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Help:Converting between references formats

This help page is a how-to guide. It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting.

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This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. Reason: The {{R}} template has been deprecated by community RfC since 2010 (its use "suspended" unless three conditions were met, which were not met). For a modern solution to citing different pages in a single source, see {{sfnp}}.

This page describes procedures to convert the references from Footnotes defined in the body of the article to List-defined references where the references are defined in the reference list.

Such a conversion may be necessary in order to move text with many references from an article that uses the list-defined format to another article, or may be used to format all references in an article so that they all conform to the same format. It requires installation of the References segregator tool.

• The References segregator tool can automatically convert all references to the list-defined format.
• Use a regular expression search-and-replace operation to replace uses of <ref> tags with the {{r}} template. To do that, search for: <ref name="(.*?)"/>, and replace it with {{r\|"$1"}}, while checking the "Treat search string as a regular expression" checkbox.

1. Use a regular expression search and replace operation to replace uses of the {{r}} template with <ref> tags. To do that, search for: \{\{r\|([^}]+)\}\}, and replace it with <ref name="$1" />, while checking the "Treat search string as a regular expression" checkbox.
2. Copy and remove (cut) the entire {{reflist}} template with the list of references.
3. Install the References segregator tool and click the "Segregate refs for editing" button.
4. Remove all the empty <ref> tags from the lower text box.
5. Paste the list of references into the lower text box (after its existing contents).
6. Save the page, which merges the citation templates from the lower text box into the upper text box and removes the unused footnotes in the process.