Thomas Corell wrote:
I see footnotes or end notes in paper-based publishing
and in an
academic context, but never seen a encyclopedia with end notes.
I'm pretty sure that I *have* seen encyclopedia entries with end
notes, but can't swear for sure.
Don't forget possible targets like publishing
Wikipedia in paper-based
form. Take a proper paper-based encyclopedia and try to imagine how bad
end-notes would look like.
This argument doesn't hold up, for the following reasons:
(1) The last I heard, there wasn't much chance that Wikipedia would
be published anytime soon in a paper-based form.
(2) Even if it *were* published in a paper-based form, it would be a
trivial task to write code that would strip out end notes if so
desired. Something like this would have to be done in any case for
Wiki links and external hyperlinks. (Underlined text in different
colors ALSO looks bad in a paper-based document, especially when
there's no way to click on them and go to the hyperlinked resource.)
(3) Actually, end note tags might make it *easier* to produce a
paper-based document. Right now, many articles contain embedded
hyperlinks that point to URLs outside of Wikipedia. Exporting those
articles for use in a paper document would require someone to make a
decision about what to do with those embedded hyperlinks. Do you just
ignore them? Do you put them in parentheses in the middle of the
article, where they would break up the text and make everything ugly?
Do you stick all the embedded hyperlinks at the bottom of the
article, as "pseudo end notes"? End note markup tags would give the
*authors* of articles a way of indicating which of these choices they
prefer, rather than leaving it up to some deterministic algorithm.
--
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Editor, PR Watch (
www.prwatch.org)
| Author of books including:
| Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
| Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
| Mad Cow USA
| Trust Us, We're Experts
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