Thomas Dalton wrote:
Anyone else bothered by how much these clutter up and interefere with editing text?
Do you have a solution? The only thing I can think of is putting all the references at the beginning and then just putting <ref name="foo"/> in the main text, but that would mean a big block of code at the top of every page (or at least every page that is properly sourced) and I'm not sure if it's possible to stop the top of each page looking like a numberline.
I had the notion once of a reference: namespace, used just like the template: namespace but solely for references. That way instead of having every last detail duplicated in every article that used that ref you could have
<ref name="foo">{{reference:foo}}</ref>
or perhaps for larger references like books,
<ref name="foo">{{reference:foo}}, p. 21-22</ref>
If we wanted to be daring we could have the <ref> tags be automatically generated for transclusions like this, perhaps using a bar to tack additions on like a parameter. {{reference:foo|, p. 21-22}} for example.
This would have the benefit of:
*preventing duplication of effort between articles that use the same reference *maintaining a more uniform format for reference text *allowing easier tracking of which articles use which references
It would have the downside of:
*making it harder to find the text of the reference if you want to edit it, much like with regular templates *requiring some sort of naming convention that is consistent, unique, but not so elaborate as to make it pointless to put the reference in a separate page *cross-article references could be more vulnerable to subtle vandalism or honest mistakes. If one article used a source to cite one fact and another article used the same source to cite another fact, and then someone who only knows about its use at the first article fiddles with it, it might invalidate its use in the second article.
This is just an idea I kicked around once, there's probably all sorts of other problems I haven't thought of yet.