Template:Refn

Template documentation (for the above template, sometimes hidden or invisible)

Purpose

This template is used to create footnotes in Wikipedia, as an alternative and complement to the <ref> tag. Because of a technical limitation, some of the standard Wikipedia markup elements that are often used in the article prose do not work within a set of <ref>...</ref> tags, including but not limited to the pipe trick, template substitution and another "nested" set of <ref>...</ref> tags. For example, the following does not work as expected:

1. <ref>[[Help:Footnotes|]]</ref> (Generates: [[Help:Footnotes|]] instead of a wikilink)
2. <ref>{{SUBST:TODAY}}</ref> (Generates: {{SUBST:TODAY}} instead of the date that the edit was made)
3. <ref>Explanatory footnote<ref>Citation</ref></ref> (Generates: Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page). </ref>)

Replacing the outermost <ref>...</ref> set with Template:Tlp allows for the use of the markup elements listed above.

Usage

• groupname: Groupname per WP:REFGROUP; if not specified, then the main and nested references will be rendered into the same reference list
• name: Reference name per WP:REFNAME

Examples

Footnotes with Citations

Substitution

The first example shows that substitution does not work in a regular <ref>...</ref> tag (the accessdate does not appear correctly). The second example shows that the accessdate is substituted correctly within {{refn}}.

Errors

If the reference or note content is missing, then "Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; refs with no name must have content." will be displayed.

See Also

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