Refn

Template documentation

Purpose

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 ... tags, including but not limited to the pipe trick, template substitution and another "nested" set of ... tags. For example, the following does not work as expected:

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

Replacing the outermost ... 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

An example.{{refn|group=note|name=first|A note.An included reference.}} Another example.{{refn|group=note|Another note.Another included reference.}} A third example.{{refn|group=note|The third note.The reference in the third note.}} Repeating the first example.{{refn|group=note|name=first}}  ==Notes== {{reflist|group=note}}  ==References== {{reflist}}

Substitution

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

{{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}}

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

If the note content contains an equals sign (=), the equals sign will be interpreted as setting off a named parameter and cause an error. This can be worked around by using a numbered parameter, for example:

{{refn|1+1=2}}

{{refn|1= 1+1=2}}

See also

TemplateData