Category:Pages with broken reference names

This is a maintenance category, used for maintenance of the Wikipedia project. It is not part of the encyclopedia and contains non-article pages, or groups articles by status rather than subject. Do not include this category in content categories (except for eponymous maintenance categories). This is a tracking category. It builds and maintains a list of pages primarily for the sake of the list itself. They are not part of the encyclopedia's categorization scheme. This category is hidden on its member pages—unless the corresponding user preference (Appearance → Show hidden categories) is set. These categories can be used to track, build and organize lists of pages needing "attention en masse" (for example, pages using deprecated syntax), or that may need to be edited at someone's earliest convenience. These categories also serve to aggregate members of several lists or sub-categories into a larger, more efficient list (discriminated by classifications).

This category has a backlog that requires the attention of willing editors. This notice will hide itself when this category has fewer than 50 items. (recount)

Pages are placed in this category when any of the following cite errors are generated on the page:

The named reference $1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

Please do not delete the ref nor comment it out. This error usually occurs because someone deleted another ref with that same name that had text in it. To fix these errors, look in the page history to find the deleted ref and copy its text into the remaining ref with the error message. To find the first entry of a ref use WikiBlame. AnomieBOT does some fixes and often leaves helpful suggestions on an article's Talk page.

Other reasons this error can occur:

• Someone copied the ref when copying text from another article (or from another language version of Wikipedia), but didn't move the part where the ref was defined.
  • Solution: Copy the ref text from that other article.
• Someone edited the ref name (maybe an attempted copyedit or vandalism).
  • Solution: Change the ref name back to what it was before, or in more complex situations, copy the ref text.
• The ref is transcluded from another page, but the passage where it's defined isn't transcluded.
  • Solution (usually): Edit the transcluded page so that the ref is defined in the portion that's transcluded.
• A numeral was automatically added to the ref name when a user pasted wikitext into Visual Editor.
  • Solution: Remove the numeral (but make sure that it really is intended to be the same ref, rather than two unrelated refs that happen to have similar names).
• Someone updated information and changed the ref name in a systematic way (for instance, changing the year) without realizing that that isn't sufficient to produce a citation to an updated source. (Often happens in infoboxes and tables.)
  • Solution (usually): Remove the ref and find a citation or add a citation needed tag. Copying the ref text is not adequate, because the old ref probably doesn't support the updated information.
• The ref name is spelled inconsistently (for instance, sometimes with a capital letter and sometimes with a lowercase letter, or with different punctuation or spacing).
  • Solution: Edit the ref names to be consistent.
• Someone copied the ref as part of a long piece of complex wiki syntax such as an infobox or table, without realizing that it was a citation.
  • Solution (usually): Remove the ref – it was being used to support information about the article that the syntax was copied from, and is unlikely to be relevant to this article.
• The article is missing a closing </ref> tag.
  • Solution: Add the missing tag.
• It's clear what source is intended, but the syntax is wrong (for instance, a URL used as a ref name).
  • Fix the syntax.
• References invoked after the reflist.
  • Solution: Varies. Often the ref is not needed that far down in the article and can be removed. In other cases the reflist needs to be moved to below the passage with the reference, or the footnotes need to be split into groups.

The pages Template:Broken ref, Help:Cite errors and subpages contain deliberate errors and do not need to be repaired.

If you fix an error, you can leave this edit summary if you wish:
Fixed broken reference names – [[:Category:Pages with broken reference names|You can help!]]

Pages in this category are sorted by namespace; articles are sorted by their first letter (A-Z), and pages in other namespaces are sorted using Greek letters so that they are listed after all of the articles.

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