[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

[wiki-list at phizz.demon.co.uk]

On 05/10/2010 15:23, Liam Wyatt wrote:
> On 5 October 2010 13:39,<WJhonson at aol.com>  wrote:
>
>> In a message dated 10/5/2010 6:01:14 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
>> jayen466 at yahoo.com writes:
>>
>>
>>> You're right there. It's a bloody headache finding the words of the
>>> article in amongst all the citation templates when you're trying to edit.
>>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> That however really isn't a fault that can be laid at the feet of the
>> citation method (inline), but rather perhaps at the feet of the editor
>> program.
>>
>> It has been discussed before, that it might be helpful should we have a way
>> to splice apart the content from the format.  Vanilla HTML does not do that
>> at all, but other competing editors can and do.  Some steps in that
>> direction have been taken already with the newer upgrade, but not all, in
>> particular the templates.  Perhaps this is an opportunity.
>>
>> W.
>>
>
> One of the things that the Usability team is working on is the idea of
> "template folding" - as discussed here:
> http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/04/template-folding/ Indeed, I suspect
> that one of the main reasons for moving to the iFrame editing window system
> with the Vector skin was to enable this kind of thing. (unfortunately the
> test environment for this feature that is referred to in the blogpost is
> currently broken).
>

What is the main point of wikipedia to edit it, or to read it? Because 
the readability of something like the Bulger article is very low. Making 
it easier to edit with peppered refs will probably mean that more refs 
get added making it less readable.

NOTE: when reading an article or a book one rarely looks at the 
references. They are, in the main, a distraction.