[notahacker]

I have to say that whilst Wikipedia's referencing implementation and policies are horrible from an editor perspective, I think they're about right for the reader. The raison d'être for the footnotes is to indicate the statement can be verified for editors and other determined fact-checkers rather than to point the average reader towards other encyclopedic material, and many of the references are page references for dead tree media. As such they're not intended to be the first point of departure for the median reader, and so shouldn't have the same prominence as the internal links or "further reading" external links, let alone significantly more prominence if they support a few facts referenced at different points in the the article. Despite being afforded less prominence than the Wikilinks, they remain much more usable than footnotes (or especially endnotes) in a book.

I'm also struggling to see how the Newslines implementation would be a better solution in the case of the Tom Hanks article referenced in your blog. I mean, would linking the word "immigrated" to a seven minute YouTube clip mostly not on the subject of Tom Hanks' ancestry reduce confusion? I think it would make it worse. The problem isn't the extra click, the problem is that the source is a fraction of a seven minute chatshow clip.

I agree with your points on timelines and data, but in fairness Wikipedia isn't and shouldn't try to be the whole internet. People who have the programming/UX skills to a specific subset of content appropriate form and functionality are always going to be a step ahead of random strangers tweaking text.

[sparkzilla]

We use a footnoting system to reference books, although with increasing digitization this should be less necessary. As for the Tom Hanks example, you're right, that should include the YouTube "start time" parameter to link directly to the exact time he talks about his ancestry. Adding that parameter shows another advantage of direct linking -- that it can go deep into a video source.

I don't agree that the footnotes system is good for the reader or editor, because it obfuscates the link between the text and the source. It is very easy to add biased information to any wiki page. Let's say someone writes "Donald Trump calls McCain a war hero" but the reader thinks, "Hmm that's not what I heard". On Wikipedia they have to go to the footnotes and then click through, losing track of where they were at on the main article. How many people will do that? Not many. So the reader gets misinformation, and loses trust in the site, and the bias remains.

Instead if a link direct to the video is added then the person will know straight away. Even better if the video is embedded directly, but that's another story.