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This used to be Wikipedia:Manual of Style :: Footnotes
a next step of the discussion is at Footnote2
Then, a new proposal for autonumbered footnotes using templates was made at Footnote3. The current guideline for footnotes is at Wikipedia:Footnotes.
All footnotes (text that for clarity or conciseness should not be inline) should be of the following form.
(footnote ref)'s can be any number or other reference which is not already used in the article; they don't need to be in order of appearance in the article. Later, someone doing copy-editing can re-order the existing footnotes in an article so they match.
After whatever is to be noted, insert:
<sup id="fn_(footnote ref)_back">[[#fn_(footnote ref)|(footnote ref)]]</sup>
Alternatively, you can insert the note reference into the text using the template <ref>.</ref></nowiki>, such as this [1].
At the end of the document, in a section titled "Notes", insert (in numerical order):
<cite id="fn_(footnote ref)">[[#fn_(footnote ref)_back|Note (footnote ref):]]</cite> Some good note
The widget was designed by Jones and Haddock 1 and built by Longreach and Grab 5. . . . The widget design was much improved by Sukett and Cie 3. ==Notes== Note 1: Design of a good widget (Jones and Haddock 2002) Widget design Note 5: Building a well-designed widget (Longreach and Grab 2003) Widget building Note 3: Improving widgets (Sukett and Cie 2004) Widget improvement
Please comment on this proposal on the Talk page, or if you have an improvement, feel free to just change the proposal. If you like it, or use it, please mention this on the talk page also. If enough people like it, I'll make it into the Current guidelines. JesseW 05:45, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
If the purpose of the footnote is to direct the reader to an outside source, simply put the link to the source in single brackets: [http://promo.net/pg] [1].
If the footnote involves original text of any kind, this is obviously unsatisfactory. The best solution is to put the notes as body text in a "Notes" section and then direct the footnotes to the "Notes" section as a whole 1 (<sup>[[#Notes|1]]</sup>). Depending, presumably, on how many notes you have. If notes are added and removed, notenumbers will have to be adjusted in the text manually.
This is a text with a footnote<sup>[[#Notes|1]]</sup> directed to the following section.
== Notes == # Note 1 goes here, yada yadda # Note 2 goes here, yadda yada # And so on, yohoo
This is a text with a footnote 1 directed to the following section.
I added a proposal to the talk page that is easy to use, numbers the note, automatically renumbers notes added in the middle, uses wiki markup instead of html, and allows reference to books and other offline sources [2] Pedant 14:15, 2004 Dec 4 (UTC)