How to make a reference note on Fanlore

[branchandroot]

So, Fanlore is kind of addictive, you know? I keep looking at that temptingly blank Gundam Wing page and thinking hmmmm, something about the fandom, eh?

Most of wiki markup language is pretty straightforward, but one thing I suspect many people will throw up their hands over is the markup for making a footnote–an in-text reference. I know I puzzled over it for a bit, and I’m already familiar with both html and wikis. So here’s a small breakdown of the thing.

The Logic: you write your footnote and enclose it in <ref> and </ref> tags, putting the note in the text right where you want the little superscript number to appear. The listing of the notes and the counting of numbers is automatic, all you need to do is write the note itself and put the tags around it.

The footnote itself is just text and probably a link, and you write it just like you would any wiki link. Remember that an external wiki link goes in square brackets with the url, a space, and then any link text you want to use.

For example, if you want to put just a link to a source, that would look like: [http://url.of.link link text goes here]

If you want to link to the source and then explain it or say when you accessed it, that would look like: [http://url.of.link site name or similar] Insert explanation here, accessed da/te/here

Make sure that <references/> appears at the bottom of the page (not the section, the whole page). That generates the list of footnotes. If it isn’t there already, put something like this just before the categories:

==References==
<references/>

It isn’t actually complicated, it just looks that way when all that code is mashed up together. So there you go! Whenever you say something and want to note where you got the information, just throw in your reference link/note right there in the text, enclosed in <ref> and </ref> tags. Make sure the <references/> tag is at the bottom of the page, and everything else is automatic.