Wikipedia:Advanced footnote formatting: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 03:29, 9 August 2019

Revision as of 13:34, 7 July 2020

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The footnote's superscript <small>"[p]"</small> can be coded by just a short wikilink: <nowiki>^{[[#Notes|[p]&nbsp;]]}</nowiki>. The full, detailed content of that footnote text is not at the top of the article but, instead, is coded within the section named "Notes", thus shifting all that text into the Notes section, and deferring details away from the main text of an article. The ''Notes'' section could be coded as:

<sourcesyntaxhighlight lang="html">

==Notes==

<div style="font-size:89%">

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</div>

<references/><!--Show numbered footnotes from <ref> tags. -->

</syntaxhighlight>

</source>

Since the actual footnote text (of a remote footnote) is written at the bottom of an article page, there is ample space to also compare formal versus local pronunciations of town names, without cluttering an article's top text.

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<div style="width:auto; overflow:scroll">

<sourcesyntaxhighlight lang="xml+jinja">

In [[digital imaging]], a '''pixel'''<ref>{{Cite book

| author=Rudolf Graf | date=1999

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-->GIDA&sig=7tg-LuGdu6Njypaawi2bbkeq8pw }}</ref>

(or picture element) is the smallest part of an image.

</sourcesyntaxhighlight></div>

Note the above line-splitting of the 6-line URL (for the webpage in Google Books) uses the [[HTML]] comment tokens "&lt;!--" and "-->". Each part of the footnote coding is placed on a separate line, thereby allowing each part to be indented from the lefthand side. There must be no spaces added to the URL (which is a single string of characters where spaces are coded "%20"). Do not add spaces before "&lt;!--" or after "-->" within the URL. However, when splitting an ''italicized phrase'' or long wikilink ("<nowiki>[[xx xx xx]]</nowiki>"), consider putting a space after "-->" on the 2nd line.

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Because of a Wikipedia formatting quirk, the first footnote on a page might be treated as a quotebox when indented (as during May 2009). However, the indentation can be simulated, by line-splitting with HTML comments, between all lines within &lt;ref>....&lt;/ref>:

<sourcesyntaxhighlight lang="xml" style="text-size:70;">

In digital imaging, a pixel<ref><!--

-->R. Graf, ''Modern Dictionary of<!--

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-->Google Books (see: References).</ref>

(or picture element) is the smallest part of an image.

</syntaxhighlight>

</source>

The above line-splitting of the entire footnote text, into 4 lines, allows it to be coded as the first footnote of a page. Note that the first footnote might be in an infobox, appearing at the top of a page.

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==Deferring details==

Another major technique for clarifying text, containing many footnotes, is to defer the footnote details to later parts of the article, such as using named ref-tags and putting "see: External links" for URLs. For example, listing 3 footnotes:

<sourcesyntaxhighlight lang="xml">

In digital imaging, a pixel<ref name=MD/><ref name=AD/><ref name=DE/>

(or picture element) is the smallest part of an image. The word

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Disco Dave Citizen, ''Disco Electronics Dictionary'',

1978, page 340 (''see below:'' External links).</ref>

</syntaxhighlight>

</source>

In the above example, the 3 footnotes are reduced to just short ref-name tags at first, then later expanded to show more details. However, they defer the extreme details for publisher, ISBN, and webpage-URL links to be contained as entries under "External links". Using that advanced method, no publisher names, ISBN numbers or long URL names appear in the upper article text for those 3 footnotes.