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{} for references to books {{cite journal}} for magazines, academic journals, and papers; A template window then pops up, where you fill in as much information as possible about the source, and give a unique name for it in the "Ref name" field. Click the "Insert" button, which will add the required wikitext in the edit window.
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 ...
A little used, and discouraged technique, allows you to add page numbers after the reference in a similar superscript format. The numbers are in the form of a comment and do not link anywhere. It is best avoided, but can be used if other editors have used on the same page.
The easiest way to start citing on Wikipedia is to see a basic example. The example here will show you how to cite a newspaper article using the {} template (see Citation quick reference for other types of citations). Copy and paste the following immediately after what you want to reference:
date: date of publication, in same format as dates in the body of the article. pages or page: the page number or numbers of the relevant information (e.g. pages=31-32 or page=157). Note that "pages" overrides "page" if they are both present. access-date: Date when item was accessed, in same format as dates in the body of the article.
A citation ideally includes a link or ID number to help editors locate the source. If you have a URL (web page) link, you can add it to the title part of the citation, so that when you add the citation to Wikipedia the URL becomes hidden and the title becomes clickable.
Below are some example citations (using the examples outlined above) and a sample reference list below, except this time, they will display like they would in an article. If you look at the reference list, next to reference 1, it says a b. Click on one of those letters next to the citation. a will
This example is the most basic and includes unique references for each citation, showing the page numbers in the reference list. This repeats the citation, changing the page number. A disadvantage is that this can create a lot of redundant text in the reference list when a source is cited many times. So consider using one of the alternatives ...