On 12/6/05, Jonathan Leybovich jleybov@yahoo.com wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
Introducing detailed citation features would require
either abanoning
that simplicity or abandoning the concept of writing
the wikitext
directly. Both of these would be significantly
detrimental to the
Wikipedia project in the short term.
The mark-up would look something like:
[[cite:ISBN:123456789:p. 10|"cited text"|"paraphrase/article text"]]
To me that doesn't seem more complicated than most other basic wiki mark-up.
Maybe complicated isn't what I'm looking for. But consider the following and whether or not you'd enjoy editing it by hand:
'''Roy [[cite:ISBN:123456789:p. 7|"Roy Orbison's middle name is Kelton"|"Kelton"]] Orbison''' ([[cite:ISBN:123456789:p.9|"He was born in Foo, Bar on April 23 of 1936"|"[[April 23]], [[1936]]"]] – [[cite:ISBN:123456789:p.11|"He died that same year, on the 6th of December"|"[[December 6]], [[1988]]"]]), [[cite:ISBN:123456789:p.13|"They called him "The Big O""|"nicknamed "The Big O""]], was ...
Maybe I'm misunderstanding how these cites would be used, because that was hell; it was even worse than I had thought before going through the actual exercise.
I don't think wiki markup is the proper solution for this. And that means significant redesign. Feel free to prove me wrong here, though, and show us a working model which is just as easy to edit as Wikipedia.
I think it's a great idea, I just think it's years ahead of its time (and that assumes it's designed independently of Wikimedia, cramming it through Wikimedia development processes would only hinder it).
Anthony