Template:Broken ref/doc

This is a documentation subpage for Template:Broken ref.
It may contain usage information, categories and other content that is not part of the original template page.

This template is used in system messages.
Changes to it can cause immediate changes to the Wikipedia user interface.
To avoid major disruption, any changes should be tested in the template's /sandbox or /testcases subpages, or in your own user subpage. The tested changes can be added to this page in a single edit. Please discuss changes on the talk page before implementing them.

Usage

Cite.php is the software extension for the footnotes system. Cite.php includes error checking for <ref>...</ref> tags and generates error messages using MediaWiki messages. This template is used to control the namespaces and categories where those messages show.

This template causes error messages to show only on main (article), template, category, help and file pages; the page that triggers the error is placed into a category.

It is possible to extend this template so that each namespace has a custom version of the message that may include a different or no category.

See Help:Cite errors for a full list of the MediaWiki messages.

Parameters

|msg=text of the error message

|cat=category

The default category is Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting; see Category:Pages with citation errors for other categories.

Showing cite errors on other pages

Errors on talk and other pages do not show by default but can enabled by adding a rule to your CSS:

span.brokenref {
  display: inline;
}

This does not add the page to a maintenance category.

Message links

These MediaWiki messages do not support internal wikilinks, thus an external link must be used:

These MediaWiki messages do not support internal wikilinks and mangle external links:

All of these messages have editnotices to inform the editor of the issues. This problem has been reported as bug:17865.