Template talk:Infobox 2011–2012 Saudi Arabian protests

Latest comment: 11 years ago by Boud in topic Making referencing simple for editors

Making referencing simple for editors edit

IMHO references in either the lead or infobox of an article should be repeat references. If a piece of information is not important for the main body of the article, what justifies using it in one of these various sorts of summaries? There are a few exceptions to this, but very few.

There is a technically valid solution with the present version of mediawiki software as implemented here. If repeat references, i.e. with the same 'name="something"' attribute, both have the full reference details (author, date, url, title, etc.), then this is not a problem for rendering the reference list. i don't know what happens if the reference details are inconsistent between the two versions - probably the first (or last) one is used as a default.

So we could include all the references here "full-inline", i.e. with the full reference details in the "main" part of the infobox template, instead of (or in addition to) the refs= section of reflist. This would make the infobox source a bit more difficult to read, because repeat refs make the main text tidier, but since the infobox is structured anyway, probably that's a small price to pay.

This would solve the problem explained in the documentation - if someone needs to include the infobox in a new article, e.g. timeline for late 2012, then s/he will (at present) have to copy/paste most of the refs= references.

Probably the more frequent action of people adding "full" references to the template will not create problems.

Boud (talk) 19:03, 15 January 2012 (UTC)Reply

I think i've solved the problem using a subpage to be transcluded. See the present 21:10, 14 July 2012 (UTC) version of the template for details. Boud (talk) 21:10, 14 July 2012 (UTC)Reply

replacing by English-language ref edit

This infobox has to be compact, and it's going to be hard for English-only readers to work out the minimum number of references from these Arabic sources, so i'm replacing them by English-language sources. They could be added somewhere in one of the timeline articles as additional sources of info. Here they are so that they don't get "lost":

Boud (talk) 23:43, 27 January 2012 (UTC)Reply