On 8/11/06, Ligulem <ligulem(a)pobox.com> wrote: Probably, but infoboxes are a) much more common, and b) almost invariably at the very top of articles, making them the first thing most users see. *Anything* that isn't very similar to what's displayed is scary to technophobes. The technically-inclined can comfortably look at it and say "Hmm, it must somehow generate the box there, or something", then ignore it, but someone like my mother would become instantly uncomfortable and worried that they might break something if they tried to edit. She wouldn't try to decipher what it actually meant, if all she was thinking of doing was correcting a date or something; she wouldn't want to put in the effort.

Wouldn't that be a great use for subpage-templates? Have the Infobox at Paris/infobox and just include it as a template.

On 8/11/06, Ligulem <ligulem(a)pobox.com> wrote: Ahh the power of discussion to improve the clarity of our statements... I think tables are just as bad as infoboxes, okay fine.. a concession: they are indeed worse. The point I was trying to make was more along the lines of "when someone wants to edit the intro and they get something which is not the intro it leads to confusion".

Steve Bennett wrote: I think the absolute worst part of this is references. Firstly, if you spot a typo in a reference, the instinct is to click the "edit" link for the References section. But then all you see is: == References == <references/> The other thing is that if you spot a typo in the middle of a paragraph which has inline references in every sentence, it is *extremely* hard to find that typo because all the inline references distract. You look somewhere and you don't even know if you're looking at the paragraph or the inside of a <ref> tag. If the person designing the references syntax had thought about this a bit more, these severe problems should have been apparent to them. A much more sensible thing would be to use [1], [2] etc. in the text, and define the references in the place where they are actually displayed -- the References section. (Duh.) Timwi

Steve Bennett wrote: Why? I can't think why. Of course, the software would have to automatically renumber them if references get deleted or moved around. That's another possibility, of course -- although I would still contend that something like [1], or even if it needs to be [ref:1], is much better (easier to read, easier to ignore, easier to type, easier to type without mistakes) than <ref name="ref1"/>. Timwi

On 8/15/06, Timwi &lt;timwi(a)gmx.net&gt; wrote: Can you elaborate on that? What exactly is your proposal, because anything that involves typing in numbers manually sounds like a terrible idea, at first glance. Still a problem if you have to add the references to a references section (bad if you're doing section editing). Steve

Hi Tim, Ok that's the bit I hadn't picked up on - automatic re-numbering. A curious idea, combining static and dynamic numbering. Your ideas have merit. I was stuck on the idea of dynamic numbering. Inserting a new footnote 2 and having to manually renumber the others...you know... Sounds pretty good. Steve

On 8/14/06, Timwi &lt;timwi(a)gmx.net&gt; wrote: If you had thought about this a bit more, the severe problems with your suggestions should be apparent to you. :) More precisely, neither you nor Avar probably saw all the arguments for each side before you made your respective statements/commits. (When Avar did it, the arguments against hadn't been *developed*, due to lack of experience.) 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. 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.

On 8/14/06, Simetrical &lt;Simetrical+wikitech(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: 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