[WikiEN-l] Suggestion on how referencing system could be improved

[Andrew Gray]

2008/12/4 Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>:

> A popular approach? No offense, but isn't this just the way it should
> have been done all along? It is certainly the way many journals and
> books do it, and it is common sense.

Yes, yes it is. :-)

In practice - as far as I've seen it - most referencing puts the refs
directly into the text and then invokes them with <ref name="foo"/>
every time they're later used, the practice originally objected to;
this has a whole host of unfortunate side-effects, including the mess
of backlinks at the bottom when a single reference is called twenty
times, and the fact that it discourages specific citation by page
number.

When I say the notes-then-refs is "popular", what I mean is that I
seem to be seeing it more and more recently... anecdotally, I'd say
it's becoming more common to do this from the start rather than when
"formalising" the article for FA status. I've no idea how easily we
can quantify this guess, though.

(One day, I really need to go through all the articles I've written
and sort out their references...)

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk