I think
discreet superscripted numbers *would* be annoying if they
appeared after each and every statement of fact. And we'd have 500
cites per article.
That said, I'd prefer a dynamic metadata system so that any arbitrary
piece of text could be matched to a source, the editor who wrote it,
and so forth. But that would be way, way beyond any of the software
we have now in complexity, I think.
Such a system already exists. It's called Project Xanadu
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu), and it's such an
incredibly complicated system that it's taken 38 years for a
preliminary implementation to appear.
There's an open-source implementation of Xanadu, is there not? Maybe
we could use in MediaWiki (or, more realistically, a successor
system) in the far future.
--
Philip L. Welch