Template:Refn
Template documentationPurpose
This template is used to create footnotes, as an alternative and complement to the <ref> tag. Because of a technical limitation, some of the standard wiki 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:
<ref>[[Help:Footnotes|]]</ref>Generates: [[Help:Footnotes|]] instead of a wikilink.<ref>{{SUBST:TODAY}}</ref>Generates: {{SUBST:TODAY}} instead of the date that the edit was made.
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 may not be purely numeric
- Names must be unique—you cannot use the same name to define different groups or footnotes
- Quotes are optional if the only characters used are letters A–Z, a–z, digits 0–9, and the symbols
!$%&()*,-.:;<@[]^_`{|}~ - Inclusion of any other characters, including spaces, requires that the name be enclosed in quotes (
") - 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 names may not include a less-than sign (
<) or a double straight quote symbol (") - Please consider keeping names simple and restricted to the standard English alphabet and numerals.
- (You may optionally provide names even when the name is not required.)
Examples
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 20707.