Numbered footnotes or references

ACTUALLY, I think this would be pretty easy to do. You can set a page anchor at every reference and have them all listed at the top or bottom, and then when you need to change one, just click the reference you want from the list, and it will take you to the page anchor so you can update it easily.

Also, you could also do this now, and not have to wait till PBwiki 2.0. If you're good with HTML, you might find this helpful (check out specifically the Anchor and Name Attribute).

Thanks. The anchors would let you change something already there, but this is for text where there could be 200 or 300 references. The idea is that the author could go in, add a quick update as needed, put in the new reference if needed, and then all the other referenced would be renumbered.

Ohhhhhh. Hmm. I think this is something that cannot be done with HTML, but might be possible to program and then integrate, maybe via a plugin. However, a wiki page of text with 200-300 references will be REALLY big - a better option might be to split it up content-wise so it's easier to read, and will be faster to load.

A wiki isn't really like a static webpage, it's supposed to be something you can grow and add to, but it's also intended to be easy to use and understand - a hundreds-of-pages long wiki page is going to be pretty intimidating, and probably won't feel welcoming enough to edit on a regular basis.

I think you're thinking "Mom and Pop", who do often need to be coddled. However, PBwiki's current interests seem to be Education and Business, and both of those areas often hire professionals, who don't really have a problem with large documents. Someone working on a research paper shouldn't have to split their work up into multiple wiki pages simply to deal with PBwiki's inadequacies. Also, what would you do with the footnotes/references if you split it up? Have all the references on their own, separate page?

There are extremely simple, time-tested methods for handling large documents (like collapsible divs) that don't require authors to modify their creativity to accommodate PBwiki's lack thereof.

I've looked high and low for a wiki that lets you create content that's made to be consumed as a printed page - no joy! I think there were a few cases of DocBook wikis but nothing hosted and nothing that "just works" (I particularly needed LaTeX).

There's a contradiction between one big wiki page (an entire book in one wiki) and the ability to collaborate (wikis don't allow concurrent editing). If you're going to go the wiki route, you'll almost certainly have to break it up into many wiki pages (one per chapter at best... one per section at worst!)

I think there's a great market for using wikis to create "book" content, but the wiki markup will never cut it. DocBook always seemed a create framework...

Paul,

"Editing" a book is not the same as "writing" a book. Frankly, I don't consider edits as a collaborative process. E-mail, blog comments, or a newsgroup would work just as well (maybe even better).

I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, but wikis are COLLABORATIVE! Edits are (almost always) not unless edits to edits are commonplace.

Thanks for all the replies. Currently, the "text" I am asking about is already a static online textbook - endotext.com. There are 100s of authors. Unfortunately, updates move no more quickly than a hardbound book. I was looking at the WIKI format as it would allow the authors to quickly update new material - ie the study just released this morning. An editor could also do this update. The key is that this updating has to be simple and quick and easy for these many authors. People who had been to the site could then receive notice that there had been an update. So while this may not be the anyone can add info WIKI - it actually does fit how they can work. Anyway, it does not seem that updating reference is an easy task, at least not yet.