Cite/Cite.php

Other languages: Template:Cite/Cite.php

This page gives general documentation valid for all MediaWiki installations which use the cite extension. For use of this feature in the English Wikipedia see w:Wikipedia:Footnotes. That page also includes more examples.

Cite.php is a Cite extension that adds two parser hooks to MediaWiki, <ref> and <references>; these operate together to add citations to pages.

Contents

Where to download

• Cite.php
• Cite.i18n.php

Required by Cite.php or else you'll get a pretty blank page!

Requirements

This version requires at least Mediawiki 1.6x.

How to install

1. Copy the Cite.php and Cite.i18n.php file to your extensions folder, and
2. Add a

   require_once( "$IP/extensions/Cite.php" );

   line to your LocalSettings.php (Directly below require_once( "includes/DefaultSettings.php" ); )
   • If the above does not work, add this line just above ?> at the bottom of LocalSettings.php:

   include( '$IP/extensions/Cite.php' );

How it works

The basic concept of the <ref> tag is that it inserts the text enclosed by the ref tags as a footnote in a designated section, which you indicate with the placeholder tag <references/>. The new format cannot be used interchangeably with the old format - you must pick one or the other.

If you forget to include <references/> at the end of the article, none of the footnotes will appear.

This page itself uses footnotes, such as the one at the end of this sentence. If you view the Wikicode of this page by clicking "Edit this page", you can see a working example of footnotes.

Example

According to scientists, the Sun is pretty big.<ref>E. Miller, The Sun, (New York: Academic Press, 2005), 23-5.</ref>
The Moon, however, is not so big.<ref>R. Smith, "Size of the Moon", Scientific American, 46 (April 1978): 44-6.</ref>

==Notes==
<references/>

Multiple uses of the same footnote

To give a footnote a unique identifier, use <ref name="name">. You can then refer to the same footnote again by using a ref tag with the same name. The text inside the second tag doesn't matter, because the text already exists in the first reference. You can either copy the whole footnote, or you can use a terminated empty ref tag that looks like this: <ref name="name"/>.

In the following example, the same source is cited three times.

This is an example of multiple references to the same footnote.<ref name="multiple">Remember that when you refer to the same footnote multiple times, the text from the first reference is used.</ref>

Such references are particularly useful when citing sources, if different statements come from the same source.<ref name="multiple">This text is superfluous, and won't show up anywhere. We may as well just use an empty tag.</ref>

A concise way to make multiple references is to use empty ref tags, which have a slash at the end.<ref name="multiple" />

==Notes==

<references/>

The text above gives the following result in the article (see also Notes section below):

This is an example of multiple references to the same footnote.

Such references are particularly useful when citing sources, when different statements come from the same source.

A concise way to make multiple references is to use empty ref tags, which have a slash at the end.

<references/>

Placing <references/> inserts the full text of all pending inline citations defined by <ref>, anywhere on the page. For example, based on the citations above, the code:

<references/>

will yield:

On Wikipedia, references are sometimes made smaller than normal text, using the code:

<div class="references-small">

<references/>

</div>

Customization

Template:Technical The format of the output of <ref> and <references> is almost completely customizable through MediaWiki messages, that can be modified, for example, through the MediaWiki namespace depending on the configuration of the wiki.

For a list of messages that control the output of <ref> and <references> and the values, if any, that are passed to them ($1, $2, $3 ...), see the code in CVS for an up-to-date listing of their default contents.

• cite_reference_link_key_with_num
  1. key
  2. num
• cite_reference_link_prefix
• cite_reference_link_suffix
• cite_references_link_prefix
• cite_references_link_suffix
• cite_reference_link
  1. ref ID
  2. backlink ID
  3. count to display
• cite_references_link_one
  • Used to format the source list that <references /> outputs, it configures 3 things: the backlink ID, the ref ID, and text of note.
  1. backlink ID - used for creating the number order of the source list.
  2. ref ID - used to link back to the actual reference in the text, this is where you can configure the <bold>^</bold> symbol
  3. text of note - text used above describing the source info
• cite_references_link_many
  1. backlink ID
  2. list of links
  3. text of note
• cite_references_link_many_format
  1. ref ID
  2. numeric value to use as a backlink
  3. custom value (as defined in cite_references_link_many_format_backlink_labels to use as a backlink)
• cite_references_link_many_format_backlink_labels
• cite_references_link_many_sep
• cite_references_link_many_and
• cite_references_prefix
• cite_references_suffix

Set references to use ^ and letters like Wikipedia

In file Cite.i18n.php starting at about line 47,

'cite_references_link_one' => '<li id="$1">[[#$2|^]] $3</li>', 'cite_references_link_many' => '<li id="$1">^ $2 $3</li>', 'cite_references_link_many_format' => '[[#$1|^$3]]',
The ^ replaces the up arrows and putting $3 in the last line between the sup /sup tags fixes the links w/ a b c... vice 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, etc...

Issues

Current issues

??? appears in rendered pages instead of ↑

Using <ref> in templates breaks numbering

Issue with MediaWiki regarding in what order things are parsed

Using <ref> within a template will create correctly numbered reference mark but it will be missing from the output of a <reference /> on the calling page. (example)

It's impossible to pass template arguments to <ref>, e.g. <ref name={{{1}}}>

Issue with MediaWiki, see bug 4529

The citation links generated by <ref> and the backlinks generated by <references> have an empty title attribute (<a href="..." title="">...)

Issue with MediaWiki, not this extension. MediaWiki will generate output like <a href="#foo" title="">bar</a> when given input like [[#foo|bar]]

Missing name= anchors for backwards compatibility (5567)

The generated <a href="#_note-n"> links should have a name="_ref-n".

The generated <a href="#_ref-n"> links should have a name="_note-n".

This currently seems to be working. —72.255.34.142 17:02, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Commenting out <ref> with HTML comments <--…--> hides the citation but the reference still appears on the list

This would appear to be a parser error…

Template substitution misrenders inside <ref> tag.

Contents of non-first named <ref> are not rendered, even if all prior tags with same name are empty.

Criticisms

The major criticism regarding Cite.php is that it renders the editing of references much more tedious. Moreover, because many casual Wikipedia users are not familar with the cryptic Wikitext tags that they find with the use of Cite.php, it is likely that the net effect of Cite.php is often to deter new users from making edits to reference sections. Although Wikipedia supposedly got its name from the Hawaiian word "wiki-wiki", meaning "quick-quick", Cite.php is arguably neither quick nor easy for the average Wikipedia user.

A possible solution would be to have the actual reference section contain all of the references with given names, then throughout the article, simply reference by name, instead of the full citation. This would also reduce confusion concerning multiple uses of a reference having different text, but only showing the first instance (causing confusion with sections are shifted around, the displayed reference might change, while the text hasn't). I.e.:

Some text that needs a ref.{{ref|foo}} Another sentence that uses a ref,{{ref|bar}} followed by another usage of the first ref.{{ref|foo}}

===References===
{{refs
  {{ref|foo|Text of reference}}
  {{ref|bar|A difference reference}} }}

Although, this would require two passes by the parser, it would greatly simplify the process of sourcing. I.e. if I am adding something to an article and want to use a source that I know is already cited, I have to dig through the text of the article to find where it is used, (which can be a major pain in large articles, esp. ones which have a lot of references) instead of just glancing at the code for the references section and finding the name.

Another criticism is that, unlike Footnotes3, it is currently impossible to separate bibliographic information from article copy.

However, at least one editor, Ta bu shi da yu, has found it incredibly useful in splitting articles and shifting text with footnotes around the article. Before, a paragraph with a footnote needed to be moved, and multiple footnotes in the Notes section shifted. This was very difficult to do. With Cite.php, reorganising text and splitting articles is considerably easier.

Past issues

The extension didn't generate id attributes that could be uniformly styled with CSS2 attribute selectors

Issue in Cite.php, see bug 4579

Using multibyte characters, colons, spaces and other values that need to be encoded according to the HTML spec breaks internal links

Issue with MediaWiki, not this extension, see bug 4461.

Using <ref> in image captions breaks the XHTML output

Issue with MediaWiki, not this extension, see bug 1887.

Comparing ref/note style and Cite.php style

They are actually very similar.

• To make a single use footnote:
  • Ref/note
    1. {{ref|foo}} at the in-text place.
    2. # {{note|foo}} text of note at the proper place in the Notes list.
  • Cite.php
    1. <ref>text of note</ref> at the in-text place.
    2. (Only needed once per article)<references/> under the Notes heading.
• To make a multiple use footnote:
  • Ref/note
    • With strict ref/note style this was impossible, but a number of alternative forms had been created, for the details of which, see the appropriate pages.
  • Cite.php
    1. <ref name=foo>text of note</ref> at each in-text place.
    • 1. Alternatively <ref name=foo /> A self-closing tag on every use after name=foo has been defined.
    1. (Only needed once per article)<references/> under the Notes heading; exactly the same as to make a single-use note.