The German Technical Wishes team is planning to implement a feature we're calling "book referencing", which supports one level of nested references. This makes it possible to reference the same book several times in an article, pointing to various pages, without repeating the full citation.
A more complete description of the feature and a screenshot is available below, please feel free to comment in Phabricator or on this thread. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T234030
There has already been some community discussion, but since we're proposing a small change to wikitext (the <ref> tag will accept a new attribute), I thought it would be appropriate to wait for a round of technical feedback before we begin coding.
Regards, Adam
-- Adam Wight - Developer - Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. - https://wikimedia.de
Sounds like a great idea. It's sad that dealing with references on Wikipedia is so complicated and requires knowing at least a dozen templates and things like hash linking if you want to do it right (or edit a featured article without breaking the references). Any efforts to simplify this with Wikitext are welcome. While we're at it, can we add a separate <note> tag, so that we can add footnotes with their own references (rather than having to resort to templates)? See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T7265 (originally requested in 2006!).
On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 9:29 AM Adam Wight adam.wight@wikimedia.de wrote:
The German Technical Wishes team is planning to implement a feature we're calling "book referencing", which supports one level of nested references. This makes it possible to reference the same book several times in an article, pointing to various pages, without repeating the full citation.
A more complete description of the feature and a screenshot is available below, please feel free to comment in Phabricator or on this thread. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T234030
There has already been some community discussion, but since we're proposing a small change to wikitext (the <ref> tag will accept a new attribute), I thought it would be appropriate to wait for a round of technical feedback before we begin coding.
Regards, Adam
-- Adam Wight - Developer - Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. - https://wikimedia.de _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 11:56 AM Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
While we're at it, can we add a separate <note> tag, so that we can add footnotes with their own references (rather than having to resort to templates)? See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T7265 (originally requested in 2006!).
The bug you linked there was correctly marked as a duplicate of T8271. You seem to have gotten it confused with T3310 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T3310, which is a separate issue with the parser in general.
Also there's no actual need for templates for the current workaround, you can use {{#tag:ref}} directly to nest them.
Thanks for the feedback, Brad. To clarify, I know you can use {{#tag:ref}} instead of <ref> as a workaround, but that's a terrible solution and undocumented https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cite to boot. T3310 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T3310 (allowing nested tags) has been batted around for years (as the bug number attests) but doesn't seem to have any traction (although no one seems willing to decline it either). The bug I linked to, T7265 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T7265, seems like a relatively simple, straightforward solution to a common use case that still doesn't have a real solution: creating footnotes that have references. The fact that this solution has been rejected in favor of more complicated solutions that either will never happen (T3310 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T3310) or don't actually solve the problem (T8271 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T8271) is disappointing, IMO.
On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 12:17 PM Brad Jorsch (Anomie) bjorsch@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 11:56 AM Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
While we're at it, can we add a separate <note> tag, so that we can add footnotes with their own references (rather than
having
to resort to templates)? See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T7265 (originally requested in 2006!).
The bug you linked there was correctly marked as a duplicate of T8271. You seem to have gotten it confused with T3310 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T3310, which is a separate issue with the parser in general.
Also there's no actual need for templates for the current workaround, you can use {{#tag:ref}} directly to nest them.
-- Brad Jorsch (Anomie) Senior Software Engineer Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 5:05 PM Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
The bug I linked to, T7265 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T7265, seems like a relatively simple, straightforward solution to a common use case that still doesn't have a real solution: creating footnotes that have references.
Hi Ryan, thanks for bringing up this request. I see that the <note> tag (T7265) discussion goes back even further than the task, for example on the footnotes talk page [1], as early as 2005 [2]. Un-merging the task was a good call, maybe the next step would be to promote it during the next community wishlist survey, or elaborate enough that it would make a good mentorship project.
There might be some beneficial overlap from improvements to be made to the marker number sequence logic? We noticed that the VisualEditor module [3] and backend [4] each do their own numbering and neither code is open to extension.
-Adam
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_talk:Footnotes [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style_(footnotes)/Arc... [3] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/extensions/Cite/+/531900/ [4] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/extensions/Cite/+/530399/
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