Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Footnotes: Difference between revisions

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Mixing footnotes and references

Please see also /archive5#Footnotes and References and bugzilla:6271 and possibly give your vote. --pabouk 14:00, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

I notice that it doesn't seem possible to keep separate lists of (additional information) footnotes and of references using the <references /> mechanism alone. One way round this is to use the separate {{note|blah}} and {{ref|blah}} mechanism for footnotes (or vice versa); but it seems kind of tacky and pointless.

I don't think that footnotes (for the type of minor detail that would bloat the article if included in the main text) and actual citations belong together, but I can't see any other way of doing it?

Is there a more elegant (and commonly accepted) way to do this?

Fourohfour 11:24, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Meh. I see nothing wrong with having notes that combine citations and discursive material; it's a style that's fully endorsed by at least the Chicago Manual of Style (and, indeed, pretty much the only style that makes sense if what's being annotated are the citatins themselves), and it helps avoid what would otherwise be an unreadable forest of little numbers in an article that's both heavily cited and heavily annotated (e.g. this). Kirill Lokshin 11:26, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

I don't see that it doesn't make sense. Most of the time the citations themselves aren't the things being annotated(!). Personally, I don't like the {{ref|blah}} mechanism, and the duplicate numbers are confusing (as well as the links not working properly). But that's a problem with the existing mechanisms on Wikipedia, not the concept of separate lists. Let me put it this way; is there any reason these two different things *should* be together? One's a list of info too detailed/non-essential to warrant bloating the article with, the other's a list of sources. Fourohfour 12:26, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

In both cases, they're annotations to the actual text; whether each annotation contains (a) the source of a statement, (b) further details on a statement, (c) both a source and further details, (d) a source and further details about the source, or something else is pretty much random; presenting the annotations as a single, continuous list seems more sensible than trying to separate them out by "type".

(If you really do want to separate them, there are ways of getting a different numbering system for one type versus the other; see, for example, Che Guevara or Alcibiades. I don't really see the benefit of doing it like that, though.) Kirill Lokshin 18:41, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Two intertwined sets of in-text pointers is needlessly complicated, and without utility. [Goodness, Alcibiades has references to citations within the notes!] One set of numbers lets me get from the text to the note just fine. There's a reason it is not done in professional typesetting.

On the other hand, I find that separating notes and references (as in T-26) is often the best way to use the <references/> system. The notes tend to be short, not obscuring the wikitext with clutter, and lengthier annotations stand out so they are easy to spot when reading the article. The references are listed alphabetically by author, and aren't repeated. —Michael Z. 2006-11-23 19:52 Z

Personally, I consider inline reference citations to be a type of footnote, thus I think they should be combined with note-type footnotes. As for references that are not inline, I'm not sure what is really the best approach. Kaldari 19:54, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

Both of these issues have problems of redundancy.

How do you cite a reference when it appears in a second note? And if someone adds an inline reference to it earlier in the article, they have to go through all of the wikitext, find the full reference, and adjust both notes (so that the full reference remains in the first note). Bad for maintenance: in a long article it's likely to get out of synch, and become bad for readers.

Keeping the full references in a separate list also avoids the problem of non-inline references. Otherwise, you get stuck with two lists of references: one numbered and ordered by appearance in the text, the other bulleted, and ordered alphabetically. Bad for readers. —Michael Z. 2006-11-23 20:11 Z

I also prefer to have a separate list of bibliographical references, without anything else included, ideally sorted in alphabetical order, like it is done in well typeset books. The notes should be on its own separate list or lists. --pabouk 13:52, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

I broadly agree with these last points, but with one reservation: the list of books might become too long and contain books not entirely essential to the subject's bibliography. So, I would note books briefly in the footnotes and put the book details in the book list if they are solid references for the subject as a whole; but if they are incidental references from books largely about other subjects, I'd give the book details in the notes. The book list for a well-referenced article can otherwise start to get out of hand, I've noticed. qp10qp 23:59, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

The format of footnotes in Alcibiades seems unnecessarily complex. The format in T-26 feels rather clumsy to me. I rather like the “content notes” style in Che Guevara, although it is technically complex to edit. But I favor simply intermingling references & notes as in the article on Johann Wolfgang Goethe; Wikipedia provides a hypertext format—one can link back & forth easily—no need to let style get in the way of utility.

Skål - Williamborg (Bill) 03:12, 6 December 2006

Content note

^ Einstein: As Einstein has been quoted, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, and no simplier."

Successive ref tags and spacing

The article currently says that successive ref tags should not have any space between them. What about a non-breaking space (nbsp;)? Would that be acceptable? Lyrl ^Talk _Contribs 01:59, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

I would prefer not to see any punctuation between ref tags, whether spaces (of any type) or commas as some editors have used. It would be nice if wikipedia highlighted whilst editing the whole of a footnote's ref structure in a different colour, to aid readbility of the article's prose whilst editing. But this is wandering off topic and would need meta-wiki upgrade :-) David Ruben ^Talk 02:20, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Proposal for new section on main page: Maintaining a bibliography separate from the main article text.

This section was recently added: WP:FN#Citing_a_footnote_more_than_once.2C_with_all_footnote_bodies_in_a_separate_list

Originally this section described making a list of hidden named references at the top of an article, then using them throughout the article. I don't think this should be encouraged because 1) it's a sort of a hack, and 2) hidden text can cause issues with some software for vision-impaired accessibility. Now the section has been rephrased so the list of references is visible, and I'm not sure what the use is now. References have to go at the end per Manual of Style.

I propose this section be deleted. Gimmetrow 17:25, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

I agree. There was no discussion, and it's certainly not widespread enough to be part of a style guideline like this. It's a theoretical solution with little practical appeal. And the fact that the referred solution can now be anywhere makes the whole solution outdated in my opinion. Circeus 18:40, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Hmm. Yes, I see this was changed. The part of the page discussing this needs to be clearer that backslash-terminated uses of a name ref can now preceed the definition of the named ref. As more editors become aware of this, new habits may form, and once they are established this page can discuss them. Gimmetrow 19:06, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi, I'm the one who made that change. I removed the span tags, so it's no longer advocating hidden output. It just describes how to avoid having huge citation bodies in inline references. This has practical appeal---it is very difficult to parse paragraphs with huge citations in the middle. There is even a discussion about this further down on the main page; see the comment about "best of both worlds". You can see how I have it working here: speculative multithreading. As a final note, I would like to mention what I consider an even better mechanism for maintaining bibliographies: put each reference in a separate template. That way, it can be included from multiple pages, it is extremely easy to cite, it will contribute to a project-wide bibliography, there are no extraneous back-links in the real reference list and there are no mystery citations either. If you like, I can write about that instead or as well. Citing becomes as simple as {{bib-lastname-year-firstword}}. However, I consider what I wrote a second-best solution that doesn't require as much effort. If you can show me a better way to do things without inline references, I'm all ears. --Chris Pickett 20:16, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Hmmm, it seems that my template idea won't work yet: User:Pengo/pageusingref --Chris Pickett 21:28, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Sorry to be so pendatic, but since I just made the same change to the article I feel obliged to say it - it isn't a backslash, it's a forward slash, or preferably just a slash. CiaranG 21:54, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

My mistake on the slash. No, cite.php tags don't work in transcluded templates, apparently due to the order things are parsed by the mediawiki software.

I think that would make great strides towards having maintainable cross-article bibliographies, so I guess I will just wait for it.

The approach at speculative multithreading makes it easier for editors to maintain the article, but it's rather confusing for readers. The last backlink in each note goes to the clump of numbers at the top of the notes section. That will confuse even experienced editors, as will the clump of numbers itself. It's fine to experiment with the cite.php system but I don't think this should be presented for general use.

OK, that's fair enough. I'd like to voice my opinion that having editors being able to maintain an article is perhaps more important than article readability. That is the whole point of wiki, after all: it's easy to edit. I think that since citation is so difficult it contributes to the wealth of poorly cited articles (by poorly cited I mean unacceptable by journal standards).

A number of editors use only "short" notes in the ref texts, such as Author:Date, like a Harvard ref. The full bibliographic information, with cite templates, is then listed together in a separate "References" section. This is becoming the norm in featured articles in history, eg: Finnish Civil War, where typically each reference is cited multiple times with different page numbers. This approach seems comparable to BibTex and the citation styles common in scientific journals.

This appears to work for books. In my experience with citing papers, you typically cite the entire paper, you don't cite individual pages. A literature review article can have upwards of 100 references. So you'd have a Footnotes section with 100 footnotes with multiple back-links to the text per footmark, and then you'd have a separate references section with the "real" version of those 100 references, unnumbered, and sorted by author last name (note: it either has to be sorted by author last name or automatically by citation order in order to be at all useful to readers as well as maintainable). Even with the extraneous back-links and the clump of references in speculative multithreading, I don't see how adding a separate Footnotes section with 15 Author:Dates would be more readable, but perhaps that's a matter of opinion. For the book citations it seems to work, because each citation references a different page range, and so clearly this information is not redundant. Perhaps more importantly though, I can't see how to make that work with Cite.php (that's exactly what I was trying to do)---are you saying I should just use Harvard refs instead? If you want to show me an example on my talk page or somewhere else appropriate (here maybe?), that would be great.

Also, according to this style guide ref marks go after punctuation. The text you wrote (currently commented out) has the ref marks before punctuation. Gimmetrow 22:09, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

I read a lot of back-and-forth discussions on this and it wasn't clear. But it's easy enough to convert, and with the current wikipedia formatting it does look better to have the superscripted reference after the punctuation.

Thanks for your time! --Chris Pickett 23:08, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

P.S. See MichaelZ's comment two sections up. Chris Pickett

Example paragraph from speculative multithreading

This is the "short note" style that many editors use. References get sorted by author. This approach keeps the citation templates out of the ref texts. (The Finnish Civil War article however uses Harvard templates to make the notes also link to the full bibliographic reference.) This keeps the references together in a maintainable group, and won't appear redundant if a good portion of the references are used more than once. In this approach few if any of the refs are named, even if they repeat. Gimmetrow 23:39, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

That works, with the following disadvantage: unless you specify a name for the ref, multiple citations are duplicated in the Notes list, as with the Bruening:2000 ref below. I've fixed it to eliminate that problem. Additionally, the year is often not enough to disambiguate, so for clarity I put the first word as well; if the goal is to have robust citations, this will prevent future disambiguation nightmares. CiteSeer follows this style and it works pretty well. Finally, note that the ref body needs to be repeated in each reference, to make the editor's life easier when they go back to delete later; there is some redundancy here.

What do you think about making an example Footnote style page that demonstrates this style, and espousing it from the main article? No need for "sample code"; editors can just click edit to see how it works, just like I did here with your example. --Chris Pickett 00:26, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Because of the ordering issues that used to exist with named refs, many editors tend to avoid named refs. If so some note texts repeat, but on the other hand every footnote has a distinct number. You can use named refs if you want, just saying that it's also OK not to. That's why this style guide shouldn't promote any specific approach unless there is a strong censensus for it. The talk page can explain things. Gimmetrow 01:02, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Okay, so repeated footnotes can have a benefit; it's more like what a footnote actually is, will encourage actual page citations to disambiguate between footnotes, maintains a global order of citations in the footnotes list, etc. etc. Plus the brevity in the ref itself is very nice. Can we please at least recommend this (your) style on the main page as a potential solution to the "list of references in a separate section" problem? Many authors will want to know how they can solve this problem, and I've already wasted enough time on it not to want it to disappear into the archives of this page. I won't make the edits, I'll let you or someone else who comes along do it. I will change the name of this section though. --Chris Pickett 01:14, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

In the style recommendations, it already says "Consider maintaining a separate bibliography/references section, then just the page number and book name can be given in each note..." That refers to this style. What do you suggest saying further? The WP:FN page already has a lot of distracting detail. I see someone above mentioned the article T-26, which is a pretty good example of this style. Gimmetrow 00:08, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm suggesting making that recommendation more prominent (e.g. section or subsection status) and creating separate pages that exist merely to illustrate the style; one with Harvard references in footnotes, per your original example, and one with Cite.php references. Helping editors learn how to maintain a separate bibliography is an important issue; that's irrespective of the current WP:FN mess. I think many editors familiar with separate bibliographies coming to Wikipedia, such as myself and practically anybody who has worked with BibTeX or EndNote or some other bibliography system, already know that this style recommendation is what they want, they just don't necessarily know how best to achieve it. Just look at the back-and-forth between me and you before I finally got it sorted out. Yes, pointing people to T-26 and Finnish Civil War is helpful, but they still need to go and look at the huge sources for those pages and figure out what's going on, and there's also no room for discussion of the style. Having some example pages is also helpful as they can be easily modified to reflect improvements in the citing technology as time goes on. --Chris Pickett 00:48, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

I guess my biggest problem with WP:FN and WP:CITE is that they give plenty of recommendations of how the output should look, but they don't go into enough detail about how to achieve that look painlessly. The section "Maintaining a separate "References" section in addition to "Notes"" on WP:CITE is an example of what I mean. --Chris Pickett 00:55, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Using Ibid

I have noticed that when academically-trained writers contribute to Wikipedia, they commonly use Ibid in the references. This isn't a problem if only one person writes the entire article, but when other people start contributing to it, they tend to add in new references without fixing the Ibids. Depending on how long this goes undetected, it can be very tricky to fix, if it gets fixed at all. Another problem with this is that lots of readers have no idea what "Ibid" means and are confused by it. Can we officially state that Ibid should not be used in Wikipedia footnotes? If a reference is repeated (with a diffferent page number for example), they should use the format "Smith, 182" rather than "Ibid, 182", so as to avoid these problems. Does that sound reasonable? Kaldari 18:18, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

I see your point about "ibid", and this guide could mention the disadvantages of using "ibid". But to "officially" ban it would take a consensus, and I doubt that would happen given the number of articles that use it. Gimmetrow 00:08, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

We can't be prescriptive, since there's no way it will ever reach consensus, but we should explain on the page the problems like this that are caused by traditional reference styles, and hopefully it will encourage editors not to use them. Preventing others from contributing by obfuscating the reference system is a bad thing. — Omegatron 22:27, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I have added a note in the Style section stating that it is preferable to avoid using Ibid and explaining the reasons why. Kaldari 23:43, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Sentences with multiple notes

I see nothing in the guideline regarding such sentences. Here's an example from Bianca Ryan:

Bianca Ryan began performing as a tap-dancer; it was a big surprise to her parents when the nine-year-old told them she wanted to audition for Star Search in 2003. Her participation ended when she earned 12 stars from the judges to 13 stars for Spensha Baker (after young Tiffany Evans won the competition, Shawn Ryan decided to send his daughter to Evans' coach, Sal Dupree, for vocal lessons).

Putting both refs for the second sentence at the end looks awkward. Thoughts? RadioKirk (u|t|c) 18:27, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

In my experience it's common practice to put a ref right after the clause that needs the ref, and the sentence only if the ref applies to the whole sentence. They should be as precise as possible. --Chris Pickett 19:46, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Agreed, thanks; perhaps a note on the project page, presuming consensus? RadioKirk (u|t|c) 19:49, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good, I guess you could go ahead and do it or wait for other people to say something. --Chris Pickett 20:02, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I don't mind being WP:BOLD, but perhaps a few more eyes first—not that ours have problems, or anything... ;) RadioKirk (u|t|c) 20:22, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm not entirely sure what's actually being proposed here; the guideline already says that editors should "place a ref tag at the end of the term, phrase, sentence, or paragraph to which the note refers". Kirill Lokshin 20:28, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Why not just change that to: "place a ref tag at the end of the term, phrase, sentence, or paragraph to which the note refers; it is perfectly acceptable to have more than one ref tag in a sentence, or two ref tags side by side if appropriate" ? --Chris Pickett 20:33, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

More or less what I was thinking, except perhaps the more concise "A sentence may contain more than one ref tag, as needed." :) RadioKirk (u|t|c) 20:39, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I don't really agree with the last part; having two ref tags side by side is only an artifact of the way the named ref tag system works—as most formal style guides recommend combining the neighboring footnotes into a single note—so I don't think we should be encouraging it. Kirill Lokshin 20:37, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I've never seen a combined note on Wiki. Have an example, per chance? :) RadioKirk (u|t|c) 20:39, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Certainly (I use them all the time); here, for example. Kirill Lokshin 20:42, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Okay, I've seen those, fully written out; I've not seen it used in a template, such as {{cite web}}, yet. I suppose it could be hashed out as well, I'll have to give it a shot. :) RadioKirk (u|t|c) 20:46, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

You could probably get away with just having multiple cite templates in a single footnote, actually. It wouldn't quite be the correct format (as I don't believe the templates support note-form punctuation, just bibliography-form), but I doubt anyone using them would be overly concerned by that. Kirill Lokshin 20:55, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

(reduce indent) Exactly what I just did. Looks identical if done right. :) RadioKirk (u|t|c) 21:01, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Just out of curiousity, Kirill, can you point to some heavily-cited articles, preferably in a scientific discipline, where there lots and lots of journal- or conference-paper references? I notice that the examples I keep seeing here, such as Finnish Civil War, T-26, and Battle of Ceresole are all citing just a handful of books. In the papers I'm used to reading, there is a list of references at the end, and the body of the text refers to these references individually; footnotes/endnotes are used only sparingly. There is never a level of indirection between the article text and the actual list of references, and you would never combine multiple side-by-side references into one footnote. It seems to be a question of difference between history (arts in general) style and computer science (science in general) citation style. Here are acceptable examples of how the formatted article text I'm used to looks: 1) blah [1]; 2a) blah [1][2]; 2b) blah [1,2]; 3a) blah [1][2][3]; 3b) blah [1,2,3]; 3c) blah [1-3]; 4a) blah [1,3,4,5]; 4b) blah [1][3][4][5]; 4c) blah [1,3-5]. --Chris Pickett 21:18, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Not off the top of my head; admittedly, the more elaborate ways of using footnotes are more of a humanities thing. (But it should be pointed out that there's a practical reason for this as well; scientific articles tend to cite papers more than books, which often reduces the need to have different notes for every page from the book. In other words, an article citing books may have the first citation as "Smith, p. 507; Jones, p. 121" and the second as "Smith, p. 508; Jones, p. 122"; while an article citing papers might have both as "Smith (1991); Jones (2002)", in which case it would make more sense to associate the numbers with the references themselves, rather than with the footnotes.) Kirill Lokshin 21:27, 5 December 2006 (UTC):

Yes, I would like to avoid footnotes altogether, but I can't find a good way to do it. Having actual {{cite...}} text inline is not good enough for me, the bibliography (i.e. source code for references) must be separate. (I had some discussion above with Gimmetrow. There I appear to have settled on having footnotes as well as references above but the style is still awkward for me). I know I'm rambling here... my question to you above was prompted because you seemed to be saying above that having two ref tags side-by-side is not acceptable, but in fact I consider that perfectly normal, as per my example. (Except I wish the numbers weren't superscripted, which is unusual.) Perhaps it's just not possible to have a scientific article style. I think I'll open a bug. --Chris Pickett 21:42, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I largely go along with Kirill about the benefit of combining more than one note in a reference (but sometimes "helpful" editors come along and separate them out for me!). I suppose it is a matter of aesthetics, but I don't like to see more than one ref tag in a sentence and certainly not two next to each other. On the other hand, aesthetically again, I don't like to combine two refs if they are about two semantically unconnected things; this occurs sometimes with the insertion of a by-the-way, two-or-three-word appositive quotation (an elegant technique, I think) aside from the main point of a sentence—in that case, I do resort to placing a tag after a phrase, to give editors a chance of easily breaking the sentence up in future, if they wish.

In answer to Chris Pickett's point, I don't think it's possible to do without inline citations altogether, but one way of reducing them on scientific articles might be to tag only at the bottom of a section, which would at least leave the text largely clear. Another way of reducing tags might be to reference chapters or page ranges, rather than pages, and try to keep the content of article sections consistent with that in the book chapters or particular papers referenced. qp10qp 22:10, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

In reply to Chris's question: does Hurricane Katrina work? Titoxd^(?!?) 23:29, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately, everyone has their own ideas about the "best" citation format and style. I think multiple citations per sentence is preferable for semantic and practical reasons. Wiki is not paper — Omegatron 22:24, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

In response to both you and qp10qp, I filed a bug here bug 8167 that I hope demonstrates exactly what it is I'd like to be able to do. I really don't think this is a particularly odd request, although it might come across as demanding (sorry if so); thousands and thousands of papers are published like this every year. --Chris Pickett 23:17, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Question about footnotes

On article Yeti we are trying to simplifying footnotes. We've used the <ref name=blah /> as much as is possible at this point, but we still have many redundant citations. Is there any quick and easy way to have two references point to the same footnote but somehow indicate different page numbers? ---J.S ^(T/C) 21:15, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

One thing that would free up some space in the text is to add a separate "References" section with the full bibliographic information of your book references. Then cite the books just as, e.g. "Heuvelmans, 129" to avoid having to repeat the whole citation every time. Christopher Parham (talk) 17:38, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

"Notes" versus "References" section title

(Note: I copied this out of the most recent archive because I don't think it was actually directly responded to, and I also think this clarification should be made. John Broughton | Talk 20:50, 20 December 2006 (UTC))

Regarding the How to use section:

Place the <references/> tag in a "Notes" or "References" section near the end of the article—the list of notes will be generated here.

The Wikipedia:Guide_to_layout#Notes differentiates between "Notes" and "References" sections—something with which I am in agreement. I would like to, if possible, change the above line changed to read

Place the <references/> tag in a "Notes" section near the end of the article—the list of notes will be generated here.

to conform to this, in order to reduce confusion, and to provide a more definite guide. Comments? DocWatson42 05:38, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

I support this. This would mean that (a) Footnotes always go into a "Notes" section; (b) Harvard-style references go into a "References" section, and (c) embedded citations go into a "References" section. That's the way things are described, and the way examples are given, in MOST of Wikipedia guidance pages. It would be great to be totally consistent. John Broughton | Talk 20:50, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

Non-paper references are useless for a note/references separation, becasuse you have no reasn to call from multiple parts of a specific webpage. I tried to do that with Verbascum thapsus and will soon revert it. It's utterly silly. If ALL refernces are given in the footnotes, then tere is no reason to call it "footnotes". It makes it sund as if there are no references. As far as I'm concerned, this page (i.e. WP:FOOT should not even give a suggestion fo the section title. Some pages acctually ahve both notes and references as footnotes in different sections anyway! they do that by using templates for the notes proper. In no case should we enforce headers in a hard and fast way. There will ALWAYS be articles that use a complete;y diofferent system. At best we can recommend that "notes" be reserved for a section that contains no references at all (or harvard footnotes), and "references" for the section listing sources. I notice the page also makes no suggestion to when both fotnotes references and general ones are used (I usually use the semicolon). Circeus 21:06, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

I am against mixing notes and references in one section. If you do so I think that the mixed section should be called "Notes and references" so it does not make any confusion about what it contains. I think that the current <ref> code is not very practicably usable. Please see also #Mixing footnotes and references. --pabouk 07:48, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Full stop at the end of footnotes?

Hi guys,

is there any recommendation as to whether a full stop should be used after the footnote text? The manual page itself is inconsistent in this respect. —Gennaro Prota^•Talk 09:44, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

I think this is similar to captions. Notes of two or more sentences need full stops. Notes of one sentence possibly should too, but phrases or "short citations" may or may not end in full stops as the editors prefer. If consistency within an article is important, then if one note has a full stop, they all should. Gimmetrow 13:43, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

What have I done wrong?

I have added some notes and references to Haakon the Red, but it is messed up, and I have no clue as to how to fix it. I would be grateful for any help and explanation as to what has gone wrong.--Berig 10:14, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

See edit summary of http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Haakon_the_Red&diff=95702381&oldid=95693757 --Francis Schonken 10:39, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

As for the Reference style (as in WP:CITE), there is something else that's wrong with it:

[...] If quoting from a different language source, an English translation should be given with the original-language quote beside it. (see: Wikipedia:Citing sources#When you add content)

--Francis Schonken 10:50, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks. I agree, but I have criticized before for providing the original text.--Berig 11:27, 21 December 2006 (UTC)

Anyway, although I was right in saying that Wikipedia's Cite.php implementation doesn't parse "å" in a tag name, I was wrong in saying this was due to XML in general: see XML#International use. It rather seems to be a parser limitation, which probably should better be mentioned in Wikipedia:Footnotes#Disadvantages and future improvements. --Francis Schonken 11:36, 21 December 2006 (UTC)