[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Mediawiki-l] that awful <ref> syntax

[Avi]

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Personally, this is why I prefer to have the <ref> and {cite}
data pasted in columnar format (each option on a separate line).
It is invisible when reading the page, and it has the non-text
ref stuff stand out noticeably in edit mode. When the ref is in-
line in the edits, it can sometimes be impossible to determine
what is text and what is a ref.

- --Avi
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-- 
en:User:Avraham
----
pub 1024D/785EA229 3/6/2007 Avi (Wikipedia-related) <aviwiki at gmail.com>
   Primary key fingerprint:  D233 20E7 0697 C3BC 4445 7D45 CBA0 3F46 785E
A229

On Dec 12, 2007 11:11 AM, <wikien-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: "David Gerard" <dgerard at gmail.com>
> To: "English Wikipedia" <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2007 12:24:17 +0000
> Subject: [WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Mediawiki-l] that awful <ref> syntax
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: River Tarnell <river at wikimedia.org>
> Date: 12 Dec 2007 11:52
> Subject: [Mediawiki-l] that awful <ref> syntax
> To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list
> <mediawiki-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>
>
> so, the first thing i notice when editing Wikipedia articles these days
> is that they're full of <ref> tags that make it nearly impossible to
> find the actual text of the article.  the problem seems to be that the
> entire reference is inline in the text.  while this is useful for
> locality of editing, wouldn't it be nice if it would be close to the
> text, but not inline?
>
> for example, references could be named and referred to with [name], and
> then defined at the end of each paragraph:
>
> Wikipedia[wikip] is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation[wmf].
> [wikip] http://en.wikipedia.org/
> [wmf] http://wikimediafoundation.org/
>
> now, it's still easy to see and change the references, but you can
> actually see the article text as well.
>
> for an example from a real Wikipedia article, see
> <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Kate/ref>.
>
> of course this would require some changes to the core parser to do
> properly, but i think the feature is useful enough to be worth it.
>
> comments?
>
>        - river.
>
>
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