Visual inline citation guide
Formatting references using inline citations

All information in Wikipedia articles should be verified by citations to reliable sources. Our preferred method of citation is using the "cite.php" form of inline citations, using the <ref></ref> elements. Using this method, each time a particular source is mined for information (don't copy word-for-word!), a footnote is placed in the text ("inline"), that takes one to the detail of the source when clicked, set forth in a references section after the text of the article.

In brief, anywhere you want a footnote to appear in a piece of text, you place an opening <ref> tag followed by the text of the citation which you want to appear at the bottom of the article, and close with a </ref> tag. Note the closing slash ("/"). For multiple use of a single reference, the opening ref tag is given a name, like so: <ref name="name"> followed by the citation text and a closing </ref> tag. Each time you want to use that footnote again, you simply use the first element with a slash, like so: <ref name="name" />.

In order for these references to appear, you must tell the software where to display them, using either the code <references/> or, most commonly, the template, {{Reflist}} which can be modified to display the references in columns using {{Reflist|colwidth=30em}}. Per our style guidelines, the references should be displayed in a separate section denominated "References" located after the body of the article.

Inline citation code; what you type in 'edit mode' What it produces when you save

Two separate citations.<ref>Citation text.</ref><ref>Citation text2.</ref>


Multiple<ref name="multiple">Citation text3.</ref> citation<ref name="multiple" /> use.<ref name="multiple" />

== References ==

{{Reflist}}

Two separate citations.[1][2]



Multiple[3] citation[3] use.[3]




References_________________

  1. ^ Citation text.
  2. ^ Citation text2.
  3. ^ a b c Citation text3.

Templates that can be used between <ref>...</ref> tags to format references

{{Citation}}{{Cite web}}{{Cite book}}{{Cite news}}{{Cite journal}}OthersExamples
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Refref
en.m.wikipedia.org
CC-MAIN-2024-26
63915
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:YPPPHCLMP7GM4SPJ2JFHYCDJMZT7RIOG
<urn:uuid:2df96c74-f9f8-4afe-9d10-5df795158f6d>
2024-06-23T11:39:55Z
208.80.154.224
text/html
sha1:TVY4GLXSPUST66RO73XKP6UDLUYMCH66
<urn:uuid:537279a8-e1b9-41b6-9003-08042140b49b>
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Refref
response
<urn:uuid:8150a4ba-5d87-45d3-b256-22dfd9b69248>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2024-26
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2024
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-251
software: Apache Nutch 1.20 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/