Template talk:Infobox 2011–2012 Saudi Arabian protests

Making referencing simple for editors

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

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":

  • القطيف تشيع جثمان الشهيدين المحيشي والفلفل عصر اليوم rasid.com
  • سقوط شهيدين آخرين برصاص الأمن في القطيف rasid.com

Boud (talk) 23:43, 27 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template_talk:Infobox_2011–2012_Saudi_Arabian_protests&oldid=1219457986"