[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Article metadata separation from main wikitext

[Steve Bennett]

On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 11:31 PM, Surreptitiousness
<surreptitious.wikipedian at googlemail.com> wrote:
> [[Wikipedia:Footnote3]] explains it all.  I can't work out the
> difference, except maybe it took Dragons flight a lot of work to give us
> what we already had?

Interesting. I'm not sure why we tolerate so many incompatible
systems. Let's just render them all obsolete except the one true one.

I do notice this crucial limitation in the {{ref}} system:

"The {{note}}'s in the Notes section must occur in the same order as
the corresponding {{ref}}'s in the main text. This is an important
issue to consider when adding more footnotes later."

In other words, this{{ref|foo}} doesn't{{ref|bar}} work:
# {{note|bar}} A bar
# {{note|foo}} A foo


The {{ref}}/{{note}} system in general looks like a hack. You have to
manually create the bullet points and carefully preserve order. And
trying to create multiple references to the same footnote looks like a
major pain in the arse. We should kill this. It's particularly
confusing that <ref> and {{r}} refer to one system, but {{ref}} is
another system. Who can remember that??

Steve