I don't know if it is possible to link numbered notes to items in a subpage called Sources, or if it would be better to link from the numbered notes at the bottom to the subpage... My preference is to stick with numbered notes, to avoid cluttering the text.
Any techie comments on choices here?
I agree that auto-numbered notes which get accumulated and displayed elsewhere are the way to go, and ideally, they'd be on a separate sub-page. I have investigated at some length (i.e. enough to cause my brain to threaten to liquify and run out my ears, but not enough to actually get something up and running) as to whether that is feasible to to achieve, technically.
The short, non-technical, answer is that we probably can't do it with the MediaWiki <ref> system, but that we probably could adapt the older {{ref}} system (written using templates, and used on Wikipedia before <ref> was written) to put notes on a subpage.
The long, technical, answer (warning: prepare for brain liquifaction!) is that <ref> probably won't work because it basically only works on a single page. In response, I had the clever idea of wrapping citations in a template that, depending on whether a parameter ("showrefs") was defined or not, supressed the normal page text, i.e. the
other text on the page, and then transcluding the entire article page in the Notes subpage. In other words. for the article page, the article text was shown,
and <ref>s were processed normally (to produce the nice little auto-numbered superscripts). On the 'notes' subpage, when the article page was transcluded, with the "showrefs" parameter defined, the article text would be suppressed, and only the <ref>s processed; the <references/> tag, inserted at the bottom of the notes sub-page, would then print them out as usual. Alas, I couldn't find a way to suppress the main text! My first thought was to wrap the <refs>, for the "showrefs" case, in paired "-->" and "<--", (note reverse order), and start the transclusion with "<!--", etc, thereby suppressing the text. I also tried using <onlyinclude></onlyinclude> around the refs in the "showrefs" case. Alas, I couldn't make either of these work, because the markup that was supposed to suppress the article text was always being interpreted at the wrong point in the template evaluation. And later, reading up, I found
this bug, which, oddly enough, didn't seem to have bitten me (perhaps because my <refs> weren't included directly, but in an argument). Perhaps someone who's more familiar with MediaWiki hackery can figure out a way to make this basic concept work; if so, hooray!
Anyway, I had a very quick look at
the old footnote system, and I think we can
probably make it do basically what we want. In addition, using that would have the nice feature that the clickable [1] etc links would go to the right place (the Notes subpage), which they wouldn't have with the <ref> hack (above). It does have some disadvantages (which is why it's been superseded by <ref> on Wikipedia); see "Disadvantages and future improvements" at the bottom of the page.
If people want to try this, I'm willing to import the ref/note templates and hack them to use a "Notes" subpage - but it may be a certain amount of work, so please only ask if we're serious.
Noel
