نمایش مبدأ برای راهنما:Footnotes

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This page explains how to create the '''Footnotes''' section for Wikipedia articles. In this context, the word "Footnotes" refers to the Wikipedia-specific manner of documenting an article's sources and providing tangential information, and should not be confused with the general concept of [[Note (typography)|footnotes]]. This how-to does not cover the formatting of citations within the Footnotes section, which is reviewed in [[Wikipedia:Citing sources|Citing sources]].

Footnotes are used most commonly to provide:
* [[Wikipedia:Citing sources|references (bibliographic citations) to reliable sources]],
* [[Help:explanatory notes|explanatory information]], or
* source information for tables and other elements.

Footnotes or [[Help:Shortened footnotes|shortened footnotes]] may be used at the editor's discretion in accordance with the guideline on [[WP:CITEVAR|Variation in citation methods]].

Only certain types of material on the English Wikipedia are required to have an inline citation. There is [[Wikipedia:Inline citation#Citation density|no requirement to provide a citation for every sentence]], because multiple sentences may be supported by the same footnote. For advice on which material should be cited, see the guidelines on [[WP:MINREF|When you must use inline citations]], the [[Wikipedia:Good article criteria|Good article criteria]] and [[Wikipedia:when to cite|When to cite]]. For advice on how to organize and format bibliographic citations, see the guideline on [[Wikipedia:Citing sources|Citing sources]] and examples of [[Wikipedia:Citation templates#Examples|Citation templates]].

Footnotes are created using the {{cite.php}} software extension. This extension adds the HTML-like elements {{tag|ref}}, {{tag|references|s}} and {{tag|references}}. The elements are also used in a number of templates; for example, it is becoming more common to use {{tl|reflist}} rather than {{tag|references|s}} as it can style the reference list.