[WikiEN-l] Citationgate: expertise and verifiability

[Jake Waskett]

On Fri, 2006-09-29 at 19:37 -0600, Bryan Derksen wrote:
> Phil Sandifer wrote:
> > On Sep 29, 2006, at 3:26 PM, Jake Waskett wrote:
> > 
> >> On Fri, 2006-09-29 at 14:15 -0400, Robth wrote:
> >>> The problem is to balance the desire for this kind of verifiability
> >>> with the desire not to clutter up the article excessively.
> >> What's wrong with a technical solution? Write the article with lots of
> >> inline references, but make it a user preference whether or not to  
> >> show
> >> them.
> > 
> > Go write the code.
> 
> You're being needlessly brusque, and also misleading. Do you mean that
> only people who have the time and ability to actually do Wikimedia
> programming get to decide what Wikipedia looks like and how it
> functions? If I were to sit down and write the code to add a preference
> allowing users to add blink tags to all wikilinks, that'd go in without
> any discussion by non-coders? I wouldn't think so. Programmers with any
> sense of professionalism should pay at least a little attention to what
> the users of their software say about it.
> 
> That all said, I just checked the source HTML and see that references
> have 'class="reference"' in the <sup> tags. I suspect a very simple
> stylesheet change is all that's needed, not something that would trouble
> programmers.

That would be great, if it worked, but as others have pointed out, it
might not be achievable.

Personally, I'm not familiar with the Wiki code, and I don't intend to
dive in and break it, but my suggestion needn't be too difficult to
implement. I'd be grateful if someone would forward this to the
appropriate list where developers can read it.

1. Add a 'reference_level' field to the users table.
2. When generating a page, read this field at the same time as
performing the new messages check. If the user is not logged in, set a
sensible default.
3. When generating the HTML for a <ref>, check that the reference_level
permits it. A straightforward implementation would have level 0 = no
refs, 1 = show refs. For extra credit, allow 'important' references to
be specified, and allow the levels: 0 = none, 1 = important only, 2 =
all refs.
4. Add appropriate user preferences.

Jake