Steve Bennett wrote:
Now, where the hell does meta information about
individual or groups
of effectively unrelated articles go? Bizarrely, the category
namespace seems like the closest one! What else is there?
It should go into those individual or groups of articles, IMO. Possibly
a template, that's part of the encyclopedia content and is often used
for material that is common to a large group of articles.
I don't see how this helps. Putting <ref>s
into an infobox is
dangerous, as there's no guarantee the including page will actually
have a <references> section...
I'm not suggesting an infobox. In the case of these Rambot articles, I'm
proposing that the links to the [[Geographic references]] page be
replaced (probably by a bot) with the references themselves, wrapped in
<ref> tags. A part of this operation would of course be to ensure that
there's a <references/> tag in the article to display them. I suppose
you could make the individual cites into templates since they'll be so
widely used, so that for example the bot would go around inserting the
text <ref>{{cite 2002 US census}}</ref> or whatever.
Pretty much all articles should have a references section anyway, so
this would be a very positive step IMO.