Ray Saintonge wrote:
Wikimedia does not do a good job with footnotes.
Having to srcoll way
down to the bottom of the page to see a footnote can be very
inconvenient with a long text. It's often a good thing to be able to
see both the referring text and the footnote at the same time. Again,
this is something where having synchronized boxes would be very helpful.
I think we may also want to extend the concept of footnoes, given that
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).
-Mark