The Cite extension to MediaWiki provides a way for wiki editors to add references and footnotes to articles.

See mw:Extension:Cite for technical documentation on installing and configuring the extension. See mw:Help:Cite for user documentation.

Cite is responsible for implementing the <ref> and <references> tags in wikitext. Integrations are provided for the MediaWiki wikitext parser, Parsoid, WikiEditor, VisualEditor, and the reading interface.

• CE – ContentEditable, see MDN
• Cite – Citation, the act of referencing a source.
• DC – Dublin Core, used as a prefix in Parsoid's RDFa.
• Details – Attribute that marks a sub-reference as such as well as provides the sub-reference's extra content.
• DM – Data model
• List-defined reference (LDR) – When a named <ref> is defined inside of a <references> section.
• MW – MediaWiki
• MWT – MediaWiki transclusion. Used by Parsoid in e.g. about="#mwt1". This "about id" marks a "DOM forest" of un-nested siblings as belonging to the same template transclusion. More in the Parsoid DOM spec.
• Note – An item in the reference list, a.k.a. a "footnote". Link targets use "note" since the first 2005 draft of this extension. More details.
• Ref – Reference
• Reflist – Refers to either community-maintained {{reflist}} templates or the raw <references> tag that marks the position in the article where the reference list should appear.
• SA – Standalone
• Selser – Selective serializer, an extra step in Parsoid's HTML to wikitext serialization to minimize the diff.
• VE – VisualEditor
• WT – Wikitext

• The Cite extension was actually meant to implement a <cite> tag in 2005. Because that conflicts with the HTML tag it became <citation> the same day. In 2014 the tag was removed and moved to a separate CiteThisPage extension, along with the Special:Cite special page.
• The original 2005 draft of this extension suggested a <ref[ key]> syntax, e.g. <ref Britannica>…</ref>, and called that concept "key". This was changed to <ref name="Britannica"> just 3 days later. Still the term "key" remained in various places. See T299280 for the full history.
• A 2019 draft suggested an alternate sub-referencing syntax where <ref extends="Britannica"> was meant to address a parent reference by name. This got replaced with the details="…" syntax in 2025.