Help:Shortened footnotes

Shortened footnotes are a hybrid of standard footnotes and Harvard-style parenthetical referencing. They use inline citations that link to a shortened reference in a list with a separate reference list with full citations to the source. 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.

In this short example, note that an inline citation such as links to the shortened footnote under "Notes", 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.

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An inline citation can be created using standard <ref> tags, but this will not link to the long citation:

You can manually create a link to the long citation:

Using the {{}} template along with |ref=harv allows linking with simplified markup:

The {{}} template places the date in parenthesis:

The {{}} template supports the inclusion of multiple sources in a single footnote.

Before {{}} was developed, {{}} or a similar template was used in <ref> tags:

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

The list of footnotes is created by using {{}}. When only shortened footnotes are used, then {{|20em}} will show the list in an appropriate number of columns. Where shortened and long footnotes are mixed, use {{|30em}}.

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 {{}}, an anchor is always created. When using one of the Citation Style 1 templates, |ref= must be set, usually to |ref=harv (See Help:Citation Style 1#Anchors for details). By setting |ref=harv, the anchor is automatically created from the author's last name and the year of publication:

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