User:CitationTool/Hybrid referencing

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Hybrid referencing is a system for using the m:Cite.php markup style, but still editing references in a block. It has been implemented on the "live" articles Shoshone National Forest and Cuba with apparent success. If a modification is made to the m:Cite.php internal logic, this style will also work with references grouped at the end of an article (or per-section).

Section one

A number of experts contend Foo.. However, other experts believe Bar might hold. The intermediate, Baz position is sometimes held by both sides.

What was done

Some slightly odd markup was added just below the lead of this article to group together all the named references. The hope is that this avoids creating clutter in the edit window for sections, and lets editors give simple named references. The markup looks like:

{{hide|
<ref name=alpha>{{cite book
 | author=Alpha, Bob
 | title=Cool book on topic
 | publisher=Wikipedia Press
 | year=2006 }}</ref>
<ref name=beta>Beta, Sally. ''Sally weighs in''.  Note that Dr. Beta revises this analysis in ''Later work''</ref>
<ref name=gamma>Gamma, Yuri. ''Yet another one''</ref>
}}

This, confessedly, looks a little bit like "code", and will be offputting to novice editors. However, it does keep each reference on a fairly readable line by itself, and the <div> details can simply be copied as a template. These references may (and probably should), of course, also contain citation templates rather than free form descriptions.

Known issues

The "codiness" of the hidden references seems generally resolved by the use of the {{hide}} template, but there are a couple extra problems. If a non-standard monobook.css is installed, the hidden <div> may introduce vertical whitespace. Possibly a more important issue is that even a hidden <ref> tag is considered a reference for enumeration purposes. That is the "a" link is to the hidden tag, not to those that are visible. Given, however, that that linked letters are mysterious to start with, it is not clear how much this matters. That is, in a long article, a note link that reads "[17]" might actually link back-and-forth to "17 e" in the References section. But a reader has no way to tell that from the form of the reference itself, but only by counting number of links to that particular footnote that occur prior to the current one. So adding an extra "a" at the beginning of a list of meaningless letter links might be fine.

Section two

Just putting this here to force a TOC; I'm curious if it lessens the harm of the extra vertical spacing.

Reference sources

• Foo Bar (2006). How to avoid the pitfall of m:Cite.php referencing. Wikipedia.