On 9/17/07, Maury Markowitz maury.markowitz@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/17/07, Jim Hu jimhu@tamu.edu wrote:
I'm a bit confused. Are cite and ref tags two different things? I recognize ref tags from the Cite.php extension.
This is part of the confusion. There are three different things being discussed, but editors have used the terminology interchangeably, greatly confusing matters.
"FOOTNOTE": a stylistic solution to inserting small amounts of text that would otherwise break up the flow of a statement. Other solutions include the sidebar, callouts, and pop-up text. In the case of the wiki, we don't really have anything that represents these directly.
"REFERENCE": any link to another work. in the case of the wiki, we expect these to be the set of resources that are used to build the article.
"CITATION": a somewhat formal system for including a reference to another work, typically a journal or similar. In the case of the wiki, these
Now why do I complain they are confused? Well for one, go visit the wiki page on footnotes. Note that the entire article is about references! And where is the REF tag defined? In CITE.PHP!
Maury
The terminology stuff is only irritating; it might be worth coding to fix it, might not.
Footnotes... stylistically, many forms of reference work never include any. Some do. Usage is completely inconsistent field to field. We have some alternative notation methods, but can probably do without them.
That said; one could cheat and duplicate the <ref> system with new keywords <footnote> and <footnotes>, or generalize cite.php a bit and have it auto-handle both types (say, <ref name="foobar" type=footnote>In most Elven languages, the pluperfect form is used only in drinking songs and sagas</ref>, and have the <references/> generate subsections for both "references" and "footnotes" if present. These would both be easy hacks.