Help:Footnotes and endnotes

Introduction to Wikisource's presentation style
English Wikisource has many works with footnotes or endnotes, commonly also known as references. Whether the work is a book, a document, a press release, or the many other available types of work, they can contain these notes, in a myriad of styles utilised by publishers through the ages in the placement of these notes, their style, or, their presentation, in whatever the published work. So in tune with the general guidance in our style guide there is a general means to present notes in our works.

Wikisource remains true to the publishing of these notes from works, however, due to metamorphosis of these works to the web, and the mediawiki platform that we utilise, we do not present footnotes on basis of per page of the original work. Wikisource instead aims to present these notes as endnotes at the end of the presented pages—work or subpage of the work. As part of this approach, and from our experience, there is both a need and a wish to standardise the presentation of the style of endnotes, rather than replicate the styles utilised by each publisher at that time of original publication.

If the work only uses special symbols in one symbol set, the house style is to instead use incremental numbers.

Types of footnote
In publishing there are, and have been, various methods of printing notes: either as notes at the bottom of the page, or aggregated at the end of a chapter or section. Sometimes all notes are accumulated as lists at the end of the book.

Footnotes are often indicated by numbers or typographical symbols: such as the section §, the Pilcrow or paragraph mark ¶, the single and double daggers † ‡, and the asterisk *.

Adding footnotes
On Wikisource all footnotes should be implemented with
 * }

The second part should be written as:

The separate parts will be rejoined by the tags does not currently support this in the same way as ordinary text.

For example: {| class="wikitable" style="width:75%; margin:0 auto 0 auto;"
 * Lorem

or  tags could be used to separate the paragraphs, these do not always work well when exporting to PDF or eBook formats. Instead, use Paragraph break (or its shortcuts pbr / parabr) between the paragraphs.

For example: {| class="wikitable" style="width:75%; margin:0 auto 0 auto;"
 * Lorem

unexpectedly resulting in: {{box|align=left|This is a basic the computer language! statement. back to the first occurrence of  instead of to the innermost occurrence and generally thereafter becoming confused.

In these instances, the template {{tl|refn}} may be used. This same sequence may be re-expressed as: which produces something closer to the expected result:{{box|align=left|This is a basic{{refn|Not the computer language!}} statement.

This results in: {{box|align=left|This is a basic{{refn|name=dummy}}{{refn|Not the computer language!|follow=dummy}} statement.

This new coding results in: {{box|align=left|This is a basic{{refn|Not the computer language!|group="A"}} statement. Group "A":

Multiple pages that reference the same footnote
Sometimes, a page references a footnote located on another page earlier in the work. Here is one solution to make both pages and the whole transcluded document look right:

The page containing the footnote should name the reference. Example:
 * Page containing the footnote

In the body of the page, the reference should be given the name only. Example:
 * Other page referencing the footnote

In the footer of the page, one of the following options must appear, depending on which reference format is being used elsewhere in the work: See Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/35 and Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/38 for a demonstration.

Alternatives
The preceding instructions are best practice for producing footnotes on Wikisource. However, in some rare cases it may be more appropriate to use one of the following methods instead.

Ref and Note templates
The reference indicator can be replaced with a Ref template, with the matching text following a Note template. This gives the proofreader more control over the placement of the footnote but it has the strong drawback of not being able to group footnotes when transcluded to the main namespace.

Using the example above, the main text will be written as:

The footnote will be written as:

The result is:

When using this method, it is important to prepend the footnote the appropriate figure or symbol. This means the note can be found if it is being read from a printed copy instead of on a screen.

Endnotes with anchors
If the original work had endnotes at the back of the book (or other publication) it may sometimes be more appropriate to list all the footnotes in a special subpage. This subpage should ideally transclude the endnotes section from a scan of the original work.

In order to create the link from the indicator in the text to the footnote, wikilinks and anchors can be used. The indicator should be a wikilink in a format such as. The footnote should be preceded by a anchor template.

If the preceding example were in this format, with the footnote in another section, the text would appear as:

Although, rather than this help page, the wikilink would look more like 4.

The footnote would be written as:

The result is: