[WikiEN-l] External links and attributions

I would really like to see more use of attributions, references, citations within Wikipedia. Traditional encyclopedias don't do very much of this, but I think this is a serious weakness on their part. The traditional encyclopedia simply speaks _ex cathedra_, and the only reason you have for believing it is that "they wouldn't print it if it weren't true." Even if (reportedly) the U. S. version of Microsoft Encarta says the light bulb was invented by Edison, and the British version says it was Swan. (The old Britannica used to at least have the articles initialed, so you at least knew that "well, Lord Rayleigh thinks so.") I remember being shocked in high school when I learned for the first time that an encyclopedia could not be referenced in a scholarly article because it didn't meet scholarly standards for attribution. I don't know why print encyclopedias don't choose to reference their sources. Presumably it's limited space, and/or a desire not to clutter up the article with footnotes. Or perhaps it's a feeling that for the stubby two-paragraph articles the article-to-references ratio wouldn't be very high. Wikipedia has fewer space limitations. However, wiki-markup has no convenient way of representing footnotes and citations. In my fantasy, some hypertexty mechanism could give you the best of both world--invisible footnotes that don't interrupt the text but can be made visible if you want to trace the authority for something. I agree that there's nothing to stop anyone from doing what Christopher Mahan suggests. And that would be a good thing. But at the very least, I'd like to see a convenient way of doing an inter- page link, so that you can put a citation in the text that is just an unobtrusive thing like a single character, such that clicking on it takes you to the reference in the references section--AND automatically puts a RETURN- link in the reference. I believe you can do this today with hand-tuned HTML, but... It seems to me that a policy that encourages the inclusion of references, and a markup mechanism that makes them easy to write and read, would support in the spirit of NPOV and "X REPORTS Y ABOUT Z."