[Foundation-l] Jihad in Defense of Objectivity (Was: Enforcing WP:CITE)

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 12/6/05, Jonathan Leybovich <jleybov at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> > Introducing detailed citation features would require
> either abanoning
> > that simplicity or abandoning the concept of writing
> the wikitext
> > directly.  Both of these would be significantly
> detrimental to the
> > Wikipedia project in the short term.
>
> The mark-up would look something like:
>
> [[cite:ISBN:123456789:p. 10|"cited
> text"|"paraphrase/article text"]]
>
> To me that doesn't seem more complicated than most
> other basic wiki mark-up.
>
Maybe complicated isn't what I'm looking for.  But consider the
following and whether or not you'd enjoy editing it by hand:

'''Roy [[cite:ISBN:123456789:p. 7|"Roy Orbison's middle name is
Kelton"|"Kelton"]] Orbison''' ([[cite:ISBN:123456789:p.9|"He was born
in Foo, Bar on April 23 of 1936"|"[[April 23]], [[1936]]"]] &ndash;
[[cite:ISBN:123456789:p.11|"He died that same year, on the 6th of
December"|"[[December 6]], [[1988]]"]]),
[[cite:ISBN:123456789:p.13|"They called him "The Big O""|"nicknamed
"The Big O""]], was ...

Maybe I'm misunderstanding how these cites would be used, because that
was hell; it was even worse than I had thought before going through
the actual exercise.

I don't think wiki markup is the proper solution for this.  And that
means significant redesign.  Feel free to prove me wrong here, though,
and show us a working model which is just as easy to edit as
Wikipedia.

I think it's a great idea, I just think it's years ahead of its time
(and that assumes it's designed independently of Wikimedia, cramming
it through Wikimedia development processes would only hinder it).

Anthony