[WikiEN-l] insist on sources

[Bryan Derksen]

Tony Sidaway wrote:
> I only wish we had something better than the revoltingly ugly
> reference mechanism we have at present ("ref" tags), which required
> the editor to place all kinds of obstrusive metadata into the body of
> an article when he really wants it to appear at the end.  This makes
> the text of the article very difficult to read and edit.

I'm exactly the opposite. I love having a system whereby I can put
metadata right in the exact same place in the article's source as the
data that it's referencing. I very rarely did detailed referencing of my
work before this system came along, usually just tossing an external
link to the source I was working from in "external links" (in those rare
cases where I was working with offline sources I might not even do that
since a book reference isn't an "external link"). It's super-easy to put
in detailed inline references now, though, even to non-Internet sources.

What would be nice is to have an editor a little fancier than a plain
old text box, though. Simply having different colors for the different
types of text (reference, header, link, image, etc) would make the
source way easier to read. No idea how to go about crafting such a
thing, though.

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