[Wikipedia-l] Any suggestions for editing refs?

[habj]

2006/10/5, Maury Markowitz <maury_markowitz at hotmail.com>:
> I'm trying to be the good wikipedian and adding lots of on-topic refs, but I
> find editing them to be extremely difficult and error prone. IMHO the actual
> "body" of the ref should definitely not be placed in the article body, where
> it is now, as this makes reading the source difficult, to say the least.

Agreed. At least it should be possible to put a line break before and
after the reference tags, to help the eye distinguish between the text
and the ref and make the source text more readable. I have tried that,
but it puts a space between the text and the little superscript letter
that tells which source supports the statements. I guess I will
continue doing that when working on a text, then remove the line
breaks.

Another problem, when editing a text with refs in them, is that it is
not always clear exactly what is covered by the ref. A ref in the
middle of a sentence is usually obvious, it supports just a small part
of that sentence and usually one single fact. A ref in the end of a
paragraph could however refer to the whole paragraph, the last
sentence, or the last fact in the last sentence. This is seldom a
problem when only reading a text with references in it. However, I
have more than once refrained from shuffling the contents of a text
about out of fear for introducing errors in the citations.

For the future, could we imagine a citation system where the pair of
reference tags enclose the portion of the text that the source refers
to? The text of the reference itself then needs to be put someplace
else. A source text that in the current system looks something like
this

The plant A growns in Spain. It needs much sun and water, and its
leaves are sometimes used as herbal medicine. It belongs to the genus
Spirk and is usually considered related to the plant B,<ref>Peter
Plimp, The succulents of the Mediterranian, Scrottie Publishing House,
2003</ref>, although this is debated. There are many subspecies of A,
of which some are edible. The subspecies X is bla bla, Y is bla bla
and Z is bla bla. The notion that A actually belongs to the genus
Scrubbicus, which is completely unrelated to B, is supported by a
small numbers of researchers including Thomas Tipp. Recently (June
2006), Salomon Smith and coworkers discovered new facts that support
this hypothesis although these data are controversial.
<ref>[http://www.controversy.com Aron Assont on the Smith data,
controversy.com]</ref>

could maybe look something like this

The plant A growns in Spain. It needs much sun and water, and its
leaves are sometimes used as herbal medicine. It belongs to the genus
Spirk and
<ref=Plimp> is usually considered related to the plant B,</ref>
although this is debated. There are many subspecies of A, of which
some are edible. The subspecies X is bla bla, Y is bla bla and Z is
bla bla.
<ref=Assont>The notion that A actually belongs to the genus
Scrubbicus, which is completely unrelated to B, is supported by a
small numbers of researchers including Thomas Tipp. Recently (June
2006), Salomon Smith and coworkers discovered new facts that support
this hypothesis although these data are controversial. </ref>

This version contains more precise information on how the text relates
to the sources used. Academic texts are not this precise with their
references, but those texts will not be shuffled about by several
people after the original author published it. Also, the academic
standard for annotation of sources within text was created for print
not the internet - they don't have the possibility.

/habj