[Mediawiki-l] that awful <ref> syntax

[Jim Hu]

Using the ProcessCite.php extension on EcoliWiki, we have two ways to  
make these more compact:

1. for sources with identifiers, like PubMed IDs, we just use <ref  
name='PMID:number' />
2. for others that are reused, we define a page in the wiki to hold  
the reference text and use <ref name='LIB:identifier />

on the Reference Library page, the references are arranged as
identifier 1|reference text 1
identifier 3|reference text 2
identifier 4|reference text 3
identifier 5|reference text 4
etc.

identifiers can be anything.  For our purposes, the fact that 90%+  
(guessing) of our refs are PMIDs makes this practical (we think). This  
probably won't work for Wikipedia, but might work for others.

Jim

On Dec 12, 2007, at 5:52 AM, 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?
>
> 	- river.
>
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=====================================
Jim Hu
Associate Professor
Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics
2128 TAMU
Texas A&M Univ.
College Station, TX 77843-2128
979-862-4054