[Foundation-l] Can anyone really edit Wikipedia?

[phoebe ayers]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 9:14 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/9/25 geni <geniice at gmail.com>:
>> 2008/9/25 phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com>:
>>> I was going to say as well, what happened to that proposal to define
>>> references at the bottom of the article instead of inline? And then
>>> Pathos posted a nice implementation above. It does make a whole lot
>>> more sense from both a reader and an editor's point of view to have
>>> reference metadata in a single place, away from the wikitext. Defining
>>> refs with a "refname" in the text doesn't seem too bad... other than
>>> the mess of trying to get a different stylistic system going, is there
>>> some reason we don't do this?
>>>
>>> -- phoebe
>>>
>>
>> Basically it results in a high maintenance cost with a fairly high
>> chance of errors. It means you have to keep the article text and the
>> end section in sync rather than just keeping all the stuff in one
>> place.
>
> If a reference is used more than once, it's not all in one place
> anyway. It actually solves the issue of someone accidentally deleting
> the text for the ref not realising it is used elsewhere. For refs only
> used once, it makes maintenance of the ref a little harder, but
> maintenance of the rest of the article much easier.

And arguably it would make it easier, not harder, if you had several
similar refs, to correct any errors in all of your references at once,
see irregularities, etc.

-- phoebe