Manipulating <ref> - Wikitech-l - lists.wikimedia.org

George Herbert

24 Sep 24 Sep

11:47 p.m.

On 9/24/07, Liz Kim <lizkim270(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all, Does anyone know a way to manipulate the referencing style in wiki? For example, =================================== xyz <ref name=xyz:1>Some descriptions</ref> <references/> =================================== will produce something like: =================================== xyz [1] 1. Some descriptions =================================== and I would like to be able to edit the [1]. Instead of having all the footnotes be numbered, I would like to name them myself and have the footnotes be organized alphabetically. For example, I would like to view results such as: =================================== xxx[Smith 2000] yyy[Adams 2007] zzz[Thomas 2002] Adams 2007: Some descriptions Smith 2000: Some descriptions Thomas 2002: Some descriptions =================================== Perhaps some sort of a template? Any input would be greatly appreciated! Thanks! -- LK

I believe you're stuck with it in the default cite.php One can make something like the equivalent by hand, though... == Events == The tree hit him on the head. [[Article#References|Woods 2004]] == References == # Woods 2004: Woods, Gilbert F., ''When Oaks Attack", Nature, 2007/12/23 -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

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James Forrester

28 Sep 28 Sep

8:20 a.m.

On 25/09/2007, Maury Markowitz <maury.markowitz(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

On 9/24/07, Liz Kim <lizkim270(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Does anyone know a way to manipulate the referencing style in wiki?

We were _just_ talking about this in another thread. How would you like it to work? There are a couple of different styles available in HTML and I would _guess_ that it would be fairly easy to modify the <references/> tag (and {{reflist}}) to allow you to select one of these. But that would still be an enumerated list. Another possibility is one I think might be more interesting, and that's that the ref tags themselves have a "link=" or "tag=" where you could define a specific tag on a per-ref basis. For instance... <ref name="Smith" link="Smi89"> a reference by Smith from 1989 </ref> This would be very useful in matching technical documentation referencing style. The only problem is it would require the editors to be careful about putting in a "link=" for _every_ ref, because I'm not sure a fallback would be easy, <references/> uses LI to generate the list and that doesn't take kindly to inserting other things in the middle of the list.

If the "link" attribute is required to be unique (which would make sense), then why not use the already-unique, required, free-text field on all of these elements - namely the "name" attribute. :-) Its messy, but on a two-parse you could have an optional attribute on the references element ('citestyle="numbers|name"'), or if you only want to do one-parse a messier way would be to have a keyword modifier, __CITEUSINGNAME__ and __CITEUSINGNUMBERS__ or whatever. Of course, the sorting of links is the crucial issue, as you say; when building the page model you could collapse the list into HTML. Because, of course, we'd never just generate HTML directly. :-) Of course, what I'm saying is no-doubt nonsense on stilts; please feel free to ignore. :-) Yours, -- James D. Forrester jdforrester(a)wikimedia.org | jdforrester(a)gmail.com [[Wikipedia:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]

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Jim Hu

26 Sep 26 Sep

2:52 a.m.

On Sep 24, 2007, at 7:29 PM, Liz Kim wrote:

...

Hi all, Does anyone know a way to manipulate the referencing style in wiki? For example, =================================== xyz <ref name=xyz:1>Some descriptions</ref> <references/> =================================== will produce something like: =================================== xyz [1] 1. Some descriptions =================================== and I would like to be able to edit the [1]. Instead of having all the footnotes be numbered, I would like to name them myself and have the footnotes be organized alphabetically. For example, I would like to view results such as: =================================== xxx[Smith 2000] yyy[Adams 2007] zzz[Thomas 2002]

While this is my preferred form of citation using Endnote in Word docs, I think there are some costs you should consider before going for that citation style. In particular, it would require you to limit what users can put inside ref tags to only those things that can be parsed as having Author-Year. You also have to deal with the whole Smith 2000a vs. Smith 2000b etc. and how those would change during editing of a wiki page. I can't imagine doing this using templates and Cite.php without some major modifications of the cite codebase. And then you'd have something that breaks backward compatibility with lots of other wikis. Just my $0.02. The other thread was more about how to make the material in the wikitext inside the ref tag more concise. I don't think it branched into changing to a different citation style (but I've fallen behind in the thread, so maybe it's gone there since my last reading).

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Adams 2007: Some descriptions Smith 2000: Some descriptions Thomas 2002: Some descriptions =================================== Perhaps some sort of a template? Any input would be greatly appreciated! Thanks! -- LK _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

===================================== Jim Hu Associate Professor Dept. of Biochemistry and Biophysics 2128 TAMU Texas A&M Univ. College Station, TX 77843-2128 979-862-4054

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