User:Fluffernutter/foot
 | This help page is a how-to guide. It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting. |
So you're trying to add a source to your article. Great! You've probably already noticed that trying to add a typed-out bibliography to the end of your article the way you might in an essay results in some pretty messed-up formatting. That's because Wikipedia actually tries to make it easier on you by automatically generating a bibliography...if you use a certain type of citation format. In this essay, we'll show you how to do some bare-bones, and a little bit of fancier, footnote syntax so you can take advantage of that automated bibliography-creation.
What's a footnote?[edit]
Let's begin with a bit of background. What, exactly, is a footnote? How does it differ from the other terms you've probably heard around here, "citation" and "source"? Consider the following example:
This is a sentence I want to prove.[1]
- ^ Cited work, 2014, en.wikipedia.org
In this example, "1. ^ Cited work, 2014, en.wikipedia.org" is the footnote and "Cited work, 2014, en.wikipedia.org" is the source. To see the citation, we have to look a little deeper, to the "wikitext" that underlies the text you see on the screen. If you were to click the "edit source" tab on this page and scroll down to the example sentence, what you'd see would be this:
This is a sentence I want to prove.<ref>Cited work, 2014, en.wikipedia.org</ref>
followed by:
{{reflist}}
Now you can see that the source is wrapped up in special tags that turn it into a functional citation. These tags let the software know that a citation is there, and to display it in the bibliography. The {{references}} tag lets the software know where to display the biblopgraphy (which we refer to as "Reference list" or "Reflist" - thus the name of the tag).
So in short, a source is where you got the information you're writing. You format that source into a citation, and then the software displays it as a footnote. Don't worry if you don't understand the code right now; for the moment we just want to be sure you know what we mean by each of these words.