[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:
> >
> >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]]"]] –
> >[[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 ...
>
> Yes, that is extremely hairy.  I'll try and come up
> with something more manageable and post it on the Meta
> project site for review.

Hmm, just throwing something out there, but what if this is all kept
on a separate page?  So you'd have the regular wikitext, and then
you'd have a list of references, in the form (reference, cited text,
article text).  One problem with this is if the article text changes
*at all* the reference would have to be updated.  But *eventually*
mechanisms could be designed to resolve this, once we get away from
editing articles using raw ascii text.

As long as the article text in the reference matches the article text
in the article (you could even ignore markup if you want), then you
can tie the two back together to create those nice graphics.  Plus, at
least as the format of the reference itself gets more standardised,
you can start to generate the ==References== section automatically
(combining multiple references from the same source, standardising
into whatever format, optionally disincluding certain references).

Anyway, I just came up with this now, so I haven't completely thought
it through, but I figured it's something to throw out there.

Anthony