 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Reference data should be maintained in a centralized database akin to Wikimedia Commons for images |
- This proposal, initially titled "A suggested improvement #0001" is from February 2007 (Wikipedia had only 1.5 million articles).
There have been critiques of the accuracy of Wikipedia, and whether Wikipedia is progressing in a direction which will cause a greater fraction of articles to be highly accurate and well-written.[1] The current system of citing references does not lend itself to both goals. In addition, it is not amenable to many useful process changes:
- The length and syntactic complexity of the templates required interfere with Wikipedians who intend to make edits to the style of writing or the article organization. It is too difficult to edit text containing interspersed notes.
- There is no central repository of the references which have been cited by Wikipedia. If a reader wishes to evaluate the quality of all the references cited by Wikipedia articles, this author is not aware of a facility which would provide a list. Editors have no central repository to search for useful references.
- References do not integrate with existing outside repositories such as PubMed. (Although templates and macros exist which do create links to PubMed such as the {{PMID}} template which creates a link based on PubMed ID (PMID).)
- There is no central mechanism by which a reference may be deemed unsuitable to the purposes of Wikipedia.
- Reference names are not portable across article space. Although a reference may be repeated by optionally assigned name throughout any one article; a reference created for citation in one article may not be reused in a second article without copying the reference information to that second article.
- There is no central mechanism for updating references which may incorporate or generate URLs that should be amenable to centralized updating.