On 8/14/06, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikitech(a)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.
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