On Sat, 11 Dec 2004, Bryan Derksen wrote:
At 09:48 AM 12/12/2004 +1100, David Gerard wrote:
What we need is to encourage a culture of including references. I'm trying to get myself better at this ... If we can get the reference syntax implemented, that would help tremendously. (And I'm dreaming of it doing fancy reference-indexing things.)
Once upon a time long long ago I remember putting in a feature request for a simple "footnote" markup, along the lines of adding [[Note:blah blah blah]] anywhere in the article and having it turn into a superscripted number linking to an anchor for the text "blah blah blah" down at the very bottom of the page. Something like that could be suitable for references too, though it wouldn't be nice for making multiple references to the same source scattered throughout an article. Maybe a [[Ref:blah blah blah]] markup that automatically combines identical "blah blah" text into the same reference at the bottom?
The following won't solve the entire problem, but it's an easy fix to part of the problem of providing references.
I've recently noticed, while updating a few of the articles that offer statistics on nations, that for the most part they lack any notice that the information was taken from the CIA Factbook. Adding a reference to those articles would not only explain where these figures came from, but in the all-too-frequent case of outdated information allow a user to find the latest numbers.
The only reason I can see that we wouldn't want to provide proper attribution is that contributors don't want to acknowledge a connection to the US CIA, which, to put it mildly, has a remarkably tarnished reputation.
So to solve this problem in attribution, I wrote {{template:CIAfb}}, to be added to the bottom of the relevant articles. Perhaps some folks could join me in adding this template to more articles where appropriate?
Geoff