Footnotes

A footnote is a note placed at the bottom of a page of a document that comments on, and may cite a reference for, a part of the main text. The connection between the relevant text and its footnote is often indicated with a number or symbol which is used both after the text fragment and before the footnote.

Footnotes are sometimes useful for relevant text that would distract from the main point if embedded in the main text, yet are helpful in explaining a point in greater detail. Footnotes are also often used to cite references which are relevant to a text. Citation of sources is important in supporting Verifiability, a key aspect of Wikidoc.

Wiki software, MediaWiki, has built-in support for footnotes. You can add footnotes to an article using tags, which will be explained on this page. This way of adding footnotes is called "Cite.php footnotes", where "Cite.php" is the name of the file in MediaWiki that makes this possible.

Footnotes are an excellent way to cite sources, but they are not the only way; some articles use inline links instead. Also, Cite.php footnotes are not the only way to make footnotes. Many articles use templates to create footnotes, particularly if they use Harvard references. For a general overview, see Citing.

How to use

 * 1) Place a &lt;ref> ... &lt;/ref> where you want a footnote reference number to appear in an article—type the text of the note between the ref tags.
 * 2) Place the '''  and   may be short notes or full bibliographic references, and may be formatted either by hand or with the assistance of templates. Instructions on available templates to help format bibliographic references may be found at Citation templates. Use of such templates is not required; see WP:CITE.

Previewing a single section edit
When you edit a single section on a long page, the Notes or References section will not be visible when you preview your edits. Thus you ordinarily cannot see how your footnotes (text you place between  and   tags) will later appear when you save your edits.
 * Notes and references not normally visible

A simple workaround is to temporarily insert a  or   tag at the bottom of the edit box of the section you are editing. Your footnotes will appear at the bottom of your section so you can preview them. When you are satisfied with your edits to the section, delete your temporary  or   tag, and save your edits. Now your footnotes should appear in the "Notes" or "References" section along with other footnotes on the page.
 * Workaround for notes and references

While you preview the footnotes in a section this way, the first footnote in the section will temporarily have a number of one (1), because the preview will not show footnotes from elsewhere on the page. The footnotes will renumber properly across the entire article after you save your edited section.

Another complication is that you will not be able to preview the effect of citing a footnote from another section merely by citing its name (for example: ). If the section you want to edit reuses footnotes from elsewhere on the page, a simple solution is to edit the whole page at once in order to preview the footnotes accurately.
 * Re-use of reference(s) from another section

If you want to avoid this, the only workaround would be to copy and temporarily insert the full code of the relevant reference(s) at the top of the edit box of the section you are editing. If you have used the "workaround for notes and references" (above) the footnotes will appear at the bottom of your section so you can preview them. When you are satisfied with your edits to the section, delete the temporary full reference code and save your edits. Now your footnotes should appear in the "Notes" or "References" section along with other footnotes on the page.

Style recommendations

 * Internal links should still be used as normal, like this: Main Page.
 * Citations should always follow punctuation, like this.
 * Consider using a separate bibliography section if the same book reference is used in multiple footnotes. In this case, just the page number and book name can be given in each note, following Citing.
 * There are templates you can insert between the tags to format bibliographic references for you. If you find it easier to type the reference in bibliographic style yourself, you are not obligated to use these templates, but they help to maintain a consistent bibliographic style across articles.

For readability it is however only exceptionally advised to reduce lettering size of footnotes, and not below 90%. Note also that the MoS Formatting issues has "Formatting issues such as font size [...] should not be dealt with in articles except in special cases", and that there is no consensus that footnotes would be an overall "special case" in this sense. So, the basic option is to use Footnotes without size reduction, unless when you're able to gain consensus that "special case" can be invoked for the article where you apply cite.php references.

Resizing references
Some editors prefer references to be in a smaller font size than the text in the body of the article. Although smaller text has some disadvantages, it is common when there is a long list of references (as a rule of thumb, at least ten) to replace the basic tag with  , which reduces the text size to 90%. (Note: Do not use   with a "subst:".) The underlying CSS class is "references-small", so an alternative is to use this directly:   . If this class is used to make other sections at the bottom of the page ("Notes", "See also", "External links", etc.) small for consistency (this is rarely done), the div tags must be opened and closed within each section.

A similar CSS class exists to create small footnotes in two columns, but this displays as a single column in some common browsers (like Internet Explorer). If desired, use

The same effect (with any number of columns) can be accomplished by using.

Compatibility with other MediaWiki sites
As of late December 2005, the Cite.php extension to MediaWiki has been installed on all Wikimedia wikis. Other wikis that use the MediaWiki software may not have this extension installed, and therefore may be unable to display Cite.php footnotes.

Technical details
See Cite/Cite.php for a technical explanation of the Cite.php extension on Meta-Wiki.

All information on this page is attributed to WikiDoc and its contributors.