Wikipedia:Citation templates


 * See Template messages/Cleanup for cleanup request templates (such as "citation needed" and many more).

Citation templates are used to format citations in a consistent way. The use of citation templates is neither encouraged nor discouraged. Templates may be used or removed at the discretion of individual editors, subject to agreement with other editors on the article. Because templates can be contentious, editors should not change an article with a consistent citation format to another without gaining consensus.

There are several families of citation templates. The Citation template is intended to provide citations for many types of references. The other main family has names of the form (for example, Cite book and Cite web). For consideration of article consistency bear in mind that these two families produce slightly different citation formats. For example, the family separates elements with a full stop, while the Citation template separates elements with a comma. There is also the harvard citation template family (see the end of this page).

Wikilinks to citation templates can be created in a number of ways, see wikilinks to full references. This is of particular interest for inline citations using parenthetical referencing or when using shortened footnotes.

Use in footnotes
For a citation to appear in a footnote, it needs to be enclosed in "ref" tags. You can add these by typing at the end. Alternatively you may notice below the edit box there is a list of "markup" which includes - if you highlight your whole citation and then click this markup, it will automatically enclose your citation in ref tags. Optionally, one may add the name attribute by using  . Thereafter, the same footnote may be used multiple times by adding  .

One way to provide specific page numbers for multiple references at different locations in the same work is to use the rp template (which has extensive documentation transcluded on its main page).

Examples
Below are examples of how to use templates to cite books, encyclopedias, journals, theses, papers, websites, comic strips, videos, and editorial comics. See also Category:Citation templates.


 * For full description of the template — click the template name
 * Required field(s) are indicated in bold
 * Copy and paste the text under "common usage" to use the template.
 * Following each example is the resulting article text.

See Citing sources for a list of tools which can help create some of the templates below.

Citations are commonly embedded in reference templates. See Footnotes for information on a commonly used reference template.


 * Comic/cartoon citations and other notes