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

[Ral315]

On Dec 12, 2007 7:55 AM, Angela <beesley at gmail.com> 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.
>
> Angela
>
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Theoretically, could references be placed on a subpage -- {{/ref}} -- and
references via ParserFunctions?  It might be a pain on the server end, and
I'm not sure if there'd be a limit on such, but I would think it could be a
fairly easy way to make the text much more readable.  The downside would be
that references would have to be on a completely separate page, of course,
but it could be a great workaround.

-- 
Sincerely,
Ral315
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ral315