This help page is a how-to guide. It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting.

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This page, Help:Reftags, explains the use of the reftag element,<ref>...</ref> for defining reference footnotes, as displayed by using a <references /> tag or a ((Reflist)) template to list the footnotes. A reftag can also be defined by using wikitext function ((#tag:ref|...)) to generate the text <ref>...</ref> and allow direct use of subst'ing of templates to embed equivalent markup inside a footnote, or to nest a <ref>...</ref> inside a ((#tag:ref|...)).

The general format is <ref>text</ref> for a simple reftag footnote. However reftags can have a name="xx" to define a footnote to be reused on a page by named ref, <ref name="xx" />, as when citing the same webpage at several spots in the article text. There can be more than 3,000 reftag footnotes defined on a page, but usually there are less than a hundred.^{[fn 1]}

This section is retained only for historical reference. Reason: The ((R)) template has been deprecated by community RfC since 2010 (its use "suspended" unless three conditions were met, which were not met). For a modern solution to citing different pages in a single source, see ((sfnp)).

When citing different pages in a single source, a named ref^[1] can be followed by a ((R)) template. Given a ref like "<ref name="author1990">book</ref>", the ref "author1990" can be reused, now using a different page number, say 53. This subsequent ref ((R|author1990|p=53)) will show the same superscript number, with a suffix of a colon and, in this case 53, the page number.^[1]: 53 This format allows the reader to click to the reference section, and then click on other references from the same source.

Rather than define hundreds of footnotes in a single list, various reftags could split to some named groupings, such as using "<ref group="gg">...</ref>"" to collect those footnotes into group name "gg" as displayed by <references group="gg" />.^{[fn 2]} For example, a common tactic is to define footnote group "fn" which shows each link as "^{[fn 9]}" for the 9th footnote in the group="fn". A group name can be multiple words in straight double quotation marks (group="set xx yy"), but a single-word name with no punctuation or other special characters, just ASCII letters and numerals, can omit the quotation marks (as: group=fn). Hence, many group names are typically one-word labels, to avoid excessive quotation marks.^{[fn 3]}

Rather than using an element <ref>text</ref>, an alternate method is to use the wikitext function tag:ref, as ((#tag:ref|...text...)) to define the contents of a footnote.

Examples:

• Using ((#tag:ref|Example of tag:ref function)) will show a superscript number: ^[2] and list footnote "Example of tag:ref function" under the References.
• Using named ((#tag:ref|Named reftag function xx1|name="xx1")) will show a superscript number: ^[3] and list footnote "Named reftag function xx1" under the References below. The footnote name "xx1" then can be reused by putting <ref name="xx1" /> at various points in the text.^[3]

• Wikipedia:Advanced footnote formatting – special layouts
• Wikipedia:Citing sources (WP:CITE) – how to format footnotes or bibliography
• Wikipedia:Reliable sources (WP:RS) – about reputable references
• Wikipedia:Find sources – how to hunt for quality source documents
• ((Cite web)) – most common citation template, for sources with a URL
• ((Cite book)) – to cite a book/chapter or volume as a source reference
• ((Cite journal)) – to cite an article in a periodical as a source reference
• mw:Help:Cite – original documentation of the <ref> citation feature provided by MediaWiki