Help:Cite

This help article explains how to add a reference or footnote to an article.

There are a few items you will need to know about:

• The reference templates
• The <references /> tag

The easiest way to add a reference to an article is by adding {{ref|This is a reference}}. It will appear like this If you try and save the article now, you might get the following error:

This is because it wants to add a list of all the references you've added to the article, but you havent told it where to do this. The best and most preferred place for them is at the end of the article in a section called Notes, along with any Categories and Information tables. To do this, add a section at the end as follows

== Notes ==
<references />
info tables
categories

This will produce a list as follows

Named references

If you want to reuse a reference, say two parts of the article refer to the same chapter, you can add a name to the reference which allows you to reuse it somewhere else. This is done as follows

This is the first fact{{ref|name=NAME|this is a reference that gets used multiple times}}

This is another fact that needs the sane reference{{ref|name=NAME|empty=true}} or <ref name=NAME /> The empty=true argument is optional, and should only be used to defer the text to a following named reference.{{ref|name=NAME}}

Notes versus References

Some articles have points which aren't references, but still need to be notation rather than part of the article proper. This can be accomplished with the group tag.

This is a statement which needs notating

{{ref|group=nb|And this is a notation}}

Where as this needs a reference

{{ref|This tag doesnt even have a group}}

Notes

<references />

notations

<references group=nb />

See also: Footnotes on Wikipedia