Citation templates

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''.

Use in footnotes

For a citation to appear in a footnote, it needs to be enclosed in "ref" tags. You can add these by typing at the front of the citation and at the end. Alternatively you may notice above the edit box there is a row of "markup" formatting buttons which include a 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. ''citation'').

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:

''or''

Using the same footnote multiple times

Add a name attribute when creating a footnote . Thereafter, the footnote may be referenced by just using the following expression .

Using multiple pages from the same source

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 (see ), which automatically displays an entirely new reference listing in the References section per unique page citation. Another method is to use the template , 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 appearing after a superscripted footnote number.

Creating links to citations

Wikilinks to citation templates can be created using the templates , , , , etc. For example, this "" links to a citation template below. This is of particular interest when using shortened footnotes. (See the examples below or wikilinks to full references.)

Using commas rather than periods

creates a citation in the same format as most of the 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 can be found at . The parameter can be used to alter the punctuation.

Examples

Below are examples of how to use various templates to cite a book, encyclopedia, journal, website, comic strip, video, editorial comics, etc.
* For full description of a template and the parameters which can be used with it—click the template name (e.g. or ) in the "template" column of the table below.
* Required field(s) are indicated in bold
* Copy and paste the text under "common usage" to use the template.
* Following each example is the resulting article text.

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.

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Harvard reference and shortened footnote examples

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: · · · · · · · · · · (an up-to-date list is at Help:Citation Style 1). To use the links, the template must define (or ) and (or ).

Variations

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. ) 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:
# By hand. These are simply typed directly; however, when using shortened footnotes, each individual full citation can be surrounded with to ensure that the appropriate shortened references are linked to the full references below.
# Using the templates, such as , , , or .
# Using the generic template.

The main differences between the generic template and the specific templates are:
# The templates produce citations with individual sections (e.g. title, author, publisher, etc.) separated by periods, with a trailing period, while separates sections with a comma and has no trailing punctuation. (However, this can be changed using the and parameters.)
# Not all templates can easily be replaced by the template. Generally, any template of a general nature (e.g. book; web site; journal or newspaper article; article in an edited collection or encyclopedia; etc.) can be replaced, but specialized templates (court cases, comic books, video games, etc.) cannot very easily.
# Some of the parameter names differ. For example, citing an article in an edited collection uses the misnamed template, with for the article name and for the collection name; the equivalent parameters in are named and , 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):
# Footnotes. These simply place the citation inside of a 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 , 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 template to add an inline page number after the small bracketed footnote number.
# Footnotes with list-defined references. All inline citations take the form <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>.
# Shortened footnotes. Instead of the full citation appearing in the footnote, a short form appears (e.g. ), giving only the author and year (or in some styles, a shortened version of the article or book title), and page number if appropriate. The full citation appears later on, in a bibliography section. This usually follows directly after the footnotes, is titled "References" or "Bibliography", and contains all relevant citations, listed in (typically) alphabetical order. This style is especially appropriate when there are large numbers of references overall and frequent cases of multiple references to the same work, especially in the presence of differing page numbers.

When using shortened footnotes, there are three ways to link the short and full references:
# Insert manual links. These look like e.g. . 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 to attach the anchor to it.
# Insert links using a Harvard citation template, e.g. See, for example: . 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.
# Use the template for the whole of the footnote. The template creates its own named tags: is exactly equivalent to which is itself equivalent to .

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.

Discussing citations on talk pages

When citations are brought to talk pages, noticeboards and other discussions, follow the group of citations, or the text you have added, with .

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.

See also

* Wikipedia:Template index/Sources of articles for templates about citation-related problems in articles
* Wikipedia:How to avoid duplicated citations

Notes

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