Wikipedia: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 below may be freely mixed, since they all produce a similar format.

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:

or

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 (see 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 {{}}, 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.

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