[WikiEN-l] Newbie recruitment: referencing

[Ian Woollard]

On 4 November 2011 07:07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> On 11/03/11 7:36 PM, Alan Liefting wrote:
> > On 3/11/2011 10:45 p.m., Ray Saintonge wrote:
> >> On 11/02/11 3:38 PM, Ian Woollard wrote:
> >>> 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.
> >> Inline references are a problem even for newbies wanting to make a
> >> simple correction.  In a reference rich article the error may be easily
> >> visible in article space, but becomes difficult to find in edit space
> >> when one needs to wade through a lot of references.
> > WikEd has syntax highlighting to make editing easier.
> >
> That just introduces another geekish piece of software. In a random page
> in need of help there is no link to this software, If I want to fix an
> obvious typo with one or two keystrokes I don't want to spend an hour
> tracking down and learning some new tool.  That just makes the cure more
> onerous than leaving the error in place. Non-technical people are
> quickly turned off by the fairy world of additional software.
>

I still think a bots the right answer. A bot that collects the references
to the end of the article has no very major downsides I can find; the users
can carry on doing more or less what they already do, and the bot just
tidies up.

It could work something like, if a reference is named and there's a
reference list which it's not in, then the bot moves it into the list and
leaves a named tag that points to it, if it's unnamed or there's no list
then leave it where it is.


> Ray
>
-- 
-Ian Woollard