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

[phoebe ayers]

On Dec 12, 2007 4:24 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: River Tarnell <river at wikimedia.org>
> Date: 12 Dec 2007 11:52
> Subject: [Mediawiki-l] that awful <ref> syntax
> To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list
> <mediawiki-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>
>
> 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?
>
> for example, references could be named and referred to with [name], and
> then defined at the end of each paragraph:
>
> Wikipedia[wikip] is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation[wmf].
> [wikip] http://en.wikipedia.org/
> [wmf] http://wikimediafoundation.org/
>
> now, it's still easy to see and change the references, but you can
> actually see the article text as well.
>
> for an example from a real Wikipedia article, see
> <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Kate/ref>.
>
> of course this would require some changes to the core parser to do
> properly, but i think the feature is useful enough to be worth it.
>
> comments?
>
>         - river.

I like this a lot. I don't like having the full ref in the actual text
-- makes it too easy to make mistakes with the tags and makes the
source hard to read.

The only thing I wonder about in your example is the syntax for
identifying ref names -- I don't think using square brackets is ideal,
because the refs blend in with the rest of the text. I'd ideally want
something that set the ref names off in the text, the way the <ref>
tag does -- "hey look the content in between these tags is a
reference" -- but didn't require typing the whole reference in the
actual text.
Maybe <Blatt> <Green> <Asimov> or even <ref> Blatt</ref> <ref>
Green</ref> <ref>Asimov</ref>, which would then lead to <Blatt> Blatt,
Bill, "A Big Book of Dogs", London 1881 etc. etc. in the actual
references section. Same amount of typing as the current
implementation, and much cleaner to read in the text.

While we're at it, I've been asked many times if there's a way to do
an "ibid" style citation to an existing reference but citing different
page numbers or volumes, either retyping the whole ref or having to
add references like "Green, p. 23." It would be great to have
something where you could add a page # parameter to the ref tag in
order to cite exact references throughout the text -- e.g. <ref
name="Green" page="23"> -- and in references, the full Green reference
would show up with "p. 23" attached to the end. Does this already
exist and I just don't know about it?

-- phoebe