To all Wikimedia developers (and any other interested parties): Alterego and I, soren9580, are working on creating a new footnotes feature for Wikipedia, because we believe in the power of footnotes and want to make it easier for writers to cite their sources in articles and include relevant material in an easily readable format. We've developed some examples for people to take a look at. First, the description of what we are trying to do is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnote2 A good example site using the current footnote implementation we have developed, combined with a bibliography, is available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator

Our goal is to develop an inline, dynamic footnoting system. Basically, we want the ability to do footnotes the same way we currently do Tables of Contents, by putting the text for the footnote right in with the text it refers to, and having mediawiki autogenerate the footnotes section at the bottom of the page. Sample code might look something like this. {{F|Auto-generated inline footnotes allow the user to write footnotes as he or she is writing his or her article. The user can simply spell out the text of the footnote as so, and allow the software to place it where it needs to go. For more details see The Skeptic's Dictionary (2004). Myers-Briggs Type indicator. Retrieved December 20, 2004.}}

This tag would, with the proper coding, automatically create a footnotes section at the bottom of the page wherever the writer of the article put the tag {{Footnotes}}.

As of right now, our implementation uses two templates, an {{f1}} template and an {{f1b}} template (with the numbers changed for each footnote). The f1 is put at the site of the footnote, and the f1b is put in the footnotes list with the text of the footnote. each creates a link which links back to the other one, so the reader can quickly skip down to the footnote he wants, and skip back up to where he was reading. It works and is easy to use, but is not as fluid as inline footnoting, and still requires the writer to make sure everything is numbered properly, and to renumber footnotes when adding them in the middle of the document. There is a better way to do this, we believe we have a good idea for how to go about implementing it.

Please give us feedback (alterego is also subscribed to this list so he'll see what you post here in response), and if any developers are interested in writing this feature into the next version, please let us know. Thanks!

-Chris Nicholson