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.
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?
If you use something a bit more distinctive than single pairs of square brackets, you could use actual English in the reference names without fear of clashes, instead of abbreviations like "wikip" and "wmf". For example, double-parentheses. Then you could make something that looks very much like Harvard-style referencing. ((Wikipedia, 2007))
As for the reference list syntax, I've previously suggested co-opting the definition list syntax, making any definition list under a heading called "references", or one of its aliases, into a reference list.
-- Tim Starling
== References == ; Wikipedia, 2007 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_referencing
If you use something a bit more distinctive than single pairs of square brackets, you could use actual English in the reference names without fear of clashes, instead of abbreviations like "wikip" and "wmf".
Heck, why not use the awesome superscript Unicode chars?
Wikipedia¹ is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation².
¹ http://www.wikipedia.org/ ² http://wikimediafoundation.org/
OK, it might not be that practical -- and may even conflict with some math formulas? -- but you must admit that it looks cool.³
-Evan
³ You must!
Would a parameter in the ref tag which stops it being displayed as a superscript number (or letter, or whatever) and linked back to be enough to fix this? It would allow all refs to be declared at the bottom of the page and just <ref name="foo"/> to be included inline. Refs could be put at the end of each paragraph rather than the bottom of the page if the people working on a particular page wanted to do so, of course.
Adding a parameter would probably be less invasive.
Would you be suggesting a second parameter for bottom="true/false"
DSig
-----Original Message----- From: mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Dalton Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2007 8:47 To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] that awful <ref> syntax
Would a parameter in the ref tag which stops it being displayed as a superscript number (or letter, or whatever) and linked back to be enough to fix this? It would allow all refs to be declared at the bottom of the page and just <ref name="foo"/> to be included inline. Refs could be put at the end of each paragraph rather than the bottom of the page if the people working on a particular page wanted to do so, of course.
would that be location="bottom/section" ?
IMHO a more modular and interoperable solution would be a tag extension e.g. <bibliography> that is applied to a list of references. It would replace all citations in the text that are written in a (selectable) style (e.g. Harvard style) with the appropriate Wiki markup, or hyperlink the bibliography in place. And it could be smart enough to not interfere with the way tags are currently handled.
$0.02
B.
On 12-Dec-07, at 1:42 PM, Dave Sigafoos wrote:
Adding a parameter would probably be less invasive.
Would you be suggesting a second parameter for bottom="true/false"
DSig
-----Original Message----- From: mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Thomas Dalton Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2007 8:47 To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] that awful <ref> syntax
Would a parameter in the ref tag which stops it being displayed as a superscript number (or letter, or whatever) and linked back to be enough to fix this? It would allow all refs to be declared at the bottom of the page and just <ref name="foo"/> to be included inline. Refs could be put at the end of each paragraph rather than the bottom of the page if the people working on a particular page wanted to do so, of course.
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
On 12/12/2007, Dave Sigafoos davesigafoos@sanmar.com wrote:
Adding a parameter would probably be less invasive.
Less invasive that what? A whole new syntax? It's also much easier to code.
Would you be suggesting a second parameter for bottom="true/false"
Which would do what? I don't understand.
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.
MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
===================================== Jim Hu Associate Professor Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics 2128 TAMU Texas A&M Univ. College Station, TX 77843-2128 979-862-4054
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