For the Wikipedia policy on references, see Wikipedia:Cite sources.

Why Wikipedia needs a better system for references

The quality of many articles could be improved by easing the use of references. Right now most Wikipedia articles contain a host of facts for which there is no stated source. Oftentimes this is because the text is simply written from a knowledgable party and is not based on any specific source, but in cases where attribution -is- possible it is highly desirable. It allows verification by others, allows readers to learn more, and provides a mechanism for assessing the strength and neutrality of claims made in articles.

State of the art

At the present time, Wikipedia has a very rudimentary system of referencing, based either on collection of sources at the bottom of a text, or the inclusion of hyperlinks within the body of a text (like so [1]).

Proposed changes

It would be desirable for Wikipedia to make use of a reference format similar to that used by scholarly journals, that would combine the above features. That is, the text of an article may be peppered with reference links [2]. Reference links would have consistent numbering: the same link would always be assigned the same reference number (right now they do not). At the end of the text the references would be collected and listed:

References:

1. http://www.google.com
2. http://www.ebay.com

Since links by themselves are not very descriptive it would be nice to provide an alternate format:

{reference text (e.g. for books) or url + descriptive text|reference keyword}

e.g.

{http://www.google.com - Google Search Engine|GOOGLE}

Subsequent references may refer by keyword alone: {GOOGLE}. At the end of the text the full reference text will be listed, allowing us to reference books, websites, etc., and include descriptive text as well:

1. http://www.google.com - Google Search Engine
2. Stevenson, Robert Louis. "A Child's Garden of Verses",

Bantam Publishing, 1974

If we desire to include "additional links", i.e. links to books or articles that we do not specifically reference in the text but are still of general interest, we might use a pipe trick: {http://www.yahoo.com|}, which would make text appear in the auto-generated References section but would be invisible within the body of the article.

Alternative - BiBTeX-like

Maybe it would be a good idea to include a central registry for references. This way users might be even more encouraged to use references. A good example is the BiBTeX system for TeX documents: Every time I learn about a new book, I put it into my central BiBTeX file and invent a keyword for it. All my articles and documents reference that same file. In the body text I simply use a reference to the keyword. Then I run LaTeX, BiBTeX, and LaTeX twice again and have my Reference list.

There could be special "Reference:Author-Jear" style pages in the wiki. Maybe with the beginning of the title included in the Name, as well: Some unambigous but not too cumbersome way should be found to construct that keyword/title. A common choice for BiBTeX is <Lastname>:<Capital letters of title>-<last two digits of year>.

Now that there are Wiki Pages for single Books/Articles/Webpages..., these could simply be referenced by normal Wikipedia entries. However, that is not really what was intended in the first place. Some special reference type like the one above should be invented. Something like {Google:Webpage} should produce an entry like [1] AND an entry in the automatically generated list of references at the end of the page. The precise form of that entry in the list of references would be somehow defined on the page "Reference:Google:Webpage". There, a special element could be used to generate the long entry on that page and the maybe shorter entry in the list of references in a standard format. An obvious choice for this special element would be the type used by BiBTeX. But maybe that should be simplified a bit.

Since it might be more cumbersome at times to include new references this way, it could be a good idea to combine both alternatives.

Also, this scheme might go beond the scope of wikipedia. Maybe there is another project already doing that Bibliography stuff. There are specialized projects like http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/index.shtml, which does a great job for articles in and related to physics.

References

1. http://www.google.com Web site of the Google search engine