On Dec 12, 2007 10:52 PM, River Tarnell
<river(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
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?
I think this, along with {{fact}} and other tags, should be moved out
of the edit box completely. People should be able to add meta data,
interlanguage links, references, trust values, feature stars, AfD
notices, stable version flags, and whatever else they like in a
separate overlay which readers and editors can turn on and off and can
edit in a separate place.
I agree, though I think that a fact tag, or something
like it, that is
primarily there to warn the reader that there may be something
problematical about the stated fact is worthwhile. In a sense it is
somewhat of a disclaimer for those inclined to see everything as gospel
truth. It should not be there as a red flag that signals obsessive
bulls to charge. We would like it if people found substantiation, but
no-one should be under any obligation to fix them all, or to remove the
material that is tagged.
The other caution that I would make is not to move all this to the
article's talk page. Adding various templates to talk pages has
detracted from their original purpose. At one time if the discussion
link was in blue I could go there with reasonable confidence that there
was something there to be discussed, or that a potential POV problem was
being considered. Now when most of these are filled with some kind of
meta-data templates and nothing else I am less inclined to look at
them. If others too are less inclined to look at them it limits an
important avenue for finding a compromise solution to difficult content
problems.
Ec