Last modified: 2014-09-24 09:44:57 UTC
Some of our Wikipedia articles are increasingly cluttered with referencing superscripts. These are necessary for verifiability purposes, but detrimental to readability of the text. I therefore propose a UI element which would allow hiding these. This element could be a button or hyperlink, either at the top of the article or the start of each section, or a global preference set by the user.
These items are currently labelled as class="reference"; this is governed by [[Mediawiki:cite_reference_link]]. If you want to hide them, alter your personal CSS to hide that class. Similarly, the list of references is labelled as class="references". HTH HAND
there should thou be a possibillity to hide individual references, simlar to LaTeX \nocite
It doesn't really make sense to hide individual references; citation is important, especially for things like encyclopedias and any other site which needs to be able to present evidence for factual claims. If we start allowing editors to hide single reference items, then other users could become confused. It does make sense to allow users to temporarily hide references for a page view, which could be approached using JavaScript. As Phil points out above, more permanent, per-user hiding of references, can be done via custom CSS.
Yes, you should only be able to hide all or none, and this should be in the user's power, not the editor's.
Somewhat related to this would be the ability to make the <ref> containing the actual data to be hidden; this would allow an editor to put <ref name="foo" /> tags all through an article and then have a <ref name="foo" hideme>{{cite blah}}</ref> at the end, which allows the references to work but unclutters the article without displaying a spurious reference anywhere. Let me know if this belongs in a different bug report...
Bug 5997.
*** Bug 10579 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Report was apparently closed as a duplicate of bug 5997. Reopening to ask for clarification - bug 5997 is a very different proposal, although subsequent commenters raised the issue of bug 5997. This bug should not be closed as a dupe if the original report refers to a different problem. Also, please don't use bug reports as excuses to offload your own pet problems. Open them as separate reports, or keep them to yourselves.
Indeed, seems unrelated. Don't know whether it's worth the effort to add a UI element for hiding UI elements... ;) But it would probably be pretty easy to do as a JS widget. (Poke a stylesheet and they all hide/show.)
I've seen articles go through cycles. Somebody adds a fact tag, questioning if something is true (sometimes, they actually remove something that's true because they don't believe it). Next, another editor restores the text, if necessary, and adds a reference, possibly to something already listed as a reference in the article (sometimes this means moving the reference from an explicit list to a ref tag). Quite frequently, the reference was added at the same time as the text, but the first editor hasn't gone into the history to ascertain that. Finally, another editor removes the ref tag because it's unnecessary detail to cite every single sentence in an article. Wait a while and the process starts anew. And, if there is a discussion on the talk page, it's never looked at or is actually gone because of archiving. Two things happen: We have citation/reference wars, and we have overly cluttered references all over the place. Just look at the hard-to-read page [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama] and you'll see what I mean -- one citation for every 25 words (a total of 216) and multiple runs of three and four citations in a row. And this is a featured article! Here is my suggestion on how things could work to address these problems: 1. By default, only the first reference to something appears superscripted in the text. Later ones are only visible in the source, unless an option is set. 2. Multiple references which are to the same source with a different page number or the same URL with a different hash are treated similarly. 3. When multiple references appear in a row, only a single citation is shown. If (5) is adopted, there is one * to the set; if (5) is not adopted, the refs are shown as a group, e.g., [33-37] or [33-37,15], with the latter case for a single re-reference following multiple references. 4. A reference can be marked as "minor" in the source. Minor references do not appear in the text unless the option is set. They do, however, appear in the references section with backlink(s). In the Barack Obama example, the first 43-word sentence contains 6 references and that's only because nobody's required a citation for where Obama's father was from. I would make refs 6, 7, and 9 minor, leaving 8 as major (and I'd delete 10 and 11 as irrelevant to the sentence). And ... 5. Display all in-text refs as superscripted *'s instead of [n]. It's smaller and will hurt readability less. The numbers appear in the printable version of a page or (possibly) if a user turns on an option. The numbers are a historical artifact from the world of paper that we should abandon. (I've separated #5 because I realize it's a bit off-topic for this bug report, but I think its part of a complete solution).
This adds a link to the sidebar to toggle the dispaly of the in-text footnote markers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Zhaofeng_Li/RefToggle.js
