---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: River Tarnell river@wikimedia.org Date: 12 Dec 2007 11:52 Subject: [Mediawiki-l] that awful <ref> syntax To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list mediawiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org
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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