[WikiEN-l] Preloading template in new articles

[Steve Bennett]

On 1/25/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1) The referencing system is non-intuitive, and a first-time editor
> can't use it. I still don't know how the fuck to use it, and have
> always found it to have a terrible interface from a reader's
> standpoint as well. And for good measure, I just read [[WP:CITE]],
> which is a godawful instruction manual.

This is mainly caused by our unwillingness to totally and utterly
abandon every superseded citation/reference system.

All you need to know is:

--
Here is my fact.<ref>Here is my source<ref>

==References==
<references />
--

Really. Just memorise that.


> 2) A casual editor who comes upon a mistake or a redlink is going to
> fix it from their personal knowledge, not references. This is a
> larger problem I've observed before - our demand for references
> fundamentally runs counter to the idea of "you can edit this page
> right now" in practice. We have to get realistic about references
> before we can get serious about them.

Yay. Someone agrees that we have to get realistic.

Steve