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

[Ray Saintonge]

Steven Walling wrote:
> Um, where else would you put ref syntax and material if not in the edit box?
> The other, secret edit box?  If the editing system is not WSIWG, then people
> should be prepared for plenty of syntax that doesn't show up when you hit
> save. Besides, <ref> syntax doesn't consume that much space if you use it
> correctly and implement <ref name> usage. The full text of a reference
> should only show up once.
You're expecting a lot from people.  We want new editors without putting 
them through a lot of hoops about the correct way to add references.  
One of the features that got Wikipedia to where it is was the ease of 
editing after learning very few MediaWiki syntax instructions.

A lot of people with clear expertise in their specialty, and with an 
understanding of the importance of references are too easily deterred by 
the technical presentation of the references.  They did not learn their 
craft in a world where picayune errors mattered so much.  If their work 
contained a minor typo they relied on the common sense of the reader to 
read around it.  Now if they see a minor typo, they can see that in 
theory it should be easy to fix.  If they go to the edit page, and the 
error is in the middle of plain text they will correct it without fuss.  
If the error is buried in technical syntax they'll give up trying to 
find it.  For example if someone wants to make a simple correction to 
punctuation that comes after a long series of reference tags it could be 
difficult to find.  The problem is even worse if the error is somewhere 
in a nested series of transcluded templates.

Brilliant as some of the technical solutions may be, they leave a lot of 
less brilliant people in the dust.  An algorithm or style sheet gives 
the impression that you only need to plug in key values in 
pre-determined places to make a neat professional-looking page fall into 
place, but that simplistic attitude does not make things any easier for 
the people who did not have a hand in developing the technique.  Even a 
small number of parameters in a template can be a problem, as can 
remembering what special template needs to be used at a given place.

Going back to basics can be a wonderful sanity check.

Ec