On 21/07/06, Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:

Hi,

considering the ongoing discussion about references in articles, I thought it might help if people less familiar with <ref> tags and our template system would have an easy way to generate the necessary wiki code for references.

So, I wrote a tool: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/makeref.php

It offers a list of reference type choices (currently only two) and a standard form to fill in values for that type. Clicking a button will then generate the necessary wiki source, ready to paste into the article.

The Really Cool Thing (tm) is that the reference types and their values (and if they're mandatory or not) can be configured by editing a page on meta (link is on the tool page). The syntax should be self-explanatory ;-)

It can support other languages by adding "&language=XX" to the URL; however, there are no meta pages for other languages yet.

If you like it, maybe we could link the tool from the edit page?

Magnus

Very nice work Mr. Manske!

Sadly, I won't be using the tool as I find compiling the template in text a lot of fun (for some reason). This will be of great use to many, many users and will hopefully increase the number of references per article.

Are you planning on expanding it to cover other cite templates such as books and websites? Will you be introducing more fields (I notice that the access date is lacking).