Template talk:Reflist/Archive 3

Wikipedia's reference procedures damage article quality
Why has the readability of wikitext and regular text been damaged so severely by the use of reference templates and procedures? Why can't an article just |link directly to a source? (no middle-men please) It's insanely redundant to list every author and the date of every source. And the superscripted font text messes up the spacing of the line above in my opera browser. I propose the drastic option of switching all references to a manual Sources section which the following article is a good example of: Michelle Caruso-Cabrera. It's not possible to have a reference template and procedures that fits all legal, political, historical and other reference requirements. Please stop the readability damage insanity with references, it's a solution in search of a problem. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Zen-master (talk • contribs) 12:26, August 17, 2007


 * Why can't an article just |link directly to a source? (no middle-men please) -- For one thing, a lot of sources aren't on the internet, so can't be directly linked to. Even those that are might change location or disappear off the internet altogether. I personally hate the reference templates & never use them, but the basic system works just fine. --Yksin 16:49, 17 August 2007 (UTC)


 * I don't like the ref system and think it should be discontinued. Whenever you have a source that can be directly linked to you should directly link to it. What do you think of the Sources section idea? zen master T 17:00, 17 August 2007 (UTC)


 * I don't like it at all. I like being able to look at an article & see complete bibliographic information about the source, without being forced to travel to a link in order to find that information. Assuming that the link hasn't moved or disappeared to begin with. When a source is online, one can still link to it directly within the, but using links only without bibliographic info is in my opinion poor practice. I can understand people who don't know how to do proper citations doing it that way, but inevitably to make an article decent someone else has to come along & clean it up.  In any case, numerous sources such as books & many journal, magazine, & newspaper articles (especially before 1995 or so) aren't on the internet anyway, & can't be linked to. --Yksin 17:21, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I think a general "Sources" section is ambiguous and imprecise. Readers should be able to tell, at a glance, exactly which source was used for each fact or assertion.  Citations and sources should not be a guessing game.  --ElKevbo 17:31, 17 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Alleged precision and unambiguity should not come at the expense of readability. zen master T 17:39, 17 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Agree with Yksin and ElKevbo. The only way articles will ever truly be reliable is if the reader can quickly verify the assertions made. Inline citations allow for this, and the more information you can provide about the source, the better. Think of it this way: a link you provided may work today, but if the website moves, restructures, or simply limits the time articles are available online, future readers have no way of finding that source. If you provide a link, title, date, author, and any other available detail, right next to the claim the source backs-up, I'll be able to contact the publisher/author and verify that claim if I can no longer find it online. It also allows for quick identification of sources, where as a general source section would leave me clueless if I'm looking to verify just one claim in an article. - auburn pilot   talk  17:40, 17 August 2007 (UTC)


 * That should all be done in the Sources section and not be put inline next to every direct link. zen master T 17:56, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

The non-ref template or html tag Sources section can have entries in sentence/paragraph form. The tiny superscripted text and lack of linking directly to the source damages article readability. zen master T 17:55, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree that the current setup is not ideal for casual readers and can be confusing. However, I can't think of a better way to do things right now.  Full and correct bibliographic information for cited sources is paramount, even at the expense of a bit of usability or readability.  Your suggestion of "just link to the source inline and have a 'Sources' section" does not allow us to precisely link material to non-web sources.
 * I recommend you look into Harvard Referencing for an example of an alternative referencing system that seems to work well for some Wikipedia editors while still meeting our information and bibliographic needs. --ElKevbo 18:03, 17 August 2007 (UTC)


 * Readability is more important than how Harvard does references. I repeat, it's not possible to meet all possible reference requirements: legal, historical, scientific, etc etc. zen master T 18:08, 17 August 2007 (UTC)


 * "it's not possible to meet all possible reference requirements". Maybe I'm not understanding what you mean...any examples? - auburn pilot   talk  18:10, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
 * "Harvard referencing" does not refer to "how Harvard does references" (except in a historical and etymological sense). It's the name of a style of referencing.  Seriously - go read up on it.  It may be interesting to you and illustrative of another approach to citations.  It may even appeal to you or solve some of the problems that you perceive.  --ElKevbo 18:17, 17 August 2007 (UTC)


 * My point is: no reference policy should damage readability. zen master T 19:24, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
 * If you can figure out a better way to do things that would not impact readability, please make suggestions! Your previous suggestion, however, does not make the grade.  --ElKevbo 00:13, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Proper spacing with superscripts is the responsibility of the browser. If it doesn't work right, it's an issue for the browser developers. It might also be affected by CSS or things like browser font settings. Either way, I don't think that's a reason to avoid this sort of referencing, even if it were to create some unevenness. As for arriving directly at an external URL instead of first having to jump to a link in the references section, this is something that could be made configurable in the Wikipedia settings. Another option (possible with Opera) is creating custom user-JS code that will tweak the page locally to do that. &curren; ehudshapira 00:39, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Citation style
Could we make reflist post the text of Citation style if there were no on the article? And if we could should we? Jeepday (talk) 12:54, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

Internet Explorer 7 issue
This tag does not work on my Internet Explorer version 7.0.5730.11. For example if you say it seems to ignore the # and forces only 1 column to always appear. (:O) -Nima Baghaei talk · cont · email 23:04, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * It only works on Firefox at the moment. See the documentation. –Pomte 23:39, 17 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Technically, Mozilla-derived browsers, of which Firefox is one. (Webkit-derived browsers, also.)  IE is behind the curve, and the doco mentions this. ⇔ ChristTrekker 18:07, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Documentation says it works with Safari, but it does not work with my Konqueror (Safari & Konqueror share KHTML). --Michalis Famelis (talk)  15:37, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Not true. Safari uses WebKit, a forked version of KHTML. Ms2ger 18:40, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

XML ID syntax
Both the code and the code use XML ID syntax (all the IDs begin with _). Is it possible to rectify this (or is that too much to ask)? The Valid One 13:09, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
 * This can't be changed here, the page you're looking for is MediaWiki:Cite reference link prefix. Ms2ger 18:40, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Linking problem
The multi-columned references display fine for me, but the links from the numbers to the footnotes do not work properly for references that are not in the first column. For example, Bird doesn't lead me to note 97, but to some place in the external links. I don't know if this is specific to my browser (I use Safari 3). Lesgles ( talk ) 20:09, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
 * See Village pump (technical). –Pomte 20:21, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Interesting, although they aren't discussing quite the same problem that I have, which is related to how the link target is interpreted, rather than how it is displayed. I will continue the discussion over there. Thanks for the link. Lesgles ( talk ) 21:28, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

From Talk:Morayshire Railway

 * also posted at Wikipedia talk:Footnotes

This section contains footnotes. I beleive for consistency that should be followed in this case. I will be reverting the page back to using "reflist" as the guideline suggests. --Rockfang (talk) 18:42, 22 December 2007 (UTC)


 * This contradicts Template:reflist which states there is no concensus to use the small font version. There is no reason in this article to use the small font version. In addition FN indicates that small font has some disadvantages and conversely that some editors prefer the smaller font. I do not like the small font. In this article there are only ten referenced items, and I see not advantage for the smaller font. --Stewart (talk) 18:54, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
 * In this case, Template:reflist is incorrect. If you check the history of FN a lot of stuff has been removed because people edited it without consensus.  The "how to use" section is still on there because it has reached consensus. With regards to your small font point: sometimes small font does have disadvantages.  Some people might have poor eyesight even with glasses and the smaller font could be harder for them to read.  I would prefer to be consistent though.  Even though list isn't extremely long at only 10 items, that number was reached as consensus at the most applicable guideline to follow: FN --Rockfang (talk) 19:19, 22 December 2007 (UTC)


 * The difficulty I have with this is you have used a template which has its guidance notes and then informed me that the guidance notes are incorrect and superceded by a MoS elsewhere in Wikipedia. I will reluctantly bow to you edit, however it is important that the guidance notes with the   are corrected to reflect WP:FN otherwise others will follow the notes to the template and revert like I did. --Stewart (talk) 19:45, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Font size again
I've never really been happy with the small font used for references/footnotes, and yes I know that personally I have the option to (re-learn css and) edit my style sheet. I find the smaller font hard to read, and I have good corrected vision. Now I understand that print used small fonts for references/footnotes because it a) saved paper, and b) reduced problems with footnotes driving their own reference points ontothe next page, and c) clearley distinguished them from body text, but non of these apply to the online WP. Why then do do it? I would say (primarily) because we get an enormous (sometimes) quantity of non-flowing text that makes it hard to get to the other standard appendices, navboxen and categories - this belief is supported by the fact that we like columns, and by the temporary introduction of scrollboxen.  I would suggest that the solution is, rather than trying to compress the footnotes/referneces, allow them to move to their natural place at the end of the article, certainly after the other standard appendices.  (I also think we should rethink navboxen, but that's another story.)  Comments? Rich Farmbrough, 07:46 12 September 2007 (GMT).


 * I personally prefer reflist or to 123Pie Talk  20:25, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Scrolling reflist?
editprotected

Rationale
This article has just had scrollbars added to its reflist. The addition of a "scrolling" parameter will make such a feature easy to implement, and standardise the appearance of scrolling windows.

Implementation
Copy the content of template:reflist/editprotected to this template.

Utilisation
Once implemented, a references section can be made scrolling by setting the parameter.

Proposed by: Verisimilus  T  21:42, 26 March 2008 (UTC)


 * As I understand it, scrolling reflists aren't used because they screw up printing. --Golbez (talk) 21:52, 26 March 2008 (UTC)


 * And mirrors, and other things. They're explicitly prohibited by WP:CITE, if I recall correctly. Kirill 22:25, 26 March 2008 (UTC)


 * See Templates for deletion/Log/2007 June 11 for past consensus against this feature. –Pomte 22:39, 26 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Disabled edit-protected request per previous discussions on this topic. - auburn pilot   talk  23:37, 26 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Incidentally, I tested some code, which was written by, and if you add this to your monobook.js page, you should have a scroll reflist. It worked for me; see the image at right. - auburn pilot   talk  23:54, 26 March 2008 (UTC)