Template:Sfnp/doc

The shortened footnote with parens template ( creates a short author-date citation in a footnote.  It works exactly like the basic  template, except that it puts parentheses around the year, a bit like the way that full citations appear in (e.g.) APA style.  It is a stylistic alternative to.

A statement like  is equivalent to   except that identical footnotes are automatically combined.

To read a full description of how these shortened footnotes are used in Wikipedia, see "Shortened footnotes" in Citing sources.


 * Features:
 * Automatically combines identical footnotes.
 * Automatically creates a one-way link to a citation template at the bottom of the page.
 * Advantages:
 * The template call is both concise and readable.
 * It allows any editor to identify the reference while looking at the wikitext.
 * It minimizes clutter in the wikitext by using only the smallest possible amount of (meaningful) information to identify the source.
 * Text containing sfnp can be cut and pasted without any danger of accidentally deleting the original named reference; any call to sfnp can define the named reference.
 * It allows the detection of errors using bots (i.e. it has machine readable semantics).

=Harvard citation templates=