[Foundation-l] Can anyone really edit Wikipedia?

Thu Sep 25 16:14:04 UTC 2008

2008/9/25 geni <geniice at gmail.com>:
> 2008/9/25 phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com>:
>> I was going to say as well, what happened to that proposal to define
>> references at the bottom of the article instead of inline? And then
>> Pathos posted a nice implementation above. It does make a whole lot
>> more sense from both a reader and an editor's point of view to have
>> reference metadata in a single place, away from the wikitext. Defining
>> refs with a "refname" in the text doesn't seem too bad... other than
>> the mess of trying to get a different stylistic system going, is there
>> some reason we don't do this?
>>
>> -- phoebe
>>
>
> Basically it results in a high maintenance cost with a fairly high
> chance of errors. It means you have to keep the article text and the
> end section in sync rather than just keeping all the stuff in one
> place.

If a reference is used more than once, it's not all in one place
anyway. It actually solves the issue of someone accidentally deleting
the text for the ref not realising it is used elsewhere. For refs only
used once, it makes maintenance of the ref a little harder, but
maintenance of the rest of the article much easier.