[Mediawiki-l] that awful <ref> syntax

[River Tarnell]

so, the first thing i notice when editing Wikipedia articles these days
is that they're full of <ref> tags that make it nearly impossible to
find the actual text of the article.  the problem seems to be that the
entire reference is inline in the text.  while this is useful for
locality of editing, wouldn't it be nice if it would be close to the
text, but not inline?

for example, references could be named and referred to with [name], and
then defined at the end of each paragraph:

Wikipedia[wikip] is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation[wmf].
[wikip] http://en.wikipedia.org/
[wmf] http://wikimediafoundation.org/

now, it's still easy to see and change the references, but you can
actually see the article text as well.

for an example from a real Wikipedia article, see
<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Kate/ref>.

of course this would require some changes to the core parser to do
properly, but i think the feature is useful enough to be worth it.

comments?

	- river.

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