[Wikitech-l] Wysiwyg debate

[Steve Bennett]

On 8/14/06, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikitech at gmail.com> wrote:
> Basically, the advantages of having just a reference name be in the
> text itself, and the text in the references section, are intuitiveness
> and less clutter.  The advantages of having the full reference in the
> text are that it works with section editing, and the ref doesn't break
> invisibly if someone transplants the section or whatever without
> thinking to move the refs as well.  Trust me, that's constant and
> horrible with the {{ref}} style: I've had to spend half an hour or
> more on more than one occasion digging through page histories to
> figure out where the references disappeared.

Trust me, from the POV of the person *adding* the references, genuine
inline references are *extremely* attractive. It is *much* more
pleasant to simply write and John Smith was born in 1953
<ref>http://some.web.site.info</ref> and died in 1923, than to have to
mess around with choosing a reference name and add things in two
different places - *especially* when you're doing section editing
(because otherwise you have to make two separate edits, and the
article is in an inconsistent state in the meantime). I basically
never added footnotes at all until this new method came along, and now
I add them regularly.

However, genuine inline references *suck* for the maintainer. They're
a nightmare. There's actually a simple algorithm to find the source of
a footnote: click the footnote, then click the first letter on that
footnote line, then click edit - but it's not at all intuitive.

My suggestion is the only way I can think of making footnotes bearable
for both creator and maintainer. Short of a separate "footnotes"
editing box, that is (which I believe has been proposed before).

Steve

>
> Jay is right that coloring the refs probably wouldn't be too hard with
> current wikitext.  Ideally, WYSIWYG would handle refs in some special
> way so that editing them is fully intuitive and uncluttered.
> Something like being able to click the ref number to bring up a
> floating popup-y thing that you could edit, while also being able to
> click the ref in the references section and edit that directly, with
> the Javascript keeping them synced and secretly editing only the <ref>
> contents either way.
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