# விக்கிப்பீடியா:Citation templates



Citation templates are used to format citations in a consistent way, as an alternative to formatting the citations by hand. 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 add citation templates, or change an article with a consistent citation format to another, without gaining consensus**; see விக்கிப்பீடியா:மேற்கோள் சுட்டுதல் and விக்கிப்பீடியா:மேற்கோள் சுட்டுதல். The various citation templates below may be freely mixed, since they all produce a similar format.  

## 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 front of the citation and ***' at the end. Alternatively you may notice above the edit box there is a row of "markup" formatting buttons which include a ***' button to the —if you highlight your whole citation and then click this markup button, it will automatically enclose your *citation* in ref tags (i.e. *****citation****').  

Note, if this is a new page or if there are not already references previously cited, it is necessary to create a section usually named "Notes" or "References" near the end of the page; see விக்கிப்பீடியா:பக்க வடிவமைப்பு கையேடு and விக்கிப்பீடியா:பக்க வடிவமைப்பு கையேடு for more information on section names:  

|-  
| rowspan=2 | encyclopedia,  
edited collection  
**Title**  
**encyclopedia**  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

|-  
**contribution**=name of article  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

|-  
| episode  
(television or radio)  
**title**  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

|-  
|mailing list  
**title**  
**url**  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

|-  
|map  
**author**  
**year** or **date**  
**title**  
**publisher**  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

|-  
| rowspan = 2 | news article  
**Title**  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

|-  
**newspaper** (or **magazine**, **journal**, **periodical**)  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

|-  
| newsgroup  
posting  
(**DO NOT**  
**USE TO**  
**VERIFY**)  
**Title**  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

|-  
| patent  
**inventor-last**  
<pre>  

</pre>  
|<pre>  

</pre>  

|-  
| press release  
**Title**  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

|-  
| video  
(movie, television production, documentary, etc.)  
**people**  
**title**  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

|-  
|video game  
**title**  
**developer**  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  
| |  
<pre>  

</pre>  

| |  
|}  

---

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## Harvard reference and shortened footnote examples

These templates automatically create a one-directional link to the first matching citation template on the same page. All the following templates are supported: · · · · · · · · · · (an up-to-date list is at வார்ப்புரு:Citation/core). To use the links, the template must define "Surname" (or "Last") and "Year" and must include  

| What to type | What it makes |  |
| --- | --- | --- |
| * Article text.sfn (Shortened footnote template)
* Article text.sfn | * Article text.<sup id="A1t">[1]</sup>
* Article text.<sup id="A2t">[2]</sup>

# <li id="A1f">**^**</li>
# <li id="A2f">**^**</li> |  |
| * Harvard citation
* Harv
* Harvtxt asserts that ... (author's name part of text)
* Harvnb (no brackets)
* Harv (multi-author) | *
*
* asserts that ...
*
* |  |
| Three **Harvcol** templates are altered to use colons to indicate page numbers.
* Harvcol
* Harvcol
* Harvcoltxt asserts that ...
* Harvcolnb
* Harvcolnb | **Harvcol** templates
*
*
* asserts that ...
*
* | } |

## Variations
Wikipedia does not dictate a particular way to insert citations into an article. As a result, there are multiple ways to structure citations in an article; multiple ways to insert individual citations; and multiple ways to link short-form inline citations with the full-form citations in the bibliography, when using a style that calls for short-form citations.  

There are three primary ways to format individual citations:  
1. By hand. When using inline citations (see below), these are simply typed directly; however, when using shortened footnotes or parenthetical references, these can be surrounded with to ensure that the appropriate shortened references are linked to the full references below.
1. Using the templates, such as , , , or .
1. Using the generic template.

The main differences between the generic template and the specific templates are:  
1. The templates produce citations with individual sections (e.g. title, author, publisher, etc.) separated by periods, with a trailing period, while separates sections with a comma and has no trailing punctuation. (However, this can be changed using the and parameters.)
1. Not all templates can easily be replaced by the template. Generally, any template of a general nature (e.g. book; web site; journal or newspaper article; article in an edited collection or encyclopedia; etc.) can be replaced, but specialized templates (court cases, comic books, video games, etc.) cannot very easily.
1. Some of the parameter names differ. For example, citing an article in an edited collection uses the misnamed template, with for the article name and for the collection name; the equivalent parameters in are named and , respectively.
1. When using parenthetical referencing, a Harv templates template that identifies a citation by author and year will automatically link to the appropriate citation elsewhere in the article if created using . If created using , however, a parameter must be added.

There are also at least three ways to structure citations as a whole in an article:  
1. Inline citations. These simply place the citation inside of a reference, which inserts a small bracketed, superscripted number. When clicked on, it links to a correspondingly-numbered footnote (more properly an endnote) placed elsewhere in the article. The footnotes themselves are inserted using , which is typically placed by itself in a *Notes* (or *References*) section near the end of the article. When there are multiple references to the same citation, typing can be saved by using <code>&lt;ref name="foo"&gt;...&lt;/ref&gt;</code> the first time, and just <code>&lt;ref name="foo"/&gt;</code> elsewhere. When there are citations that differ only in page number, there are two alternatives: write all the citations out in full, including the page number, or use one citation without page numbers along with the template to add an inline page number after the small bracketed footnote number.
1. Shortened footnotes. Instead of the full-form citation appearing in the footnote, a shortened form appears, giving only the author and year (or in some styles, a shortened version of the article or book title), and page number if appropriate. The full citation appears later on, in a bibliography section. This usually follows directly after the footnotes, is titled "References" or "Bibliography", and contains all relevant citations, listed in alphabetical order. This style is especially appropriate when there are large numbers of references overall and frequent cases of multiple references to the same work, especially in the presence of differing page numbers.
1. Parenthetical references. These are conceptually similar to shortened footnotes, but the shortened reference appears inline in the text, in parentheses, rather than in a footnote.

When using shortened footnotes or parenthetical references, there are multiple ways to link the shortened and full-form references:  
1. Don't link them. This happens by default when the shortened references are typed in by hand.
1. Insert manual links. These look like e.g. <code></code>. The anchor <code>#refPereira2006</code> is attached to the full-form citation by surrounding it with (if inserted by hand), or adding a parameter to the citation template.
1. Insert links using a Harv templates template, e.g. <code></code>. This will insert "" into the text and link it to the citation with the corresponding last name and year. As mentioned above, when using a template, the parameter must be added, but this is unnecessary for . When using parenthetical references, the plain template is used, which automatically inserts parentheses. Other variations format the page number or parentheses differently.
1. Use the template for the whole of the footnote. The template creates its own named tags: is exactly equivalent to which is itself equivalent to .

See also WP:Footnotes and விக்கிப்பீடியா:மேற்கோள் சுட்டுதல் for general information, and WP:CITEX for specific examples of exactly how to write the code for various combinations of the above styles.  

## Discussing citations on talk pages
For convenience when citations are brought to talk pages, noticeboards and other discussions, follow the group of citations with .  

This template places the citations in their own box under the bold header **References**. The resulting reference box does not appear in the table of contents.