[WikiEN-l] New policy proposal

[Neil Harris]

After literally minutes of further thought, and reading the other 
contributions to this thread, I can see that there are two things needed:
* a syntax for footnotes within article text
* a way of gathering them at the end of the article, and inserting links 
within the article text to the footnote.

It seems that these are two different functions. The first would be done 
best by using the template syntax. The second would be best done using 
an extension tag, to allow the footnotes to be gathered together as a 
list under a heading (and to manufacture that heading if it is not 
present in the article), and generating the links within the HTML 
structure. (All of this assumes that template expansion is done before 
page-rendering).

So, you could have nice templates like 
{{book-ref|author=...|publisher=...|etc...}}, {{journal-ref}} and so on, 
taking named arguments, which are
* self-explanatory
* easy to understand
* easy to customise
* use existing friendly inline syntax
and a lower-level <reference subheading="..."> ... </reference> syntax 
which can be used within the templates themselves that invokes a 
Wikipedia extension mechanism. Thus, the implementation (and low-level 
syntax for invoking that mechanism) is nicely decoupled from the 
user-visible syntax.

We could probably also do {{extlink}} in the same way, to mop up the 
remaining in-line external links, and put them under the "External 
links" subheading.

-- Neil