Help:Cite errors/Cite error references no text

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Overview

A footnote used multiple times may be defined with a name:

<ref name="foo-bar">content</ref>

To invoke a named footnote:

<ref name="foo-bar" />

References may also be defined within the reference list. Here is a correct example:

{{reflist|refs=
<ref name=rename1>refcontent1</ref>
<ref name=rename2>refcontent2</ref>
<ref name=rename3>refcontent3</ref>
<ref name=rename4>refcontent4</ref>
}}

Issues and resolution

A named reference was invoked but never defined. The reference may be defined inline or in the reference list. You may have misspelled the reference name, or used special characters that look the same but are actually different.

For instance,

<ref name="foo-bar">content</ref>

and

<ref name="foo–bar">content</ref>

are not the same: one contains a hyphen while the other uses an ndash. To avoid this sort of error, try to use only the characters available on the standard keyboard.

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You may have also invoked a reference but never defined it, for example: <ref name="foo–bar">...</ref> or <ref name="foo–bar" />.

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You may have tried to include the reference inside the ref tag, for example: <ref foo–bar />.

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The full reference may have been removed from the article with other content, such as when removing information under BLP concerns. In this case the text of the reference will be available in the page history, and you can convert the single <ref /> tag into a full reference.

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List-defined references may have this error if:

• The closing </ref> tag is missing or malformed.
• If {{reflist}} is used and the |refs= parameter is missing or malformed.

Technical

Pages with this error message are placed into Pages with broken reference names. The system message page is at Cite error references no text.