Re-examining what's best to display is no bad thing. The system for URL's far predates cite.php for example.
The use of numbers is sensible; like footnotes you want to be able to say *which* link of many, if notionally discussing a page. But the numbers for URLs clash with the numbers for footnote cites, so there can be two number 1's on a page easily. That's unhelpful. Also it may be that labelling them some better way is possible. Some ideas:
1 - give them numberings that fit in with footnote numberings, so that at least url / cite numbers are not duplicated.
2 - give them a different look, maybe [url-1] ... [url-2] ...
3. - auto-render all [http://link.com] as <ref>http://link.com</ref>. It's not perfect but the information's the best there is and its consistent in style.
I like #3.
FT2.
-----Original Message----- On Behalf Of Todd Allen Sent: Wednesday, September 05, 2007 4:16 AM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Why are URLs numbered?
Steve Bennett wrote:
Just wondering: when external url's are used in a page, why are they numbered? That is, why is this:
displayed as this:
[1]
?
I imagine that once this was a useful behaviour, before we had proper referencing tools, so they kind of looked like footnotes. But there's no list of these URLs generated anywhere, so what purpose does it serve?
Would it perhaps be tidier to display something like a tiny [url] or [link] or something?
Steve PS I'm bringing this up on this list, rather than mediawiki or wikitech, as it's a question of deciding what we actually want.
Actually, I kind of like it that way. It's quite often helpful in discussions when a series of links or diffs is presented, and they're already identified by the context around them, since it doesn't make a massively long page. For articles themselves, we have the <ref> system.