Cite
A Guide to Using MediaWiki in a Hosted Environment
An instructional website by the developer of mh370wiki.net - a MediaWiki site about Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
The Cite extension allows a user to create references as footnotes on a page. It adds two parser hooks to MediaWiki, <ref> and <references />; these operate together to add citations to pages.
Source: MediaWiki Extension:Cite
Whether you use Cite for references or footnotes, the concept is the same.
The Extension:Cite is provided with MediaWiki and installed by adding wfLoadExtension( 'Cite' ); to LocalSettings.php.
Cite and Wikipedia
Every Wikipedia articles includes a list of references. One of the most recent articles of interest to me is Air India Flight 171 which crashed on 12 June 2025.
A page-source view shows that the reference are created by Cite in an ordered list, as captured for the first few items:-
Cite and mh370wiki.net
Although Wikipedia articles are carefully referenced the currency or availability of each reference cannot be guaranteed over time. To overcome that problem on the mh370wiki.net website where so many items can no longer be found at their original Internet location, I designed a custom system for References. This system also centralises all references so that one record can be associated with many usage instances. See References.
Consequently I no longer use Cite for on-page references. But I do use it for Footnotes.
For consistency, I have code snippets stored in my on-line Manual and just copy to a page and follow the instructions. Two versions have been adapted for use in this website, one for Footnotes, the second for References which link to an on-line source:-
<h3>Notes:-</h3> <references> <!-- Use this syntax in the page <ref name="Ref_Name" /> --> <!-- And this syntax here <ref name="Ref_Name"> </ref> --> <ref name="Ref_Name"> -- add text here -- </ref> </references>
<h3>References</h3> <references> <!-- Use this syntax in the page <ref name="Ref_Name" /> --> <!-- And this syntax here <ref name="Ref_Name"> </ref> --> <ref name="Ref_Name"><u>Source</u>: <html><a href=" " target="_blank"><i> </i></a></html></ref> </references>
Note: If the Ref_Name(s) are mis-matched or one is missing, an error message will be displayed, and the page will be added to the Category:Pages with reference errors
Links
- Extension:Cite
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cite
- Help:Cite
- This resource also provides examples using WikiText.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Cite