeric value to use as a backlink
 * custom value (as defined in to use as a backlink)
 * backlink ID
 * list of links
 * text of note
 * ref ID
 * numeric value to use as a backlink
 * custom value (as defined in to use as a backlink)
 * custom value (as defined in to use as a backlink)

Set references to use ^ and letters
To replace the default uparrow ( &uarr; ) with caret ( ^ ), modify the following system messages. All of these pages can be found on [ Special:AllMessages].
 * MediaWiki:Cite references link one :


 * MediaWiki:Cite references link many:


 * MediaWiki:Cite references link many format:

Replacing $2 with $3 changes the links from 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 to a, b, c etc…

Searching for these pages for the first time will result in no matches. Simply click "Create this page" to edit the code. The changes will not show up until a page with references is rebuilt.

Set reference and reference number highlighting
Add the following code to the page.

Broken references
If the or  tags are used incorrectly, the Cite extension will add an error message to the page, and will add the "  " category. These error messages will appear in the user interface language, either in the article content or in the References section. For example:

See the spec for Parsoid's Cite error representation.