Help:Shortened footnotes

Shortened footnotes are a hybrid of standard footnotes and parenthetical referencing (Harvard). They use in-text cites that link to a shortened reference in a list and a separate full reference list. The shortened reference may link to the full reference.

Shortened footnotes are used for several reasons: they allow the editor to cite many different pages of the same source without having to copy the entire citation; they avoid the inevitable clutter when citations are inserted into the source text; they bring together all the full citations into a coherent block of markup rather than being strewn throughout the text which allows the list to be alphabetized and makes it easier to edit all the full citations at once.

Please read Help:Footnotes first, as this guide builds upon the methods described there.

Overview
In this short example, note that an in-text cite such as links to the shortened citation in the Notes list, which in turn links to the long citation in the References list:

 The brontosaurus is thin at one end. Then it becomes much thicker in the middle. The Norwegian Blue Parrot will not move if its feet are nailed to the perch. Its metabolic processes are a matter of interest only to historians. Notes

References



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In-text cite
The in-text cite can be created using standard tags containing the shortened citation, but this will not link to the long citation:

You can manually create a link to the long citation:

Using the sfn template allows linking with simplified markup and has parameters to include page numbers:

The sfnp template places the date in parenthesis:

The link is normally created from the authors last names and the year of publication.

Notes list
The Notes list is created by using reflist. When only shortened footnotes are used, then will show the list in an appropriate number of columns. Where shortened and long footnotes are mixed, use.

References list
Citations in the References list are usually created with a citation template. When linking is desired between the shortened and long citations, the citation template must create an anchor. When using citation, an anchor is always created. When using one of the Citation Style 1 templates, the anchor must be enabled using the ref parameter. By setting harv the anchor is automatically created from the author last name and the year of publication:

In many cases, there is no author, therefore the link and anchor must be created in a different manner. For example:



Here the in-text cite can be created as:

And the anchor for the citation created with sfnref:

Formatting
The reference list is formatted by placing the citations in an unordered list using the * markup. Entries may be sorted by the author's last name. The text size may be formatted with refbegin and refend. The references list is normally displayed in one column with no indenting.



Dates
When using a citation template, care must be taken in how the date is formatted:
 * For a full date like December 14, 1969 use date
 * For a month and year like December 1969 use month and year
 * For a year only like 1969 use year

Never use a month and year or a year only with date as this will cause the anchor to be malformed.

Multiple works by the same author in the same year
If an author has multiple works in the same year, regardless of whether is a full date or only a year, then duplicate anchors will be generated. To resolve this, suffix the year with an alpha character. For example:

Errors
Errors involving tags will be automatically displayed in article, user, template, category, help and file pages. To show error messages on talk and other pages, see Help:Reference display customization.

It is very possible to create an in-text cite that does not link to the long footnote and to create long footnotes that do not have a matching in-text cite. Often the link and anchor may not match for some reason.

It is also possible to create duplicate ids for the in-text cite, resulting in invalid HTML. See Help:Markup validation for help in validating and resolving issues.