To all Wikimedia developers (and any other interested parties):
Alterego and I, soren9580, are working on creating a new footnotes
feature for Wikipedia, because we believe in the power of footnotes and
want to make it easier for writers to cite their sources in articles
and include relevant material in an easily readable format. We've
developed some examples for people to take a look at. First, the
description of what we are trying to do is available at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnote2
A good example site using the current footnote implementation we have
developed, combined with a bibliography, is available at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator
Our goal is to develop an inline, dynamic footnoting system. Basically,
we want the ability to do footnotes the same way we currently do Tables
of Contents, by putting the text for the footnote right in with the
text it refers to, and having mediawiki autogenerate the footnotes
section at the bottom of the page. Sample code might look something
like this.
{{F|Auto-generated inline footnotes allow the user to write footnotes
as he or she is writing his or her article. The user can simply spell
out the text of the footnote as so, and allow the software to place it
where it needs to go. For more details see The Skeptic's Dictionary
(2004). Myers-Briggs Type indicator. Retrieved December 20, 2004.}}
This tag would, with the proper coding, automatically create a
footnotes section at the bottom of the page wherever the writer of the
article put the tag {{Footnotes}}.
As of right now, our implementation uses two templates, an {{f1}}
template and an {{f1b}} template (with the numbers changed for each
footnote). The f1 is put at the site of the footnote, and the f1b is
put in the footnotes list with the text of the footnote. each creates a
link which links back to the other one, so the reader can quickly skip
down to the footnote he wants, and skip back up to where he was
reading. It works and is easy to use, but is not as fluid as inline
footnoting, and still requires the writer to make sure everything is
numbered properly, and to renumber footnotes when adding them in the
middle of the document. There is a better way to do this, we believe we
have a good idea for how to go about implementing it.
Please give us feedback (alterego is also subscribed to this list so
he'll see what you post here in response), and if any developers are
interested in writing this feature into the next version, please let us
know.
Thanks!
-Chris Nicholson