https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8033
Roy Leban <[email protected]> changed: What |Removed |Added ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CC| |[email protected] --- Comment #10 from Roy Leban <[email protected]> 2009-02-26 01:38:17 UTC --- I've seen articles go through cycles. Somebody adds a fact tag, questioning if something is true (sometimes, they actually remove something that's true because they don't believe it). Next, another editor restores the text, if necessary, and adds a reference, possibly to something already listed as a reference in the article (sometimes this means moving the reference from an explicit list to a ref tag). Quite frequently, the reference was added at the same time as the text, but the first editor hasn't gone into the history to ascertain that. Finally, another editor removes the ref tag because it's unnecessary detail to cite every single sentence in an article. Wait a while and the process starts anew. And, if there is a discussion on the talk page, it's never looked at or is actually gone because of archiving. Two things happen: We have citation/reference wars, and we have overly cluttered references all over the place. Just look at the hard-to-read page [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama] and you'll see what I mean -- one citation for every 25 words (a total of 216) and multiple runs of three and four citations in a row. And this is a featured article! Here is my suggestion on how things could work to address these problems: 1. By default, only the first reference to something appears superscripted in the text. Later ones are only visible in the source, unless an option is set. 2. Multiple references which are to the same source with a different page number or the same URL with a different hash are treated similarly. 3. When multiple references appear in a row, only a single citation is shown. If (5) is adopted, there is one * to the set; if (5) is not adopted, the refs are shown as a group, e.g., [33-37] or [33-37,15], with the latter case for a single re-reference following multiple references. 4. A reference can be marked as "minor" in the source. Minor references do not appear in the text unless the option is set. They do, however, appear in the references section with backlink(s). In the Barack Obama example, the first 43-word sentence contains 6 references and that's only because nobody's required a citation for where Obama's father was from. I would make refs 6, 7, and 9 minor, leaving 8 as major (and I'd delete 10 and 11 as irrelevant to the sentence). And ... 5. Display all in-text refs as superscripted *'s instead of [n]. It's smaller and will hurt readability less. The numbers appear in the printable version of a page or (possibly) if a user turns on an option. The numbers are a historical artifact from the world of paper that we should abandon. (I've separated #5 because I realize it's a bit off-topic for this bug report, but I think its part of a complete solution). -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the assignee for the bug. You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Wikibugs-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l
