[WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Ian Woollard]

On 2 November 2011 21:07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> What needs to be in place to make it possible to recruit newbies for
> the task of referencing things? (Alleviate the citation syntax
> problem.
>

I'm thinking that the problem here is inline references. An inline
reference is one where you plonk the reference in the middle of the text
<ref>lots of stuff</ref>. The problem with those is that they break up the
flow of the text, making it very hard to maintain.

Perhaps the Wikipedia should have a bot to convert ALL inline references
into "list defined references":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:LDR#List-defined_references

e.g.

Frobar is a beedub<ref>http://www.hello.com/</ref>and can duubdu<ref>Rank
bad links by Mr. Somebody 2008</ref> and more stuff.

which is essentially unreadable, the bot would change this to:

Frobar is a beedub<ref name=ref1/>and can duubdu<ref name=ref2> and more
stuff.

And at the end add:

==References==

<references>
<ref name=ref1>http://www.hello.com/</ref>
<ref name=ref2>Rank bad links by Mr. Somebody 2008</ref>
</references>

In other words put and keep the actual references in the actual references
section. It would certainly be a lot more readable; and I think that's a
lot of the battle when editing. I think it's the inline references that are
the main problem.

As in, you wouldn't force people to not use inline style to insert
references, but it would just get automatically adjusted to the
site-preferred format.

- d.
>

-Ian Woollard