Template:Refname rules

Names for footnotes and groups must follow these rules:

Names are case-sensitive.
Names must not be purely numeric; they should have semantic value so that they can be more easily distinguished from each other by human editors.
Names must be unique—you may not use the same name to define different groups or footnotes.
Please consider keeping reference names simple and restricted to the standard English alphabet and numerals. Failing that, including if spaces are used, the following technical restrictions become relevant:
- Quotation marks are optional if the only characters used are letters A–Z, a–z, digits 0–9, and the symbols !$%&()*,-.:;<@[]^_`{|}~. That is, all printable ASCII characters except #"'/=>?\.
- Inclusion of any other characters, including spaces, requires that the reference name be enclosed in quotes; for example, name="John Smith".
- The quote marks must be the standard straight keyboard marks ("); curly or other quotes will be parsed as part of the reference name.
- Quote-enclosed reference names may not include a less-than sign (<) or a double straight quote symbol ("). These may be escaped with < and ", respectively.
You may optionally provide reference names even when the reference name is not required. This makes later re-use of the sourced reference easier.

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