I’m not going to spend 5 hours hyperlinking dozens of references all over the place. Not a good use of my time.
My sincere apologies, I should have phrased my comment more carefully. I’m not saying the issue is that you didn’t spend enough time polishing the article and adding references, because you clearly did.
My beef is with the post-processing done by the system. The fact that the effort you put it in attaching the references didn’t translate into maximum-convenience hyperlinks is a problem with the tools you were using, not with the amount of effort you put in.
The way I originally phrased it, with “you should” statements, didn’t make this clear. I was thinking in terms of the generic “you”, but the way I wrote it instead communicated that you personally had done something wrong. I’m sorry about that.
I second the recommendation below for the integration of a tool like wp-footnotes.
How is this different than a book?
It’s different than a book because it’s a webpage. :-)
One of the advantages of the web is that it is much more convenient to follow a hyperlink than to look up a citation. Maximizing usability and convenience in following links doesn’t solve every problem (i.e. the issue of retention of information read on Wikipedia), but it’s still a significant net improvement.
To use another example, I found out about Less Wrong because I found a link to it somewhere. I followed it to one sequence, thought it was cool, went on to another, and pretty soon realized I was onto something really neat.
If it had been a book reccomendation or a citation in the back of an intriguing paper, I would’ve been far less likely to get around to following up on it. Most recommendations and references do not yield anything that great. Having a way to check them faster encourages users to check more of them, because they can get more hits for the same amount of effort.
My sincere apologies, I should have phrased my comment more carefully. I’m not saying the issue is that you didn’t spend enough time polishing the article and adding references, because you clearly did.
My beef is with the post-processing done by the system. The fact that the effort you put it in attaching the references didn’t translate into maximum-convenience hyperlinks is a problem with the tools you were using, not with the amount of effort you put in.
The way I originally phrased it, with “you should” statements, didn’t make this clear. I was thinking in terms of the generic “you”, but the way I wrote it instead communicated that you personally had done something wrong. I’m sorry about that.
I second the recommendation below for the integration of a tool like wp-footnotes.
It’s different than a book because it’s a webpage. :-)
One of the advantages of the web is that it is much more convenient to follow a hyperlink than to look up a citation. Maximizing usability and convenience in following links doesn’t solve every problem (i.e. the issue of retention of information read on Wikipedia), but it’s still a significant net improvement.
To use another example, I found out about Less Wrong because I found a link to it somewhere. I followed it to one sequence, thought it was cool, went on to another, and pretty soon realized I was onto something really neat.
If it had been a book reccomendation or a citation in the back of an intriguing paper, I would’ve been far less likely to get around to following up on it. Most recommendations and references do not yield anything that great. Having a way to check them faster encourages users to check more of them, because they can get more hits for the same amount of effort.