Help:Footnotes
This page is for technical help on how to generate a footnote with wiki code. For editorial help with formatting citations in footnotes, see Help:Formatting Guidelines for Citations.
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How to create a basic footnote
When citing a source, you will probably want to create a footnote.
- Add <ref> immediately after the text you need to cite.
- Write some text. See Help:Citing_sources for what to put in a citation.
- Add a closing </ref> tag. (Otherwise, the rest of the article will be included in the footnote!)
- Copy and paste the following to bottom of the page:
==References== <references/>
You could also call the section "Notes" instead of "References". But without <references/>, no footnotes will appear.
This page itself uses footnotes, such as the one at the end of this sentence.[1] If you view the source of this page by clicking the EDIT tab, you can see a working example of footnotes.
Example
According to scientists, the Sun is pretty big.<ref>E. Miller, The Sun, (New York: Academic Press, 2005), 23-5.</ref>
The Moon, however, is not so big.<ref>R. Smith, "Size of the Moon", Scientific American, 46 (April 1978): 44-6.</ref>
==Notes==
<references/>
Multiple uses of the same footnote
To give a footnote a unique identifier, use <ref name="name">. You can then refer to the same footnote again by using a terminated empty ref tag with the same name, like this: <ref name="name" />.
In the following example, the same source is cited three times.
This is an example of multiple references to the same footnote.<ref name="multiple">I love this footnote so much I used it three times.</ref>
Such references are particularly useful when citing sources, if different statements come from the same source.<ref name="multiple">This text is superfluous, and won't show up anywhere. We may as well just use an empty tag.</ref>
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.<ref name="multiple" />
==Notes==
<references/>
The text above gives the following result in the article (see also section below):
This is an example of multiple references to the same footnote.[2]
Such references are particularly useful when citing sources, when different statements come from the same source.[2]
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.[2]
<references />
Placing <references /> inserts the full text of all pending inline citations defined by <ref>, anywhere on the page. For example, based on the citations above, the code:
<references />
will yield:
