I believe sometime we will go in this direction. But at the moment this would mean that the edit would be more complicated. The problem is if I edit a section, I put in <ref id="smith" />. But at the same time I cannot add <reference id="smith">...</reference> into the References and Notes section. I must do that either in two separate edits or I must edit the article as a whole. Also here we need a new technical solution.
Ting
Thomas Larsen wrote:
Hi all,
The current <ref>...</ref>...<references/> system produces nice references, but it is flawed--all the text contained in a given reference appears in the text that the reference is linked from. For example:
It was a sunny day on Wednesday<ref>David Smith. ''History of Wednesdays.'' History Magazine, 2019.</ref>. The next day, Thursday, was cloudy.
== References and notes ==
<references/>
(That's a very simple example, too. References start to become a lot larger once they start to include other information and/or are produced via a template.)
Once way I could conceive of correcting the problem is to have a reference tag that provides only a _link_ to the note via a label and another type of reference tag that actually _defines_ and _displays_ the note. For example:
It was a sunny day on Wednesday<ref id="smith"/>. The next day, Thursday, was cloudy.
== References and notes ==
<reference id="smith">David Smith. ''History of Wednesdays.'' History Magazine, 2019.</reference>
This makes the raw wikitext easier to read, since the text of the actual reference is in the _references_ section instead of in the page's primary content.
I think this could work ...
--Thomas Larsen
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