Using the ProcessCite.php extension on EcoliWiki, we have two ways to make these more compact:
1. for sources with identifiers, like PubMed IDs, we just use <ref name='PMID:number' /> 2. for others that are reused, we define a page in the wiki to hold the reference text and use <ref name='LIB:identifier />
on the Reference Library page, the references are arranged as identifier 1|reference text 1 identifier 3|reference text 2 identifier 4|reference text 3 identifier 5|reference text 4 etc.
identifiers can be anything. For our purposes, the fact that 90%+ (guessing) of our refs are PMIDs makes this practical (we think). This probably won't work for Wikipedia, but might work for others.
Jim
On Dec 12, 2007, at 5:52 AM, River Tarnell wrote:
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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===================================== Jim Hu Associate Professor Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics 2128 TAMU Texas A&M Univ. College Station, TX 77843-2128 979-862-4054