The names of references contain only alphanumeric characters, ending in a 4-digit year (e.g., ‘smith1998’). When there is more than one reference of the same name and year a single lowercase letter should be appended to the name to distinguish between them (e.g., ‘smith1998b’).

In addition to the usual title/author/publication type of information, suitable for generating HTML, XML or SGML, each reference file can hold other information, including:

• nickname: the unique short name for the reference (e.g., ‘smith2001’) – this is checked against the file name
• abstract (or similar description)
• type of the reference (book, paper, etc.)
• categories (for projects with multiple categories)
• whether data in the ref has been ‘proofed’ (that is double-checked as ready for publication)
• keywords not in description (optional, for automatic categorization)
• comments (private notes)
• local filename (if local copy available) in the MemoWiki project\files directory (which starts with “nickname-”)

References use a simple plain-text markup, similar to HTML but with some special tags (such as <abstract>).

To link to a reference from a Wiki page use, for example, [cowlis2003], which will appear like this: [cowlis2003]. If a description is added, the square brackets will be omitted, thus: Here is a sample reference.

In references, Wiki markup can be used only in the content of abstracts and comments.