Delirium-
we have the technology to do so. In print, a footnote
follows the
section it's footnoting, and what exactly preceding portion to refers to
is not actually specified. This makes it difficult for
densely-footnoted texts to figure out what is going on. Since this is
the intarweb, we can annotate *regions* of text, even overlapping
regions. This would be useful in Wikipedia proper as well, as you could
annotate a particular section as "this is phrased this way because of
the following issue" and be exactly clear what you're referring to.
I *seem* to recall someone already proposed something
like this, and
even had a page at meta about it, but I can't find it (I suppose I could
be imagining things).
Nope, I have been suggesting this on the mailing lists a few times, and
there's a WikiProject on en: which collects some ideas on the matter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check
My current plan is to specify a peer review markup language (PRML), which
will of course be a subset of our wiki syntax, but which should be
flexible enough to be used in other contexts as well. The primary function
of the PRML would be to tag individual factual claims, and to highlight
them if they presently lack a citation.
My current favored syntax for the basic fact mark-up / citation is
1) Claim without citation
__The Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo Da Vinci. ??
2) Claim with citation
__The Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo Da Vinci.
[[Source:The Mona Lisa, 1984, p. 84]]
__
starts a factual claim
??
marks a factual claim as dubious
[[Source: Xyz]] or [
http://www.xyz.com]
generates an auto-numbered footnote or margin note (rendering could
depend on user preferences or CSS)
Similar to red links, unsourced claims could be (faintly) highlighted in
the rendered page, as an encouragement to add citations.
The reason I am not moving this forward more quickly is that I would like
it to be properly integrated into the MediaWiki 2.0 framework. In
particular, the [[Source:Xyz]] should really refer to a Wikidata
structure, so we can start managing our collection of references properly,
for the benefit of easy and consistent citation throughout Wikimedia. The
PRML will also allow more complex statements, as not everything can be
atomized like the above examples.
Regards,
Erik