As an avid writer on the wiki, I am always frustrated by the current
system for REFs (et all). They have little expressive power, break
easily, and made editing _extremely_ difficult in certain
circumstances. I consider this to be one of the biggest problems with
the current MediaWiki software, it costs me perhaps as much as 15%
wasted time on every article -- and a check over my contributions list
should let you calculate what sort of real-world time that represents!
The good news is that I don't think any of these problems aren't
fixable. For argument's sake, here's some of the problems I'd like to
see fixed:
1) CITE tags are _extremely_ large. Since the REF system requires them
to be embedded in-line in the article body, they can make editing of
the articles very difficult. For instance, look at the article at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory
Now click edit. Even trying to figure out what is part of the body, as
opposed to the REFs, can be very difficult. Of course one can mitigate
this problem, slightly, by removing the vertical white space, but that
doesn't _really_ help the issue as much as you would like, and has the
side-effect of making the CITEs themselves harder to edit.
2) REFs should be _represented_ as footnotes, REFs, however, are _not
footnotes_. It seems whoever built the REF system seems to have
forgotten this fact. Footnotes can be used for all sorts of different
purposes, but with the current REF system the two become synonymous. I
like to add notes about pronunciation and "trivial" links to other
articles using footnotes, but there's simply no way to do this with
the current system.
3) There's no way to reference different page numbers! This is a
_serious_ problem, because it means if you want to use different
portions of a single work, like a book, you have to put in a different
CITE for each one. In reality, people just don't bother.
4) I can't fold hand-edited refs into the REFLIST. For instance, let's
say I used a book for most of the body of an article, so I didn't
bother putting lots of REFs inline. I did, however, add a half dozen
different REFs inlined to support specific facts. Now how do I make
the REFLIST look right? I can't! I end up with some numbered ones, and
some bulleted, and due to the default styles, they look different.
Uggg.
5) REF should not be picky about position. Right now if you want to
use the same REF in more than one place, you can use a named ref.
Generally the idea is good. However, this system demands that the body
of the named ref be placed in the very first place that ref is used.
This works great until you want to actually edit the article, at which
point it because terribly easy to break _all_ the references with
something as simple as a cut-n-paste.
Here's my suggested solutions:
1) named refs should work no matter where the body of the reference is
placed. That would immediately fix most of these problems. I could,
optionally, place only <ref name=x/> into the body, and remove all of
the ref bodies to the ==References== section of the article. This
would even allow me to fold "non-inlines" into the references list,
using exactly the same mechanism.
2) there should be another, similar, tag for "real" footnotes. <note>
would be great. They would operate identically to (1).
3) named REFs can have another parameter, "page=". These would be
collected into the references at the bottom, with each lettered
reference appearing.
How would I use this? Well using the water memory article as an
example, I would...
1) remove all the CITEs into the ==References== section, surrounded in
REF tags with a name.
2) place name ref placeholders in the body of the article, some of
these may optionally include page numbers
3) some of the comments would be surrounded with <note> tags, and
optionally removed to a new ==Notes== section.
Is there anything technically impossible here?
Maury