 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
Wikipedia provides two methods of providing the citation content for footnotes: "inline references" or "list defined references".
The more common inline reference style looks something like this:
| Markup | Renders as |
|---|---|
This is some content.<ref name="Example.org">{{cite web|url=http://www.example.org|title=Example article|first=A. U.|last=Thor|date=19 September 2024}}</ref>
== References ==
{{reflist|30em}}
|
|
List defined references, however, move the content of the references to the reference section:
| Markup | Renders as |
|---|---|
This is some content.<ref name="Example.org"/>
== References ==
{{reflist|30em|refs=
<ref name="Example.org">{{cite web|url=http://www.example.org|title=Example article|first=A. U.|last=Thor|date=19 September 2024}}</ref>
}}
|
|
In both cases, the rendered article page is identical; the only difference is how it appears when editing the page.
Advantages of inline references:
- Editors are used to it (but only experienced editors, and we have a dearth of new editors joining the project).
- It avoids orphaned references (provided each reference is only used once, and automated bots can fix this easily anyway).
- It means you write the citation in the same place as adding the content.
Advantages of list defined references:
- Editing the references section lets you edit the references, which makes much more intuitive sense, particularly for new editors.
- It moves the citation content out of the way when reading markup.
- When a citation is used multiple times, it avoids editors needing to work out which is the "original" to be able to edit the citation.
The point about attracting new editors is a critical one to me: Wikipedia's complex, undocumented and unique syntax is frequently cited as a reason potential new editors are put off from contributing. The much-maligned VisualEditor was supposed to help with that, but that is unlikely to ever fully replace editing the wikitext markup. List defined references mean there's a much closer match between the rendered article (text, a small link to a citation, with full citation details in a separate section) and the wikitext (text, a small tag naming a citation, with full citation details in a separate section), than with the "normal" inline references.