User:Cyde/Ref converter

Click here to run References converter OR click here to get a list of links to process

This converts articles that use the old ref and note system into the new [[m:Cite/Cite.php| is outputed on the calling page.  If   is included within the template itself, then references from both the template and the main page will be outputed (which likely isn't what was intended either).

Converting Harvard references
Ref converter also allows the conversion of Harvard references, but this is not necessarily recommended, or even desired, in many circumstances. Harvard referencing is a citation system favored by many academics and has a different format: rather than displaying a footnote number inline, it displays an author name and publication year in round brackets after the sentence. These author-date citations are accompanied by a list of full citations in alphabetical order in a References section at the end of the page.

Please evaluate carefully whether the article will benefit from being converted from Harvard referencing to numbered footnotes - and check the article's talk page to see whether the issue has already been discussed. WP:CITE is the relevant guideline, particularily the section How to cite sources.

Changing Harvard referencing to numbered footnotes is in many cases controversial. Not so for changing well-formed numbered footnotes-by-templates to cite.php numbered footnotes, which isn't even a style change. Such change of one system of numbered footnotes to another would only be visible in edit mode: it is implementing a different technology for realising the same style of numbered footnotes.

Foreign languages
I am willing to help get Ref converter up and running on foreign language Wikipedias. Please contact me.

Statistics on usage

 * As of 17:04, 10 October 2006 (UTC), Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Ref has 8957 transcluding pages.
 * As of 10:19, 15 December 2006 (UTC), Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Ref has 8659 pages, of which some percentage are transcluded.
 * As of 00:46, 28 February 2007 (UTC), Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Ref has 9615 pages transcluded.
 * As of 23:42, 10 May 2007 (UTC), Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Ref shows 10,424.
 * As of 06:33, 15 February 2008 (UTC), according to API.php we have 6856 still to do.
 * As of 22:09, 7 April 2008 (UTC), per API.php, there are 6723. (-133 or 2% of the remaining ones)
 * As of 18:32, 7 October 2010 (UTC), according to There are 377.