Template talk:References

Revising the design

This template is quite useful, but it should just be simpler. A big grey page-wide box at the bottom takes up more space than it saves by being collapsible. (who ever struggles if there's a few links at the very end of the page? Navboxes waste more space than them, always).

It only needs to do this -

References
1. Note 1.
2. Note 2.
3. Link 1.
4. Link 2.

And that's it. Just auto-included header and then a list aligned to left.

At the moment it says "References" twice - both as a header and the table title - which is unnecessary. And it just doesn't need to be a table (unless there's strong technical reason?).

Just a simple list that ties to the cite tags in the text should be plenty enough. Cvoxalury (talk) 02:39, 17 July 2024 (PDT)

User:THE OWL, why did you decide to remove the automatic header[1]? The subsequent edits to all the pages that use the template also caused some of them to now be partially in English[2] (that one was fixed later). Cvoxalury (talk) 03:17, 18 July 2024 (PDT)

The header was one of the things that worked just fine. Not only was it auto-translated, but consistent on all pages. If editors are to be expected to manually add it above the template, there can be loss of consistency on translated pages in particular. Cvoxalury (talk) 04:17, 18 July 2024 (PDT)

I'll get the header back later (most likely tomorrow). I forgot that the HTML tags (<h2></h2>) are not editable and this could have been a good fix for the problem of having __NOEDITSECTION__ in the template.

- THE OWL (talk) 13:34, 18 July 2024 (PDT)

It not having an [Edit] button isn't that big a deal. The main Edit button still works, and people are likely to be editing the whole text for them anyway because the work needs to be done both in the body for {{cite}}s and in the references section for actual reference text.

What really needs work done is not having it as a table, per reasons listed above. To put it bluntly, it looks dumb when it's a table, and wastes space. Cvoxalury (talk) 02:58, 19 July 2024 (PDT)

And having a fake Edit button is even worse than not having any... can you just roll back, please? Cvoxalury (talk) 02:59, 19 July 2024 (PDT)