[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Mediawiki-l] that awful <ref> syntax

[Ray Saintonge]

Angela wrote:
> On Dec 12, 2007 10:52 PM, River Tarnell <river at wikimedia.org> 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?
>>     
> I think this, along with {{fact}} and other tags, should be moved out
> of the edit box completely. People should be able to add meta data,
> interlanguage links, references, trust values, feature stars, AfD
> notices, stable version flags, and whatever else they like in a
> separate overlay which readers and editors can turn on and off and can
> edit in a separate place.
I agree, though I think that a fact tag, or something like it, that is 
primarily there to warn the reader that there may be something 
problematical about the stated fact is worthwhile.  In a sense it is 
somewhat of a disclaimer for those inclined to see everything as gospel 
truth.  It should not be there as a red flag that signals obsessive 
bulls to charge.  We would like it if people found substantiation, but 
no-one should be under any obligation to fix them all, or to remove the 
material that is tagged.

The other caution that I would make is not to move all this to the 
article's talk page.  Adding various templates to talk pages has 
detracted from their original purpose.  At one time if the discussion 
link was in blue I could go there with reasonable confidence that there 
was something there to be discussed, or that a potential POV problem was 
being considered.  Now when most of these are filled with some kind of 
meta-data templates and nothing else I am less inclined to look at 
them.  If others too are less inclined to look at them it limits an 
important avenue for finding a compromise solution to difficult content 
problems.

Ec