On 02/01/07, Daniel P. B. Smith wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com wrote:
I'd like to think big here and work in a more general way on the problem of making references have a less intrusive appearance.
Of the people who complain that dense references make articles unreadable, I am not sure to what extent they are truly complaining about the appearance or to what extent they simply disagree with the verifiability policy... but under the current system dense references do interfere with readability.
While we're doing this, I'd like to see something else. The present system is an imitation of the superscripted-footnote-reference system used in books. It works well in books because the text of a book doesn't change after it has been printed.
In Wikipedia, a reference should mark, not the end of the fact being supported, but the _beginning and end_ of the fact being supported. As things stand, careless editing (and there's no way to enforce careFUL editing) can easily make unsupported statements appear to be supported. A recent example, from the article on the Statue of Liberty. A passage once read:
The seven spikes in the crown represent the seven seas and seven continents.[2]
In due course, or undue course, someone decided to add what I think were personal musings about the statue symbolizing "the American Dream," a concept I think was unfamiliar to Bartholdi, and the passage mutated to:
Each spike on the Seven-spiked crown denotes the seven seas or the seven continents. The torch embodies the meaning of enlightenment and guidance for the millions of immigrants seeking freedom from oppression. The broken shackles lying at Lady Liberty's feet confirm this view.[2]
You see the problem. The cited source says nothing about shackles or immigrants. (For that matter, it says nothing about _each_ individual spike denoting the seven seas or seven continents. Now, personally I think spike #1 represents the seven seas, spike #2 the seven continents, spike #3 the Seven Dwarfs, spike #4 the Seven Deadly Sins, spike #5 the Seven Samurai, spike #6 the Seven Pleiades, and spike #7 represents the day Bartholdi rested...)
On your ugliness point, can't one edit one's CSS to remove reference display?
On the rest: I entirely agree. It would be fantastic to be able to connect a particular reference to a set of words or sentences. I'm not sure how this could be displayed to the end user... Perhaps, on rolling over the reference number, the sentences to which the reference refers become highlighted or tinted.