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{{SfnRef inline}} is a variant of {{SfnRef}} (a.k.a. {{harvid}}) that works in manually written, non-templated citations. In most cases, this is expected to be used temporarily, in cases where an editor is not certain how to format the full citation data into a template, or does not have time to do it, or there is a dispute on the talk page about which citation format should be used, etc. In a handful of cases, however, there remain some articles with local consensus to use entirely manually formatted citations, to exactly mirror some off-site citation style. This rare, but technically permitted by the WP:CITESTYLE guideline.
This template provides a link anchor to work with the shortened-footnote templates {{sfnp}}, {{harvp}} (and their Vancouver-citation-style equivalents {{sfn}} and {{harvnb}}). Until this template, there was no easy way to cite the same manually-cited source multiple times at different pages in such an article, using short citations that link to the full citation, and auto-combining duplicate cite to the same page into a single short cite. (It was technically possible, but required manually creating an anchor point with a complicated CITEREF... ID that matched the input expected by a template like {{sfnp}} or {{harvp}}.)
What the original {{SfnRef}} does is just generate a CITEREF... anchor string using author and year data, and pass this to the |ref= parameter of a CS1 ({{Cite book}}, {{Cite journal}}, etc.) or CS2 ({{Citation}}) template, which then generates the necessary anchor.
What {{SfnRef inline}} does is create an invisible-to-the-reader anchor using the same CITEREF... ID, in a span: <span class="anchor" id="CITEREF..."></span> This is equivalent to manually doing {{Anchor|CITEREF...}}, except of course that you don't have to manually figure out the CITEREF... ID.