Reference Library

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Hi everybody

Tahitiii came up with a great idea!

Is it possible for this Forum to create a reference library whose substance can be quoted directly onto threads easily?

Maybe I should put this in a different place? I really like the idea of the reference library where one could directly quote from onto threads.

You can pm TallyMan or Cornflake. They will probably move this to the WP discussion section though so they'll see it anyway I guess.

Thanks, Wozeree!

[Moved from General Autism Discussion to WrongPlanet.net discussion]

A Reference Library?
Umm, that's what the Internet already does...

You can add a link to anything online just by typing or copy/pasting the URL, as in:
http://www.wrongplanet.net
...or specific links to data within a page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism#Mechanism
...or a fancier version of the same thing:
See the information here on Wikipedia.
...or even specific WP posts - here's a link to your post above:
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp5987464.html#5987464

Quotes are created in a post by enclosing the text to quote between special tags; "quote" tags. They're typed like this:

and look like this in a post:
It's also possible to add a name to the quote: or reference sections from websites: These use a modified version of ordinary quote tags: [code][quote="A Person"]...some text[/quote][/code] looks like this in a post: [quote="A Person"]...some text[/quote]
Always link to some reference and maybe quote a short extract from it - copying whole pages from other sites is likely to cause problems with copyright. It's also inefficient and often loses the fonts and other formatting.

Thanks Cornflake!

Actually, my suggestion was a little simpler than that.
Everyone thought it was a really good thread and wanted to make it a sticky.

I'm not sure what it would mean to set it up so that "substance can be quoted directly onto threads easily?" I was just thinking of moving the whole thread to a special forum for the really good stuff, with moderator assistance, instead of stickifying everything. The "search" thingie doesn't always work for me. I was involved in a really good thread a couple of years ago that I know must still be here somewhere, but I couldn't find it.

If all of this material, with all the different interests and opinions of what might be really good or not, was moved into a single forum - then you would end up with a forum full of all sorts of random stuff that is really good or extremely interesting to someone, but only the built-in site search tool available to find things in it. This would be... rather messy.
Also, being a single forum, there would be no way of making "compartments" within it to help keep things tidy - that's the purpose of a forum.
The nearest would be threads - and by now, we're back where we started from.

But there is a very easy solution and everyone accessing WP already has it: browser bookmarks.

A forum, or thread, or single post can be bookmarked like any other web page.
Bookmarking a forum or thread is straightforward, but it's not so clear with a single post.
The first line, the post header, starts with "Posted: ", followed by the posting date & time - but to the left of this is a tiny icon - a square with a folded corner; your mouse pointer will change to a pointing finger icon as it's moved over it.
To bookmark a post (or a point in a thread - it's the same thing) you can either move your mouse pointer onto this icon and do right-click | bookmark this link (the wording varies with browsers) or, just click on it with the mouse as usual. This will "promote" it to become the main URL displayed by your browser and it can now be bookmarked through the normal browser menu functions.

As regards setting something up so that content can be quoted easily in threads - that functionality already exists, as I'd explained above.
Content can be incorporated as links to other WP content, quotes of other WP content, links to off-site content or quotes of off-site content.

Thanks Cornflake!

Thanks, Cornflake. I never saw that little square before.
Good enough. I don't know how the vague notion I had would work anyway.

I was thinking more of a forum specifically for research articles. At least that's what I was thinking people were talking about. That's originally why I had suggested it sticky for that article. Aside from all the copy and pasting stuff, would the mods be willing to create a forum specifically for research articles?

Only Alex can create forums and historically, he is reluctant to do so.
Also, creating a forum for assorted articles of interest will just create a shoebox full of unrelated snippets with no useful means of separating or searching them. For example - what does "research articles" mean?

Rather than try to make WP into an ever-expanding reference point for articles that can already be found via Google or other engines, and that might only be of interest to very few people, it's more practical to bookmark them locally in your browser and introduce the information to a topic as the need arises.