User:SMcCandlish/Bare basics of Wikipedia footnotes

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Wikipedia permits many citation styles, and some citations (especially to academic journals) can be quite complex when they are fully specified and formatted. No one's going to bite your head off if you don't figure it all out immediately.

To get started working on a Wikipedia article and citing some sources well enough to get by, the basic form of a reference citation here looks like this:

This is a claim in the article.<ref>This is where the details about the source go: author, title, date, publisher, and page[s], if applicable.</ref>  This is another claim.<ref>Another source's details go here.</ref>

We like it when you take the time to format the citation details in a citation template like {{cite web}} or {{cite book}}. Example:

Here's a fact in the article.<ref>{{cite book |first=Jane Q. |last=Public |title=The Unbearable Beings of Light |date=2023 |publisher=Weirdo Books |page=73}}</ref>

But this additional formatting is not mandatory.

Either way, to make the citations show up, there needs to be a section for them, typically called ==References==, inside which is either {{reflist}} or <references />. This section goes below the main content of the article but above the category links at the bottom of the page code.

If you are trying to also do footnotes that are "discursive" and not reference citations, the simplest way to do that is with {{efn}}:

This is a complicated claim.{{efn|Here is some clarifying text.}}<ref>This is the source citation for the claim.</ref>

To make that work, create a section called ==Notes== (above the ==References== section), and inside it put {{notelist}}.

That's a crash course on the bare basics of footnotes. There are lot of more complicated citation styles and aspects, but if you are new to it all, just do your best, and someone else will hopefully clean up after any un-formatted or improperly or imprecisely formatted citations and notes.

The main stuff to read got more information are listed below. See also the documentation of particular citation templates when you want to use one, e.g. at Template:Cite web and Template:Cite book. The examples near the top of those show the most-used parameters; there are many, many others for citing things like ISBNs and other IDs, doing muliple authors plus editors, specifying a chapter as well as a main-work title, giving the access-date of a website, and so on.