Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (footnotes)/Archive 1

message: This system has two major problems:
# It depends on the automatic numbering of non-captioned external links to work. Therefore it effectively attempts to forbid such links in any article which uses it. This will not work: you will never convince people not to include these links, and therefore the system will break.
# It still requires editors to organise the actual footnotes into the correct order, but without the aid of any numbers.
This will not fly.
IMNSHO.
HTH HAND
--Phil | Talk 10:30, Feb 28, 2005 (UTC)
:Got something better in mind?  --Doradus 14:39, Feb 28, 2005 (UTC)
::Well the existing version here and here works pretty well, using  and ; an added advantage is that you can point to the same footnote more than once (although the back-link will obviously only go to the first reference). HTH HAND --Phil | Talk 08:27, Mar 3, 2005 (UTC)
:::The problem with that system is that it requires and gets regular renumbering.  Unfortuantely, mistakes and vandalism can creep in to this process.  There is no real reason why the number 7 footnote should be linked to the number 7 reference and the only way to directly check it is to find the exact edit where the footnote was added.  Thus, whilst the older system may be easier, it doesn't actually achieve our aim, which is to make easily verified facts.  This is a bit of a killer fault IMRHO. 
:::The fact that references can be used twice or more makes this even more serious, since it is very easy to do renumbering of one reference and not the other.  Finally, the fact that the system allows out of order footnoting means that a future editor looking through an article has to search back and forward when checking references which is unreliable and unsafe.  taken together, I think these problems make numbered footnoting a maintainance nightmare and something which has to be got rid of as soon as possible.  It was coming upon these problems whilst using the  system on the islamophobia article which inspired the new system.  Mozzerati 21:50, 2005 Mar 3 (UTC)
:: will always link back to the first occurrence of ; all occurrences of  will link to . I am not a bot programmer but I would have thought that it would be devastatingly easy to write a bot which would:
::#Find all pages using  and 
::#For each such page
::##Find all occurrences of  and record the parameter
::##Sort them and note the new parameter mapping, if any
::##Re-order the occurrences of  according to the new order
::##Patch the new parameter in to each occurrence of 
::#Make a note of when modification occurred so that a page doesn't get visited again until it changes
::This would be much less disruptive in the long run than trying to impose a system which, because it leverages the automagic numbering of unlabelled external links, effectively disallows the use of such links in any article using the system.
::IMNSHO. HTH. HAND --Phil | Talk 10:58, Mar 4, 2005 (UTC)
:::I'm talking about a different issue.  When I have a semantic label like johnson then a reference and a footnote obviously go together; there's no easy way to change them which doesn't keep the correct relation.  When I have a number; I can change the number (e.g. renumbering notes) and everything still seems to work.  But if I don't change both the reference and the note together then I will never be able to realise that the relation is wrong.  The reason that I brought up double references is not that I don't understand how they could work.  The reason is that they are a case where renumbering is easy to make a mess of.  If I change a reference number and it's matching footnote, but don't see or forget about the second reference, the numbers can easily get out of sync.  This risk implies that in the long term such footnotes become almost impossible to check, thus losing their value.    Mozzerati 20:39, 2005 Mar 4 (UTC)
First off, problems with using the templates:
# How do deal with vandalism on the template?  If these templates become widespread use, they may inflict more harm than they do good.  (i.e. Vandalism of the template may affect more than 10,000 articles)
#:same way as ever; if it isn't a problem then we don't worry;  If it becomes a problem then we protect the page.  
# There is a specific limit to the number of templates per article
#:According to the template help page that limit went away in mediawiki 1.3.  
Secondly, if we aren't using the templates, then granted, it would be much more difficult to keep track of.
My proposed solutions:
# Build the footnote system into the MediaWiki software
#: This would be the ideal way to go
#::I also support this.  The advantage of my proposal is that it is easy to either edit the template or use simple text substitution to convert to almost any imaginable future footnote system built into mediawiki; so the two solutions complement eachother. 
# Develop a coding system with HTML comments for the bot to read
#:please not, overloading comments can end up as a maintainability nightmare. 
# Create a Wikipedia project such that all subpages of the project contain the footnote sections so that they may be transincluded at the bottom of each article.  Then devise a process such that it can notify the bot to update an article's page.
#:don't much like bots in that case.  Good for correcting and verification where randomly missing pages isn't so important.  Bad for a process which needs all pages to be visited in order to work. Still a demonstration implementation (without the bot) would be interesting.  Mozzerati 20:39, 2005 Mar 4 (UTC)
-- AllyUnion (talk) 11:51, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Major problems with this system 

message: (SEWilco 20:22, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Presentation vs content 

message: This is not a problem specific to this proposal, but to the usage of the sup-directive, ...and possibly to the CSS I stole from someone a long time ago.
On my screen, a line with a footnote gets extra space between it and the preceeding line. This is irritating, and ugly, and a strong reason for me to dislike footnotes of this kind.
Oughtn't this be solved before the footnoting scheeme is marketed and sold? :-)
--Ruhrjung 21:01, Mar 11, 2005 (UTC)
* It is noticed less when reading articles which use  and  a lot, such as 14C and CO2.  Or maybe if that makes articles irritating to read, people don't read such articles much and don't get stuff changed.  (SEWilco 04:22, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  irregular line spacing 

message: I don't think it has been noticed much above that the templates  and  have been released by their author for improvement, and seem to have been converted to this method. Wikipedia_talk:Footnote3#Another_opinion
I suggest that usage of these templates, with names which are easier to remember, be encouraged.  (SEWilco 21:05, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  ref and endnote 

message: Just to say I think that the work you have been doing is fantastic. :ChrisG 23:03, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Great work 

message: I've been helping with a different problem, and I haven't seen my solution mentioned elsewhere.  I wonder if the method might be useful here, such as with a linked image.
* ,  and  all display the same image through template alias files. (Don't use this template yet in articles, it is under development) (SEWilco 08:09, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Another template tool 

message: [1] This is the obligatory gratuitous example.
I think many of the participants in this debate are in agreement that the ideal solution is for the MediWiki software to support a form of markup where a note is simply made where it needs to be made in the text, [1] and then the software will automagically put an unobtrusive anchor at that point in the text, along with an autonumbered == Notes == section at the end of the article.  For the time being, however, this doesn't appear to be a near-term prospect. Unfortunately.
[1] Readers should not infer any lack of wikifaith in this statement.
The present solution is certainly a worthwhile one. However, it does break the ability to use external links independently of footnotes, and while I agree that under most conditions, anything you'd want to extlink to inline should be represented as a note, it seems, well, uncolaborative [1] to insist that other editors not use external links as they were intended to use, because I want to hijack their autonumbering functionality to make footnotes work.
At the same time, without using the autonumbering functionality of external links, keeping the notes and their anchors matched up in a heavily annoted article becomes tedious, and correcting others' errors moreso.  The present solution does not completely address this: while unique ID's certainly make it possible to sort things out if they go awry, editors are still required to keep the footnotes at the bottom of the page in the correct order, and with the ID's hidden in the source, there's no way to, without looking at the source, know whether the notes have become disordered.
So I propose that sidenotes may be better work-around than footnotes. One advantage of this approach are they it they does, at least in the simple implementation shown here, require editors to manually number things, it only requires editors to keep their numbers straight across a single paragraph, rather than the entire article.  Secondly, the note is right there if you want to look at it, not down at the bottom of the page, where you have to click to in order to even see it, before you have any idea whether you want to read it or not.  It also does away with the need for back-links.
[1] e.g., Hamer, p. 72.
[2] Like this one, which has been made gratuitously long to illustrate a point. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
A few limitations of the system: sidenotes must be short in order to track well with the main flow of text.  For bibliographic references, this means that a short form of annotation [1] together with a longer bibliographic entry for the source in a == References == section at the bottom of the page.  Long notes [2] will push into the potential note space of the next paragraph.  Also, I am not exactly certain whether such notations can be made to play well with other things floating on the right, like infoboxes and images.
Suggestions and comments are welcome.
:I really really hate them (sorry.. I'll try to be logical and clear even so :-).   The following reasons.  
* They seriously mess up layout; consider for example that the entire sides of articles such as Warsaw Uprising are already overloaded; there's no space.  
* They aren't nice on a screen reader (device for the blind) since the position would be very difficult to plan.
* their influence will vary very much according to the size of the users screen; people writing on big screens will make side notes which are very different from those who are writing on small ones and the effect will be bad layout for each
* I think they encourage digressions since they are visible at the same time as the text.  Digressions are better moved off to subsections in other articles... 
But; 
I can see this as a good way, in future, to layout the references when an editor is doing verification.  In other words, an optional feature of some kind which lets them be turned on or off would be great.   Mozzerati 05:49, 2005 Apr 22 (UTC)
:: In answer to these objections,
* Yes, how to make them play well with other floating side objects is the chief question.  Articles like Warsaw Uprising, with or without notes, are already cluttered and would probably look better with a few full-width galleries than their a constant stream of sidelined images.
* That depends on the screen reader; what does the screen reader do when it comes to a floating table?  It will do the same thing with the note, since it is a floating table.  What does it do when it comes to an image with a caption?  It will do the same thing, because a captioned image is also a floating table.
*: typically screen readers are used with standard software such as elinks and do what that does, just reading a section of a standard CRT screen.  In other words, tables get pushed to the end of sections and read inline.  Software which attempts to work with windowed software us much more complex. Mozzerati 20:00, 2005 Jun 3 (UTC)
* Making their width a fixed percentage of the screen width ought to make them compatible with large and small screens
* I think footnotes are more encouraging to digression, since they can be as long as you wish without messing up layout.  Sidenotes must be short, by necessity.
::Shimmin 11:50, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)
Incidentally, in any case, could you please make a template for them which is compatible with (uses the same argument structure as) the inote template.  Probably you could put it at Template:snote ; the most important thing wrong with your current proposal (I keep my above disagreements, but can see that it's partly a matter of taste) is that you put inline html and don't use a template.. Using a template (or two if really needed) will let us covert to a new system much more easily in future.  Mozzerati 19:58, 2005 Apr 22 (UTC)
: Unfortunately, because MediaWiki breaks a paragraph if one attempts to put a table in the middle of that paragraph, I could not figure out how to implement this in an inote-compatible way.
: However, I did implement Template:hnote  which is inote-compatible and seems relatively foolproof as far as many different editors using them is concerned. Comments and suggestions would be helpful. In particular, can the browser be instructed to reduce the delay time needed to pop up the tooltip? Shimmin 11:16, Apr 24, 2005 (UTC)
I suggest footnotes presently be done in traditional ways, and later software changes may allow more ways to display the information.  An obvious improvement for the present system would be for the Edit screen to include two windows: the present text window and a second window with the References section.  (SEWilco 18:14, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sidenotes ? 

message: The "semantic linking" provided in the ref/note and rf/ent template pairs no longer seems to work. Paul August  ☎ 04:43, Jun 5, 2005 (UTC)
: Yes, that is because the id which is used as the link targets was generated within , and is part of what stopped working in the events discussed in the preceding section. (SEWilco 05:42, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Right.  All template expansion within HTML code has been disabled.  (SEWilco 22:12, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Semantic links" are also now broken (now works again)

message: I point out that some means of editing references should help keep references up to date.  I proposed an enhancement as Bug 2745: Have References text edit window on Edit pages as a starting point.  If there is the ability to edit References while editing an article section, References are more likely to be kept up to date.  An obvious extension is to have edit buttons which produce citation templates.  (SEWilco 23:06, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reference editing enhancement