Andrew Gray wrote:
For things like biblical quotations, it would seem that this is a marvellous niche for Wikisource, if we can figure out an elegant way to do it and keep the user functionality.
Wikisource has a complete translation in modern English, and it already seems to be annotated with IDs for verses, e.g.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(American_Standard)/John#3:16
Bible links on Wikipedia don't uniformly use the bibleverse template, editors just link to any random website. I think the vast majority of links could go directly to the most recent PD translation on Wikisource. The relevant template can be updated once every decade or so as new works come into the public domain.
A lot of bible references don't have a link at all. Maybe we could add a magic link feature, like we have for RFC and PMID. Then whenever someone types something that looks like a bible verse reference in plain text, MediaWiki would automatically convert it to a link. For cultural neutrality it would obviously have to be internationalised and support a number of other religious texts. Not impossible though.
-- Tim Starling