TechInfoDepot: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.

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:

{{pre2| == Notes == the first time, and just  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 {{tl|rp}} template to add an inline page number after the small bracketed footnote number.
 * 1) Shortened footnotes. Instead of the full-form citation appearing in the footnote, a shortened form appears, 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 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.
 * 2) Parenthetical references. These are conceptually similar to shortened footnotes, but the shortened reference appears inline in the text, in parentheses, rather than in a footnote.

When using shortened footnotes or parenthetical references, there are multiple ways to link the shortened and full-form references:
 * 1) Don't link them. This happens by default when the shortened references are typed in by hand.
 * 2) Insert manual links. These look like e.g.  . The anchor   is attached to the full-form citation by surrounding it with {{tl|wikicite}} (if inserted by hand), or adding a {{para|ref}} parameter to the citation template.
 * 3) Insert links using a Harv templates template, e.g.  . This will insert "{{Harvnb|Pereira|2006|p=25}}" into the text and link it to the citation with the corresponding last name and year. As mentioned above, when using a {{cs1}} template, the parameter {{para|ref|harv}} must be added, but this is unnecessary for {{tl|Citation}}. When using parenthetical references, the plain {{tl|Harv}} template is used, which automatically inserts parentheses. Other variations format the page number or parentheses differently.
 * 4) Use the {{tlx|sfn}} template for the whole of the footnote. The {{tlx|sfn}} template creates its own named {{tag|ref}} tags: {{tlx|sfn|Pereira|2006|4=p=25}} is exactly equivalent to {{tag|ref|content= Pereira 2006, p. 25.|params=name=FOOTNOTEPereira200625}} which is itself equivalent to {{tag|ref|content={{tlx|Harvnb|Pereira|2006|4=p=25}}|params=name=FOOTNOTEPereira200625}}.

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.