On 12/13/07, Ral315 <en.ral315(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Theoretically, could references be placed on a subpage
-- {{/ref}} -- and
references via ParserFunctions? It might be a pain on the server end, and
I'm not sure if there'd be a limit on such, but I would think it could be a
fairly easy way to make the text much more readable. The downside would be
that references would have to be on a completely separate page, of course,
but it could be a great workaround.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean. Are you suggesting, for example,
to make the references for [[Maya Angelou]] accessible through a
sub-page (or a pseudo-article, or misplaced template, or whatever you
want to call it) located at [[Maya Angelou/ref]]?
For the sake of argument, I'm assuming the following as a mock-up.
...born '''Marguerite Ann
Johnson''' [[April 4]], [[1928]] in [[St. Louis, Missouri]],
<ref>{{/ref|born}}</ref>
And something like this on the [[Maya Angelou/ref]] sub-page:
{{#switch:{{{1|}}}
| foobar = {{cite news|...|TL|...|DR|...}}
| born = {{cite news|...|TL|...|DR|...}}
| #default = {{fact!}}
}}
Sounds like madness, but it seems workable if stored elsewhere than
article space. Slightly less crazy would be an intermediate template
(let's call it "{{refsub}}" that forwards the initial template call
onward to some other subpage, either of the article's talk page, like
this:
(Template:Refsub)
{{Talk:{{PAGENAME}}/refs | 1 = {{{1|}}} }}
...or of the refsub template itself (I like this better, actually --
Put the lookup tables in the template namespace, call spades spades):
(Template:Refsub)
{{refsub/{{PAGENAME}} | 1 = {{{1|}}} }}
And you'd use it like this:
...in [[St. Louis, Missouri]],
<ref>{{refsub|born}}</ref>
This would forward the parameter {{{1}}} (the name of the ref) to
[[Template:Refsub/Maya_Angelou]], lookup the ref name in the #switch
table, and return the html created by the citation wikitext found on
that line.
This would allow the syntax to be the same for each use, without the
ungodly side-effect of storing templates in article space.
Note, before anyone asks: as far as I know it's not possible to get
<ref> tags located inside a template to function properly in an
article where the template is used. I believe they would populate a
separate list of refs "inside" each instance of the template, which
would be ignored by the <references/> section of the article, leaving
you with little bracketed numbers which don't go anywhere. Whether
this is sensible behavior (parser figuring cite.php markup before
figuring transclusions) is a debatable elsewhere.
–C.W.