[Foundation-l] Fact-markup (was: Wiki translations of Greek and Roman texts)

[Erik Moeller]

Delirium-
> we have the technology to do so.  In print, a footnote follows the
> section it's footnoting, and what exactly preceding portion to refers to
> is not actually specified.  This makes it difficult for
> densely-footnoted texts to figure out what is going on.  Since this is
> the intarweb, we can annotate *regions* of text, even overlapping
> regions.  This would be useful in Wikipedia proper as well, as you could
> annotate a particular section as "this is phrased this way because of
> the following issue" and be exactly clear what you're referring to.

> I *seem* to recall someone already proposed something like this, and
> even had a page at meta about it, but I can't find it (I suppose I could
> be imagining things).

Nope, I have been suggesting this on the mailing lists a few times, and  
there's a WikiProject on en: which collects some ideas on the matter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check

My current plan is to specify a peer review markup language (PRML), which  
will of course be a subset of our wiki syntax, but which should be  
flexible enough to be used in other contexts as well. The primary function  
of the PRML would be to tag individual factual claims, and to highlight  
them if they presently lack a citation.

My current favored syntax for the basic fact mark-up / citation is

   1) Claim without citation
   __The Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo Da Vinci. ??

   2) Claim with citation
   __The Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo Da Vinci.
     [[Source:The Mona Lisa, 1984, p. 84]]

   __
     starts a factual claim

   ??
     marks a factual claim as dubious

   [[Source: Xyz]] or [http://www.xyz.com]
     generates an auto-numbered footnote or margin note (rendering could
     depend on user preferences or CSS)

Similar to red links, unsourced claims could be (faintly) highlighted in  
the rendered page, as an encouragement to add citations.

The reason I am not moving this forward more quickly is that I would like  
it to be properly integrated into the MediaWiki 2.0 framework. In  
particular, the [[Source:Xyz]] should really refer to a Wikidata  
structure, so we can start managing our collection of references properly,  
for the benefit of easy and consistent citation throughout Wikimedia. The  
PRML will also allow more complex statements, as not everything can be  
atomized like the above examples.

Regards,

Erik