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Is it normal to have references in a template like this? it seems overly confusing. What if I just want one of them? What if I want to re-reference one (but not all) of them elsewhere in the article? Seems to me this will be pretty confusing to editors. Why not just put the references in the pages as needed? (Surely we don't need all five in every page?) Staecker (talk) 14:11, 29 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
This is unusual but not unheard of; I actually created this in my sandbox awhile back and just implemented it recently, so I can't recall from which article I got the idea. In any case, at the time there was more active discussion/controversy on the notes, and the references were inconsistent among articles. There was a lot of adding "allegedly" to articles and that sort of thing, editors doubting a single source, etc. I was actually going through articles adding additional ones and updating the Digitalwebbing.com dead link, and realized it was a bit of a chore across a dozen articles or so. I also wondered about future maintenance; just now I converted the references to template form, which would have been more cumbersome if I had to figure out which articles had the refs in the first place.
In any case, you make an interesting point about reusing a particular reference within an article, but a) so far that hasn't been an issue, and b) you could always do a secondary, trimmed-down version of the same reference for additional uses, as is commonly done for additional page number references from the same book used across an article (see Margot Fenring, refs #7-#12). I don't see what's so confusing about having a template, editors see them all the time. And perhaps every article doesn't need all five refs, but I say the more the better when talking about something controversial; they represent five different sources, and each has a slightly different bit of information that add up to a big picture. — TAnthonyTalk 02:57, 12 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I should note that you can reuse any of the citations in this template later in an article using the typical <ref name=name/> command for the citation in question. Although the original citation is technically not written out in the article, the template makes the page think that it is, and so it is readily available for re-use.— TAnthonyTalk 05:40, 3 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
