confocaloid wrote: March 29th, 2025, 5:12 am
... there is only one reference (which could and should be improved, ideally there should be links to sources for all patterns). I don't see in what way it's confusing or "dense".
That one reference is definitely a good example of a format that has been showing up more often just recently -- that I didn't know was even possible until sometime last year.
I can see how it could be described as "dense". In some ways, once people get used to it, that could be an advantage. Let's see what people think about it if I lay it out as a clear example here.
The current form of that particular reference example is this:
{This is the sentence being footnoted.}<ref>{{LinkForumThread|format=ref|f=2|t=1437|p=145447|title=Re: Oscillator Discussion Thread|author=David Raucci|date=May 11, 2022}}</ref>
...
==References==
<references />
-- where the "f=" and "t=" parameters are optional, in the sense that the link will work just fine without them. Notice that the post number only has to be added in one place (green).
This is a very easy reference format to copy from another article, and adjust to create a new reference -- especially for an article that currently does not have a References section yet. Just copy and paste some other dense-format reference, fix the post number, the title, the author, and the date, and add "
==References=={newline}<references />" as the last section of the article.
Here's what would have to be added to create the same reference in the old "non-dense" format. This is the way references always used to be laid out in LifeWiki articles, and it never occurred to me to question whether there was a less convoluted option:
{This is the sentence being footnoted.}<ref name="post145447" />
...
== References ==
<references>
<ref name="post145447">{{LinkForumThread
|format = ref
|title =Re: Oscillator Discussion Thread
|p = 145447
|author = David Raucci
|date = May 11, 2022
}}</ref>
</references>
It's a whole lot easier to mess up this format and get big red ugly citation errors in your article previews. This is partly because of the nested <references> and <ref> tags having to be done correctly, but mostly because the post number has to be in agreement in three places (red).
I'm currently in favor of allowing the "dense reference" format as a standard format, and possibly even recommending it as a preferred format -- simply because it makes it significantly more likely that new editors will be able to easily learn how to add references based on a very simple and obvious template, without being put off by weird errors involving name agreement.
