 | This help page is a how-to guide. It explains concepts or processes used by the Wikipedia community. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus. |
 | This is a very technical how-to mainly of interest to editors who work with the footnotes system and related templates |
The Wikipedia footnotes system uses the Cite.php software extension to generate references. MediaWiki messages are then used to format the display of the inline links and the references.