Anthony DiPierro wrote:
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 ...
Yes, that is extremely hairy. I'll try and come up with something more manageable and post it on the Meta project site for review.
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Perhaps. When I asked my own question about what the rest of us can do I was not interested in a lot of theoretical material about what library scientists put into card catalogues. I was considering the point of view of a normal Wikipedian (assuming such an animal exists) who is about to write an article and who already has adequate references that he is ready, willing and able to use.
Useability feedback is certainly helpful. And as I said before, people can help by thinking about the kind of features they would want out of such a system- what information should it be able to provide? What is the best way to present it? My proposal is really only based on my own experiences as an editor, so this sort of feedback will be extremely helpful.
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On 12/6/05, Jonathan Leybovich jleybov@yahoo.com wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
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 ...
Yes, that is extremely hairy. I'll try and come up with something more manageable and post it on the Meta project site for review.
Hmm, just throwing something out there, but what if this is all kept on a separate page? So you'd have the regular wikitext, and then you'd have a list of references, in the form (reference, cited text, article text). One problem with this is if the article text changes *at all* the reference would have to be updated. But *eventually* mechanisms could be designed to resolve this, once we get away from editing articles using raw ascii text.
As long as the article text in the reference matches the article text in the article (you could even ignore markup if you want), then you can tie the two back together to create those nice graphics. Plus, at least as the format of the reference itself gets more standardised, you can start to generate the ==References== section automatically (combining multiple references from the same source, standardising into whatever format, optionally disincluding certain references).
Anyway, I just came up with this now, so I haven't completely thought it through, but I figured it's something to throw out there.
Anthony
On Wed, 7 Dec 2005, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 12/6/05, Jonathan Leybovich jleybov@yahoo.com wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
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'''
No, this isn't the kind of markup you want to see when you 'edit this page', though you could make it editable-by-hand at some deep level.
Yes, there should be a separate references page.
One piece of markup you *do* want to see in the regular page-editing is an auto-citation generator that will subst: in the default cite for a given ISBN or other identifier... just to save time.
Yes, having auto-generated References and Footnotes sections should be possible... though you would also want a manually-edited subsection of References.
Anthony writes:
Hmm, just throwing something out there, but what if this is all kept on a separate page? So you'd have the regular wikitext, and then you'd have a list of references, in the form (reference, cited text, article text). One problem with this is if the article text changes
Definitely. Bear in mind that most references are best-done in the form of footnotes, floating at the end of a sentence, and only very loosely assigned to a specific block of text (the default chunk would be the preceding sentence, perhaps with simple markup that identifies the preceding N sentences or the entire paragraph). So these can be in the wikitext in the form of a footnote; both linking to a short-cite at the end of a page, and to a full-cite (including perhaps the entire sentence-text when the cite was first inserted? with some semi-automated way to update that text?) on its References: page.
The References: page should just be a versioned wiki-page like any other, but in a specific format that allows for auto-additions and auto-updates when the article itself is changed in certain ways.
*at all* the reference would have to be updated. But *eventually* mechanisms could be designed to resolve this, once we get away from editing articles using raw ascii text.
SJ
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