Template talk:Inote

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is the inote template, standing for invisible note. It has no content and this is deliberate. The aim is to provide a way to make notes in the source text which will show nothing in the final visible text, but which can be tracked using "what links here" from the inote template. Also, in future, it should be possible to convert these invisible notes into whatever note/reference system gets developed for wikimedia. This system has been created due to the fact that certain Wikipedia editors find current solutions too ugly and/or inflexible to use in articles they edit.

Contents 1 Usage 2 Conversion 3 Reasons not to use inote 4 See also 5 Comments 6 Deprecated

[edit] Usage

It is important that the template is used correctly so that later we can recover data from it. Correct usage means that the first argument is the text of a note and the second, optional, argument is a suggested label for the note

{{inote|see Jordan page 25|Jordan-25}}

Put references proper in a separate references section which is at the end of your article. It's definitely worth considering making some of your inline references proper footnotes which will then be usable to the reader (see below)

Please note that there seems to be a consensus that footnotes (and so inotes) shouldn't be used for digressions. That should also apply to inote. Normally, if they are worth saying, they can at least form a section of some other article and be linked normally instead.

[edit] Conversion

Citations using the inote convention may be converted to the ref/note convention using a Perl script called inote.pl. The script is in the public domain and improvements by other users are welcome.

[edit] Reasons not to use inote

There are some special circumstances where {{inote}} might be a good idea (extreme referencing, with a reference for every single fact). However it has serious disadvantages. Here are some reasons to consider other methods such as footnotes.

• footnotes won't be available for all other users (see below for more effects)
  • not everybody knows how to edit yet
  • not everybody will think about editing (although if you add {{explain-inote}} in the References section, that will help)
  • not everybody is reading Wikipedia; many clones don't support editing
• those who don't know about the footnotes won't be able to verify
• you lose a chance to encourage further reading and to help people learn more themselves
• fewer people are likely to read your references and so spot errors in them

Again, if you mix in a tasteful number of footnotes for your most important interesting and strange facts, with your invisible notes, most of these problems go away.

[edit] See also

• Wikipedia:Footnote3 - a system for automatically numbered footnotes
• Wikipedia:Footnote4 - a system for manually numbered footnotes.

[edit] Comments

Is there anything invisible that will be easily convertible into a more automated system, like {{cacanote|Pelican shit in danger, [[New York Times]] April 2, 1940 page 6}}? --SPUI (talk) 22:08, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

You might be interested in {{inote}} and {{explain-inote}}. --Quuxplusone 00:51, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Wait a minute, I got lost in my Firefox tabs. :) I don't know what you mean, then — you do seem to be asking for exactly what {{inote}} does as of July 2005. --Quuxplusone 00:54, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

I don't much care for the double argument set-up, and thus do not use that. I just use a single argument (only one | ). My idea of a perfect referencing system would be to just display superscripted small numbers in the prose and clicking on such a number will expand it, exposing whatever citation was hidden. Mouse-over text should also display the same citation when a mouse hovers over the the number. An automatically-created ==Notes== section would be at the end of the article with numbers and citations that correspond to the numbered citations in the prose. Those without JavaScript would be #jumped to the corresponding number in the ==Notes== section when they clink on a number in the prose. --mav 21:57, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Agreed, that's exactly what I hope could be done, and what my "cacanote" example would be converted into. --SPUI (talk) 23:30, 25 Apr 2005 (UTC)

There are two issues mixed together above: "citation information" and "citation display". Once citation information has been stored, there are many possibilities for displaying it. Although the MediaWiki software presently only supports a few ways to display the information, that can change. Gathering and storing the information on source material is important so it is available for use, whatever the user interface is. This is being discussed at Wikipedia_talk:Footnote3#Footnotes_vs._inline_web_references and other places. (SEWilco 07:05, 12 July 2005 (UTC))

For the original question, you seem to want an invisible note which can be further used in the future. Go to the Sandbox and see what happens if you use inote as a wrapper around a citation template: Wikipedia:Cite_your_sources#Citation_templates. I expect that soon citations bots will be able to parse citation templates for future needs, and inote support is already in a User:SEWilcoBot TODO. (SEWilco 07:12, 12 July 2005 (UTC))

[edit] Deprecated

Surely this should be considered deprecated? It was specifically created as something to hold references in until cite.php was adopted - now it has been, its purpose seems to be fulfilled. TheGrappler 11:04, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

I actually have used this thing once or twice for putting comments inside of reference tags, since at the time (not sure if it's still the case) putting a plain HTML comment inside a reference tag caused a bug. But yes, using this as a referencing system in itself should probably not be done; "invisible" notes are completely useless to an ordinary reader and even as an experienced Wikipedia editor I find it a tremendous hassle digging through source code for them. It doesn't look like a whole lot of articles are using it for referencing; Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Explain-inote has only 281 articles using it right now (and I just randomly checked a few and found that they didn't actually use inote for citations, so there may be significantly fewer than that). Still, these should all be converted over IMO. Bryan 17:55, 3 June 2006 (UTC)

However, I've noted that many articles where I used inote originally have already been converted to cite.php, so that number does not really reflect inote's usage at peak. However, I've noted on a couple of pages where I originally used inote as the citation method, that those who coverted to cite.php did so without checking the consequences of their work. Where, for example, inote was used to cite an entire table, convserion to cite.php has resulted in an ugly on-screen appearance.

Our articles should facilitate easy reading, and not be punctuated by footnotes for every statement. The cite.php is grossly overused, and inotes still helps in referencing lesser contentious details. I don't think its deprecated. =Nichalp «Talk»= 07:48, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

I still use inote in conjunction with cite.php; It is useful to add additional detail to a ref. For example, I often give book and page numbers in refs but add paragraph and other citation info right afterward with inote. Of course, I could use HTML comments, but that was always the case. Inote simply looks nicer in wikitext and is easier to distinguish for me. -- mav 21:45, 12 June 2006 (UTC)