User:SMcCandlish/Bare basics of Wikipedia footnotes

Wikipedia permits many citation styles, and some citations (especially to academic journals) can be quite complex when they are fully specified and formatted. No one's going to bite your head off if you don't figure it all out immediately.

To get started working on a Wikipedia article and citing some sources well enough to get by, the basic form of a reference citation here looks like this:

We like it when you take the time to format the citation details in a citation template like or. Example:

But this additional formatting is not mandatory.

Either way, to make the citations show up, there needs to be a section for them, typically called, inside which is either  or s. This section goes below the main content of the article but above the category links at the bottom of the page code.

If you are trying to also do footnotes that are "discursive" and not reference citations, the simplest way to do that is with :

To make work, create a section called   (above the   section), and inside it put.

That's a crash course on the bare basics of footnotes. There are lot of more complicated citation styles and aspects, but if you are new to it all, just do your best, and someone else will hopefully clean up after any un-formatted or improperly or imprecisely formatted citations and notes.

The main stuff to read got more information are listed below. See also the documentation of particular citation templates when you want to use one, e.g. at Template:Cite web and Template:Cite book. The examples near the top of those show the most-used parameters; there are many, many others for citing things like ISBNs and other IDs, doing muliple authors plus editors, specifying a chapter as well as a main-work title, giving the access-date of a website, and so on.