On 8/14/06, Simetrical Simetrical+wikitech@gmail.com wrote:
Basically, the advantages of having just a reference name be in the text itself, and the text in the references section, are intuitiveness and less clutter. The advantages of having the full reference in the text are that it works with section editing, and the ref doesn't break invisibly if someone transplants the section or whatever without thinking to move the refs as well. Trust me, that's constant and horrible with the {{ref}} style: I've had to spend half an hour or more on more than one occasion digging through page histories to figure out where the references disappeared.
Trust me, from the POV of the person *adding* the references, genuine inline references are *extremely* attractive. It is *much* more pleasant to simply write and John Smith was born in 1953 <ref>http://some.web.site.info</ref> and died in 1923, than to have to mess around with choosing a reference name and add things in two different places - *especially* when you're doing section editing (because otherwise you have to make two separate edits, and the article is in an inconsistent state in the meantime). I basically never added footnotes at all until this new method came along, and now I add them regularly.
However, genuine inline references *suck* for the maintainer. They're a nightmare. There's actually a simple algorithm to find the source of a footnote: click the footnote, then click the first letter on that footnote line, then click edit - but it's not at all intuitive.
My suggestion is the only way I can think of making footnotes bearable for both creator and maintainer. Short of a separate "footnotes" editing box, that is (which I believe has been proposed before).
Steve
Jay is right that coloring the refs probably wouldn't be too hard with current wikitext. Ideally, WYSIWYG would handle refs in some special way so that editing them is fully intuitive and uncluttered. Something like being able to click the ref number to bring up a floating popup-y thing that you could edit, while also being able to click the ref in the references section and edit that directly, with the Javascript keeping them synced and secretly editing only the <ref> contents either way. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l