[Mediawiki-l] that awful <ref> syntax

[Tim Starling]

River Tarnell wrote:
> 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?

If you use something a bit more distinctive than single pairs of square 
brackets, you could use actual English in the reference names without fear 
of clashes, instead of abbreviations like "wikip" and "wmf". For example, 
double-parentheses. Then you could make something that looks very much 
like Harvard-style referencing. ((Wikipedia, 2007))

As for the reference list syntax, I've previously suggested co-opting the 
definition list syntax, making any definition list under a heading called 
"references", or one of its aliases, into a reference list.

-- Tim Starling


== References ==
; Wikipedia, 2007 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_referencing