On Sunday 25 January 2004 10:20 am, you wrote:
Message: 6 Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2004 20:36:45 -0500 From: Sascha Noyes sascha@pantropy.net Or my personal favourite:
<sup>[[Articlename#References|<nowiki>[</nowiki>1<nowiki>]</ nowiki>]]</sup>
Quibble 1: How do you keep the numerals in sequence if you are editing it and need to insert another citation?
Quibble 2: Less important because less likely, but how do you keep the link from breaking if the name of the References section is changed?
Quibble 3: There are probably those who find even a superscript footnote or endnote too intrusive when casually reading the article, so ideally there would be some kind of "show/hide references" mechanism.
Quibble 4: For those who WANT to see the reference, when you click on the reference you lose your place in the text you were reading.
#1: Plain old "hard work".
#2: keep the article on my watchlist [;-)], and put an html comment in the article not to change the section name (which I shall now do)
#3: I don't find footnote numbers the least bit intrusive. As a matter of fact, I'm quite perturbed when I read a non-obvious claim stated as fact without references.
#4: No, at least not in konqueror or Firebird. If I click on the link (on eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_d%27Holbach) I can simply click the "back" browser button and return to the exact position where I was when clicking the link.
There is obviously a common theme in your quibbles. One with which I am in total agreement: This scheme could be a whole lot better. It is just that, for me personally, the scheme I have presented is the best one possible with the current software. I also think that it is important not to bury referrences in html comments, because non-editors are also interested in the references used to back up claims (and whether there are any)
Mav has put up some suggestions on meta (http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footnotes) which looks interesting. I have yet to respond because I couldn't think of a brilliant way to handle footnotes (yet) ;-)
Best, Sascha Noyes