Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 12:41 AM, Remember the dot rememberthedot@gmail.com wrote:
I've found that neatly spacing references does wonders for keeping wikitext readable. For example:
Yes, but then the text is no less impossible to simply read through if you don't care about the refs and you're just editing the text, especially if you[] have cases[] where the refs are sprinkled liberally[][].
As a reader like the end result of the refs being placed as close to the fact that support as possible, but it makes the paragraph hell to edit.
I think, rather than using JS to hide refs in page text, defining them all in the references section, or at least at the end of the section they're used in for larger articles, using some sort of new option in the ref tags to make them not display - <ref name="Foo" nodisplay="1">...</ref> - or something, then referring to them inline with only the short form - <ref name="Foo"/> - would be better. A lot of refs on one sentence would still be a little messy, but much better. Of course, the problem would be migrating all the existing refs to such a system, the benefit to just hiding them is that it'll work with everything as it is now.
The problem with hiding them with JS is that you need to be able to detect them reliably. I have some regexes I've used for other things, but they tend to assume that people have formatted the refs correctly. A few months ago, I ran a script on a db dump looking for broken ref formatting - unclosed tags, etc. What I found was that people manage to break ref formatting in unimaginable ways, and ways that resisted all my attempts at semi-automatic repair. Hiding them would work in the majority of cases, but in a few strange cases it will likely just explode horribly.