This seems like a very weird way to do things. Why is
the book being
split up by page to begin with? For optimal reading, you should put a
lot more than one book-page's worth of content on each web page. It's
hard to say what an appropriate fix is if I don't know why this is
being done to begin with.
This is being done in order to proofread the text, and in order to make it more trustable
than text without scan.
Is the idea is that the pages should later be
transcluded into one big
page, and they're only temporarily on separate pages for proofreading
purposes? If so, why not just have the extension that displays the
wikitext and Djvu pages side-by-side (ProofreadPage?) display a bunch
of pages at once?
yes, this is precisely what the extension does. It has a tag that transcludes a contiguous
list of pages. Single pages displayed with scans are used for proofreading, but they are
not the final result.
You could then put all indivisible content on the
page where it begins, so put the full ref text on the first page.
This is one of the workarounds that we have been using ; in the example that I have
posted, you can see that we did exactly that.
However, this solution is not satisfying, and it is too difficult for many users. Even
without this multiple pages problem, it is difficult to convince contributors to use the
<ref> tag, because it implies to move the footnote's text away from its original
location (remember that we start from OCR text). Now, when they see a footnote that spans
over two or more pages, they tend to refuse <ref>, and to favor templates instead,
combined with section transclusion (which makes the transclusion work very complicated)
Some contributors have designed tricks that combine the <ref> tag with section
transclusion, in order to leave the footnote text in front of the scan. However, this
results in complicated formulas, that are unacceptably difficult for most users.
If you can see multiple pages at once, this
isn't much harder to proofread, since you can just look down a bit.
I guess you also mean "see multiple scans at once". This would be another
workaround, but it would not deter contributors from trying to leave the text where it was
in the first place, and where we think it belongs.
We have been dealing with this problem for several years now, and all the solutions that
we have found have drawbacks. I do not think that we can solve this without extending the
tool that manages references.
Thomas
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