Editing MycoTaxa:Village pump (technical)/Archive 1 (section)

== Needing the &lt;references/> tag ==

===Editing a section===
Say you edit an article section to add a new &lt;ref> item.  When you '''Show Preview''', the preview shows the article text but not the references, so you don't actually see the change you made. Or if you added text and a reference, you see part of the change you made, but not all of it.

When I run into this problem, I usually work around it by temporarily adding &lt;references/> at the end of the section.  Then I '''Show Preview''', fix any errors, remove &lt;references/>, and '''Save Page'''. But that's obviously error-prone, because one's instinct is to '''Save Page''' as soon as the errors are fixed, and it's  all too easy to forget to remove the &lt;references/> tag [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barnard%27s_Star&diff=165507795&oldid=165507676 and have to go back and do it afterwards].

A technical workaround occurs to me.  I suggest that if a section being edited contains a &lt;ref> tag but not &lt;references/>, the software should append a template reference like <nowiki>{{preview-references}}</nowiki>, which would expand to something<references/> like
<pre>
    ---
    ''The section being previewed contains the following references, which in ''
    ''the complete article will appear at the &amp;lt;references/> tag:''

    <references/>
</pre>
Of course, if you're editing only the text of the section and not the references, you don't really need to see them expanded, and they're just an annoyance. An alternative approach would be a separate '''Preview References''' button, but that seems like overkill to me.<references/>

===Checking consistency===
On a related point, for both a section and an article edit, it would be desirable to trap the case where the article contains one or more &lt;ref> tags without a &lt;references/> tag that will expand them, or where it contains two or more &lt;references/> tags.  (Experiment indicates that each &lt;references/> expands all &lt;ref> tags appearing earlier in the article, so there must be exactly one &lt;references/> tag that is after all &lt;ref> tags.)  I suggest that when a '''Show Preview''' is done, a check should be done on the entire article as it would exist if '''Save Page''' was done at this point, and if any of these erroneous situations exist, a warning should be issued (either within the preview window or elsewhere, but prominent enough that it won't be missed).

I think this should be a warning issued at preview time, not an error message preventing the save, because you have to consider what happens when someone adds the ''first'' reference to an article.  If they do it during a section edit, they don't want to be blocked from saving because they forgot to add a References section first.  Similarly, someone doing a cleanup pass through an article from top to bottom in order might add several references, saving sections one at a time, before they get to the end and add References.  But they need to be reminded to add that References section.

===Or thinking bigger===
Or, thinking bigger, perhaps there's a better approach -- although I guess I can't be the first person to think of this, so perhaps there are good reason why it isn't being used.  But right now it seems to me as though [[Right Thing#The Right Thing|the Right Thing]] is to forget the whole idea of explicit &lt;references/> tags -- send a bot through Wikipedia to get rid of them and their associated sections -- and instead simply have the whole section
<pre>
    ==References==
    <references/>
</pre>
appended ''implicitly'' to the wikitext of any article containing a &lt;ref> tag, at the time when the wikitext is rendered into HTML. (Or some equivalent behavior.) And the same for any section when it is being previewed.

This change, of course, would address both of the issues covered in my other two points.

--[[User:207.176.159.90|207.176.159.90]] 23:09, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

:On that last one, the only problem is that the references section is very often not the last section in the article, and really shouldn't be. The point of using the tag is to allow some flexibility in exactly where the references are placed and in formatting them. ''[[User:Csernica|TCC]]'' <small>[[User_talk:Csernica|(talk)]] [[Special:Contributions/Csernica|(contribs)]]</small> 01:26, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

::However, if (1) one or more &lt;ref> tags were encountered and (2) no &lt;references/> tag was encountered in the wikitext, then it might be a good idea to add something like "'''ERROR!! No &lt;references> tag was seen. ERROR!!''' - Cited references were:", and then to add an implicit &lt;references> tag. -- [[User:Wtmitchell|Boracay Bill]] 03:00, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

:::A warning message, rather than an error, likely would be a useful and not particularly difficult feature to implement. The notion of auto-adding the references tag, however, leaves open a whole slew of problems, one of which Csernia above alluded to. The exact nature of how the references block is to be added to pages is quite intentionally ''not'' explicitly defined. Where the references block occurs in an article should be left up to the author of the article, to allow him the option to format it as he wishes. There are many cases where it is in fact correct to ''not'' have a references block -- consider a template or infobox that cites various sources; it is usually better to have the sources cited in this template included in the references block of the page in which the template is transcluded than in the template itself. In fact, I very much so believe that one of the greatest problems with Cite at present is that it does not allow editors ''enough'' ability to customize how references are used on a particular page -- this proposal seeks to make their usage even less customizable for the sake of alleviating a very minor inconvenience. One thing I believe to be quite imperative to implement is the ability to define different classes of reference types within a given page, such that, for instance, "notes" and "sources" can be separated from one another. I also believe it important to allow articles to make use of different forms of in-text citation, i.e. MLA, which the current system does not. Much discussion about a reform of Cite has taken place recently, and we will likely soon see some changes to the system. Worth reading would be [http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/htdig/wikitech-l/2007-September/033539.html this recent thread] on Wikitech-l. [[User:AmiDaniel|AmiDaniel]] ([[User talk:AmiDaniel|talk]]) 03:21, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

::::Okay, if there's a whole slew of problems, forget that proposal.  But I would like to see my first two subsections addressed in that case. --[[User:207.176.159.90|207.176.159.90]] 05:07, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

::::: Your first two subsections are do-able. Unless there are objections, I'll try to implement something this weekend. In any case, Cite has a lot of problems that need to be addressed -- you've barely hit the tip of the iceberg :) [[User:AmiDaniel|AmiDaniel]] ([[User talk:AmiDaniel|talk]]) 06:33, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

::::AmiDaniel, are there cases where a &lt;ref> tag has been encountered and yet it is still correct to ''not'' have a references block?  In that situation, is it more useful to have the references expanded at  the very end of the article headed by a warning message, to have the warning message appear but the unexpanded references remain hidden, or to have the unexpanded references remain hidden with no warning (current behavior)? -- [[User:Wtmitchell|Boracay Bill]] 05:46, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
:::::Sure there have been. I can't think of one on enwiki off the top of my head, but I know that I have implemented templates of this style myself. The issue, however, is not about whether it should be okay to have a ref tag without a references tag; rather, it's about whether the decision of where or if to place such a tag should be made by the software or by the editor. IMO, the correct behavior would be to warn the editor, and the editor alone, following the saving of an edit that there are reference tags with no matching reference block. [[User:AmiDaniel|AmiDaniel]] ([[User talk:AmiDaniel|talk]]) 06:30, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

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