[WikiEN-l] <Ref> tags s__k

[Steve Bennett]

On 12/10/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> It isn't garbage formatting. It is a template designed to make
> reference more standard and less work and it manages both for those
> who learn how to use it. For the rest of us there is long hand.

The benefit of storing citations in a semantically marked up format
(such as the cite templates) should be self-evident. The fact that
this is difficult to achieve at the present without producing
unreadable wikitext is a problem - but it doesn't mean we should
abandon the goal of maintaning references at a high level.

The references: namespace idea is certainly attractive, but would need
more advanced searching capabilities than mediawiki has at present,
both to find existing references, as well as to assure yourself they
don't exist if you can't find them. Definitely worth exploring this
idea further...

Also, if the major problem with separating the reference to a
reference from its definition is broken references, then maybe some
more technical solutions would help. Warnings to the user as soon as
they break stuff, that type of thing.

Steve