2008/9/25 Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com:
On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 8:37 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
I was going to say as well, what happened to that proposal to define references at the bottom of the article instead of inline? And then Pathos posted a nice implementation above. It does make a whole lot more sense from both a reader and an editor's point of view to have reference metadata in a single place, away from the wikitext. Defining refs with a "refname" in the text doesn't seem too bad... other than the mess of trying to get a different stylistic system going, is there some reason we don't do this?
The problem at the moment is that you would end up with links to each ref at the bottom of the article and each ref would have an extra letter linking back to those links. I'm looking at the code now to see how easy it would be to allow hidden refs - it should be doable.
I wrote code to create a <refdefine> tag to do that literally years ago. There wasn't much interest in it at the time.
I've got a patch written now, didn't take long at all. I've just added an attribute to the existing ref tag. <ref name="foo" hidden="true">text</ref> won't appear inline and won't be linked back to. It seems a much simpler approach to the others I've seen. I've put it on the bugtracker (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15724), I suggest implementing it and just giving people to option of using it, see what happens.