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

[Aude]

On Dec 12, 2007 8:39 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:

> > The other user helping with this article is an academic expert.  So I
> wanted
> > to make the references simple as could be and just did them like this
> > <ref>Rotter (1954)</ref> or like this <ref>Millon (2004), p. 353</ref>
>  The
> > list of books and websites is at the bottom of the page. With websites
> as
> > links, this does not work an obviously simple way, though.
>
> With that you have to follow the footnote, read the short form of the
> reference and then manually find the long form. With only a few
> references, it's not too bad, but that system certainly doesn't scale
> to pages with dozens of references.
>
>
Started doing it that way here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

There are 48 references, so far.  I will use the short format like this,
when the reference is cited repeatedly in the article.  If it cited just
once, then I will write out the full reference inside the tag.  Or put the
web citation in the tag.  Not ideal but it works.  I'm certainly open to
trying other methods of handling references.

Maybe it would be worthwhile for us to do usability testing on different
referencing methods.  Some usability testing was done on the German
Wikipedia, a few years ago.  This would allow us to test the interface with
general people, rather than experienced Wikipedians.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability

-Aude