Talk:New Sweden Genealogy

Multiple references to same footnote seem to be broken
Great set of source citations, Diltsgd! One thing that I noticed is that the first citation is reused great. The second one, "Johnson, Detailed Map" is repeated many times in the source list. Do you want to combine those into #2? Thomas Lerman 19:47, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

I tried that already. My experience with adding multiple references to one citation is that it makes the whole footnote list unstable. This list of footnotes is already fragile. With just one multiple-reference-in-one it already makes the list disappear about 10 percent of the time. When I tried doing two multiple-reference-in-one notes on the same list I found the whole list would tend to disappear about 95 percent of the time. Diltsgd 15:20, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Wow, that is not good. I think Wikipedia handles it just fine. If we are having this kind of problem, I believe we need to elevate this to have someone look at to resolve the problem. You are doing a great work with this page and many others! Thomas Lerman 15:42, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Not broken -- here's how
I clicked the Technical Support link that appears at the bottom of wiki pages and turned this in as a probable bug. Here's the answer I got from Product Support:

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Michael,

The Cite extension is behaving exactly as it is supposed to. If you are going to use a footnote multiple times, it must be declared differently. Source 1 is decalred correctly and each use of it afterward is correct. Source 5 is not declared correctly for multiple use. The following is from the Cite extension documentation:

[edit] Multiple uses of the same footnote To give a footnote a unique identifier, use &lt;ref name="name"&gt;. You can then refer to the same footnote again by using a ref tag with the same name. The text inside the second tag doesn't matter, because the text already exists in the first reference. You can either copy the whole footnote, or you can use a terminated empty ref tag that looks like this: &lt;ref name="name" /&gt;.

In the following example, the same source is cited three times.

This is an example of multiple references to the same footnote.&lt;ref name="multiple"&gt;Remember that when you refer to the same footnote multiple times, the text from the first reference is used.&lt;/ref&gt;

Such references are particularly useful when citing sources, if different statements come from the same source.&lt;ref name="multiple"&gt;This text is superfluous, and won't show up anywhere. We may as well just use an empty tag.&lt;/ref&gt;

A concise way to make multiple references is to use empty ref tags, which have a slash at the end. Although this may reduce redundant work, please be aware that if a future editor removes the first reference, this will result in the loss of all references using the empty ref tags.&lt;ref name="multiple" /&gt;