habj wrote:
2006/10/5, Maury Markowitz maury_markowitz@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.
You can put the line breaks right _after_ the ref tag without adding extra spaces.<ref> {{cite mailinglist| first=Bryan| last=Derksen| list=wikipedia-l| title=Any suggestions for editing refs?| date=2006-10-08}}</ref> And if the line break after the /ref tag adds a space it's no problem since that's usually intended anyway.
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.
I don't like this idea much, it seems likely to make the references a lot more "fragile" than they currently are. If you've referenced a large block of text this way then one could easily wind up cutting and pasting chunks that might break the citations, and it goes back to the {{ref}} template's old problem of having to change two separate sections of the article when adding or removing a reference. I'm not sure it'd be worth the extra trouble.
I like the current system because it's so "atomic"; a reference's text lives in just one location, and that location is in the same place where the citation's link is supposed to go in the final result. The only problem I've seen with the current system is that occasionally when there are multiple tags for one reference and the first instance gets removed we wind up with blank references below, but at least that's easily noticeable.