David Gerard wrote:
On 17/09/2007, Michael Daly michaeldaly@kayakwiki.org wrote:
The only thing I would like is to have in addition is a central pool of references. [...]
If someone can write code for this, English Wikipedia would dive upon it with great glee.
I mean, I love the <ref> and {{cite}} tags. They're just the right thing for showing your working when you're trying to write a halfway robust referenced article.
For short and medium length articles with less than 10 footnotes, I personally think that it works fine to put the {{cite book|...}} inside the <ref> tags. I guess this is how they were intended when they were introduced.
For longer articles, it works better to put the {{cite book|...}} under a ==Literature== heading and then to just use a very brief <ref>Johnson (2007), pp. 207-208</ref> in combination with the compact {{reflist|3}} (that renders <references/> in 3 columns.
Some long articles with 50+ footnotes repeat the identical call to {{cite book|...}} inside <ref> tags even though they cite the same work in ten different places. I've stumbled across such cases when I was looking for ISBNs with bad checksums in the Swedish, Finnish and Lithuanian Wikipedia. This means the bad ISBN needs to be corrected in several places inside the same article. That is quite far from optimal.
A "central pool" of (the most commonly used) references is something that can be extracted from existing database dumps. It doesn't have to be established by introducing new wiki syntax. If this pool then goes into Wikicat (the project suggested on meta long ago) or a new ref: namespace or an external project such as the new demo.openlibrary.org, is a matter of what is the best implementation. I personally think that a central pool (how central? Should it be common to all languages of Wikipedia, almost like the Wikimedia Commons?) is a subproject too big to be implemented inside Wikipedia. For example, in some cases this pool needs to link to works digitized in Wikisource or in external digitization projects. And at least Wikiquote and Wikinews should benefit from using the same "central pool" as Wikipedia. And if "Wikicat" is set up as a new, separate project, the people who should be involved there are already considering the global need (inside and outside of Wikimedia Foundation projects) for new bibliographic resources. My current guess is that the demo.openlibrary.org, which runs under the Open Content Alliance and/or Internet Archive, would be the best place for this.