[Foundation-l] Jihad in Defense of Objectivity (Was: Enforcing WP:CITE)

Wed Dec 7 14:25:39 UTC 2005

On Wed, 7 Dec 2005, Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> On 12/6/05, Jonathan Leybovich <jleybov at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Anthony DiPierro wrote:
> >
> >Maybe complicated isn't what I'm looking for.  But
> > consider the
> > following and whether or not you'd enjoy editing it
> > by hand:
> >
> >'''Roy [[cite:ISBN:123456789:p. 7|"Roy Orbison's
> > middle name is
> >Kelton"|"Kelton"]] Orbison'''

No, this isn't the kind of markup you want to see when you 'edit this 
page', though you could make it editable-by-hand at some deep level.

Yes, there should be a separate references page.

One piece of markup you *do* want to see in the regular page-editing is an 
auto-citation generator that will subst: in the default cite for a given 
ISBN or other identifier... just to save time.

Yes, having auto-generated References and Footnotes sections should be 
possible... though you would also want a manually-edited subsection of 
References.

Anthony writes:
> Hmm, just throwing something out there, but what if this is all kept
> on a separate page?  So you'd have the regular wikitext, and then
> you'd have a list of references, in the form (reference, cited text,
> article text).  One problem with this is if the article text changes

Definitely.  Bear in mind that most references are best-done in the form 
of footnotes, floating at the end of a sentence, and only very loosely 
assigned to a specific block of text (the default chunk would be the 
preceding sentence, perhaps with simple markup that identifies the 
preceding N sentences or the entire paragraph).   So these can be in the 
wikitext in the form of a footnote; both linking to a short-cite at the 
end of a page, and to a full-cite (including perhaps the entire 
sentence-text when the cite was first inserted?  with some semi-automated 
way to update that text?) on its References: page.

The References: page should just be a versioned wiki-page like any other, 
but in a specific format that allows for auto-additions and auto-updates 
when the article itself is changed in certain ways.

> *at all* the reference would have to be updated.  But *eventually*
> mechanisms could be designed to resolve this, once we get away from
> editing articles using raw ascii text.

SJ