Template:Refn

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Purpose

This template is used to create footnotes in Wikipedia, as an alternative and complement to the <ref> tag. Because of a technical limitation, some of the standard Wikipedia markup elements that are often used in the article prose do not work within a set of <ref>...</ref> tags, including but not limited to the pipe trick, template substitution and another "nested" set of <ref>...</ref> tags. For example, the following does not work as expected:

1. <ref>[[Help:Footnotes|]]</ref> Generates: [[Help:Footnotes|]] instead of a wikilink.
2. <ref>{{SUBST:TODAY}}</ref> Generates: {{SUBST:TODAY}} instead of the date that the edit was made.
3. <ref>Explanatory footnote<ref>Citation</ref></ref> Generates: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page).

Replacing the outermost <ref>...</ref> set with {{Refn}} allows for the use of the markup elements listed above.

Usage

{{refn|group=groupname|name=name|Contents of the footnote}}

• groupname: Groupname per WP:REFGROUP; if not specified, then the main and nested references will be rendered into the same reference list
• name: Reference name per WP:REFNAME

Names for footnotes and groups must follow these rules:

• Names are case-sensitive
• Names MUST NOT be purely numeric; they should have semantic value so that they can be more easily distinguished from each other by human editors.
• Names must be unique—you may not use the same name to define different groups or footnotes
• Quotation marks are optional if the only characters used are letters A–Z, a–z, digits 0–9, and the symbols ! $ % & ( ) * , - . : ; < @ [ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~.
  • The forbidden printable ASCII characters are # " ' / = > ? \ .
• Inclusion of any other characters, including spaces, requires that the reference name be enclosed in quotes: name="John Smith".
• The quote marks must be the standard straight keyboard marks ("); curly or other quotes will be parsed as part of the reference name.
• Quote-enclosed reference names may not include a less-than sign (<) or a double straight quote symbol ("). These may be escaped with < and ", respectively.
• Please consider keeping reference names simple and restricted to the standard English alphabet and numerals.
• You may optionally provide reference names even when the reference name is not required. This makes later re-use of the sourced reference easier.

Examples

Footnotes with citations

Markup	Renders as
An example.{{refn|group=note|name=first|A note.<ref>An included reference.</ref>}} Another example.{{refn|group=note|Another note.<ref>Another included reference.</ref>}} A third example.{{refn|group=note|The third note.<ref>The reference in the third note.</ref>}} Repeating the first example.{{refn|group=note|name=first}} ==Notes== {{reflist|group=note}} ==References== {{reflist}}	An example. Another example. A third example. Repeating the first example. Notes References

Substitution

The first example shows that substitution does not work in a regular <ref>...</ref> tag (the accessdate does not appear correctly). The second example shows that the accessdate is substituted correctly within {{refn}}.

Markup	Renders as
<ref>{{cite web |accessdate={{Subst:TODAY}} |title=Languages |work=Apache HTTP Server |agency=Ohloh |publisher= Black Duck Software |url=https://www.ohloh.net/p/apache/analyses/latest/languages_summary}}</ref> {{reflist}}
{{refn|{{cite web |accessdate={{Subst:TODAY}} |title=Languages |work=Apache HTTP Server |agency=Ohloh |publisher= Black Duck Software |url=https://www.ohloh.net/p/apache/analyses/latest/languages_summary}}}} {{reflist}}

Errors

If the reference or note content is missing, then "Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; refs with no name must have content." will be displayed.

List defined references

Currently, this template may not be used more than once within list-defined references. Doing so will result in Cite errors; see bug 20707http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20707.

See also

{{#section:Help:footnotes|pregrouptable}}

The above documentation is transcluded from Template:Refn/doc. (edit | history)
Editors can experiment in this template's sandbox (edit | diff) and testcases (create) pages.
Add categories to the /doc subpage. Subpages of this template.