Citation templates are used to format citations in a consistent way, as an alternative to formatting the citations by hand. The use of citation templates is neither encouraged nor discouraged. Templates may be used or removed at the discretion of individual editors, subject to agreement with other editors on the article. Because templates can be contentious, editors should not add citation templates, or change an article with a consistent citation format to another, without gaining consensus; see WP:CITECONSENSUS and WP:CITEVAR. The various citation templates may be freely mixed, since they all produce a similar format. WP:DUPLINK and WP:OVERLINK do not apply to citations. It is expected that a reference citation includes wikilinks to the relevant article for the source, such as The New York Times, rather than The New York Times.
For a citation to appear in a footnote, it needs to be enclosed in "ref" tags. You can add these by typing <ref>
at the front of the citation and </ref>
at the end. Alternatively you may notice above the edit box there is a row of "markup" formatting buttons which include a <ref></ref> button to the right—if you highlight your whole citation and then click this markup button, it will automatically enclose your citation in ref tags (i.e. <ref>
citation</ref>
).
Note, if this is a new page or if there are not already references previously cited, it is necessary to create a section usually named "Notes" or "References" near the end of the page; see WP:FNNR and MOS:APPENDIX for more information on section names:
==Notes=={{Reflist}}
or
==Notes==<references />
Add a name attribute when creating a footnote <ref name="name">citation text</ref>
. Thereafter, the footnote may be referenced by just using the following expression <ref name="name" />
.
When an article cites many different pages from the same source, there are two main methods of unifying them instead of copying a completely new citation. One method is Shortened footnotes, which automatically displays an entirely new reference listing in the References section per unique page citation. Another method is to use the template {{rp}}, which appends any type of positional information (such as page numbers, chapter numbers, or audiovisual time code) directly to each given citation in the article body, which would result in text such as : 2345 appearing after a superscripted footnote number.
Wikilinks to citation templates can be created using the templates {{harv}}, {{harvnb}}, {{harvtxt}}, {{sfn}}, etc. For example, this "Mumford 1999" links to a citation template below. This is of particular interest when using shortened footnotes.[1] (See the examples below or wikilinks to full references.)
{{Citation}} creates a citation in the same format as most of the Citation Style 1 templates, except that the periods (or full stops) are replaced with commas, and there is no final period or full stop. A complete list of templates that are mimicked by {{citation}} can be found at {{citation/core}}. The parameter |mode=
can be used to alter the punctuation.
Below are examples of how to use various templates to cite a book, encyclopedia, journal, website, comic strip, video, editorial comics, etc.
{{cite xxx}}
) in the "template" column of the table below.For a list of tools that can help create some of the templates below, see: Wikipedia:Citation tools.
Citations are commonly embedded in reference templates. For more information, see: Wikipedia:Footnotes.
These templates automatically create a one-directional link to the first matching citation template on the same page. All of the following templates are supported: {{citation}} · {{cite book}} · {{cite journal}} · {{cite web}} · {{cite conference}} · {{cite encyclopedia}} · {{cite mailing list}} · {{cite news}} · {{cite press release}} · {{cite arXiv}} · {{cite AV media}} (an up-to-date list is at Help:Citation Style 1). To use the links, the template must define |surname=
(or |last=
) and |date=
(or |year=
).
Wikipedia does not dictate a particular way to insert citations into an article. As a result, there are multiple ways to structure citations in an article; multiple ways to insert individual citations; and multiple ways to link a short citation (e.g. Turner 1851
) with the full citation in the bibliography, when using a style that calls for short citations.There are three primary ways to format individual full citations:
The main differences between the generic {{Citation}} template and the specific Citation Style 1 templates are:
|separator=
and |postscript=
parameters.)|title=
for the article name and |encyclopedia=
for the collection name; the equivalent parameters in {{Citation}} are named contribution
and title
, respectively.There are three ways to structure citations as a whole in an article (see Help:Citations quick reference for a tabular comparison of these three ways):
<ref>...</ref>
reference, which inserts a small bracketed, superscripted number. When clicked on, it links to a correspondingly-numbered footnote (more properly an endnote) placed elsewhere in the article. The footnotes themselves are inserted using {{reflist}}, which is typically placed by itself in a Notes (or References) section near the end of the article. When there are multiple references to the same citation, typing can be saved by using <ref name="foo">...</ref>
the first time, and just <ref name="foo"/>
elsewhere. When there are citations that differ only in page number, there are two alternatives: write all the citations out in full, including the page number, or use one citation without page numbers along with the {{rp}} template to add an inline page number after the small bracketed footnote number.<ref name="foo"/>
. The reference list at the end of the article is a list of full citations, each of which takes the form <ref name="foo">...</ref>
, all of which are surrounded by <references>...</references>
.When using shortened footnotes, there are three ways to link the short and full references:
<ref>[[#CITEREFPereira2006|Pereira 2006, p. 25]]</ref>
. If a citation template is used for the full reference, the anchor (e.g. #CITEREFPereira2006
) is automatically attached to the full reference; if the full reference is typed by hand, surround the reference with {{wikicite}} to attach the anchor to it.<ref>See, for example: {{Harvnb|Pereira|2006|p=25}}</ref>
. This will insert a footnote into the text and link it to the citation with the corresponding last name and year. Other variations of the Harvard citation templates format the short citation differently.{{sfn}}
template for the whole of the footnote. The {{sfn}}
template creates its own named <ref>...</ref>
tags: {{sfn|Pereira|2006|p=25}}
is exactly equivalent to <ref name=FOOTNOTEPereira200625>[[#CITEREFPereira2006|Pereira 2006]], p. 25.</ref>
which is itself equivalent to <ref name=FOOTNOTEPereira200625>{{Harvnb|Pereira|2006|p=25}}
</ref>
.See also WP:Footnotes and WP:Citing sources for general information, and WP:CITEX for specific examples of exactly how to write the code for various combinations of the above styles.
When citations are brought to talk pages, noticeboards and other discussions, follow the group of citations, or the text you have added, with {{Reflist-talk}}.
{{Reflist-talk}}
This template places the citations in their own box under the bold header References at the position where the template was inserted; otherwise the citations (and any others in the talk page) will be listed at the end of the talk page, below all sections. The resulting reference box does not appear in the table of contents.