Editing Incubator escapee wiki:Help desk/Archive 8 (section)

==Creating new anchors==

<div id="test"></div>

Is there any way to create an anchor on a Wiki page that is not a part of a section or subsection?  I would like to use the <nowiki>[[#link]]</nowiki> syntax in order to link from footnotes in the text to a corresponding footnote in the References section.  Instead of having footnotes refer to a manually numbered list (with the instrinsic problem of having to renumber each pair of footnotes whenever a footnote is added or deleted), I would have each footnote in the text refer to an anchor in the References section.  For instance, if I had "Henry Ford created the automobile" in the text, I would then have an entry in the References section with the appropriate reference, say (I'm making this up) "Smith, R. Automotive Weekly, 1988. page 69."  The anchor that I would use would have a shortened name of the reference, like #SmithR, or #Smith1988, or whatever is needed to avoid ambiguity.  I'd then place a footnote after the text with a reference to the anchor in the References.  This system allows one to have an extensive References list but avoids the problem of having to renumber footnotes.  This could be accomplished with the use of HTML anchor tags, but the <A></a> tags are disabled by Wiki.  Is there any other way to place anchors in the text that I'm not aware of?  I realize that each subsection is an anchor, but I don't want the References section to have each entry as a subsection, as that would make the text look messy.  Also, I would like the tags to be invisible rather than a part of the text. (In other words, I don't want "[Smith1988] or whatever to appear in the text of the bibliography.)  Any suggestions?   &mdash;[[User:Brim|Brim]] 21:56, Sep 18, 2004 (UTC)

:Nope. Improved footnote handling has been on the various wishlists for quite a while, but no one's gotten around to implementing it. -- [[User:Cyrius|Cyrius]]|[[User talk:Cyrius|✎]] 22:25, 18 Sep 2004 (UTC)

::See the comments on this at [[MediaZilla:192]] where "Forest" has created some patches that might address this feature request. There is also some discussion of it at [[meta:Footnotes]]. [[User:Angela|Angela]][[user talk:Angela|.]] 22:39, Sep 18, 2004 (UTC)

I found a system that works okay.  If I put the References in a Template, then it will hide those sections from the Table of Contents, so the TOC won't appear so messy from all of the references being seen as subsections.  It's a little cumbersome having to edit two documents (article and the template), but it's a temporary solution, until a better system gets implemented. &mdash;[[User:Brim|Brim]] 22:52, Sep 18, 2004 (UTC)
:There is also a low limit on the number of times a template can be used in an article - five I think. [[User:Rmhermen|Rmhermen]] 22:58, Sep 18, 2004 (UTC)

Yes, it is possible, make an anchor with <nowiki><div id=".."></div></nowiki> or add id=".." to the start tag of any existing [[w:HTML element|element]], 
e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Wikipedia:Help_desk#test and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_area#neth --[[User:Patrick|Patrick]] 02:15, 2004 Sep 19 (UTC)

:Thank you!  That is exactly what I was looking for, and it works great for my system of footnotes.  (Actually I had just found the answer posted on [[Wikipedia_talk:How_to_edit_a_page|Talk:How to edit a page]] by [[User:Merriam|Merriam]], and I was just coming here to post about it here). &mdash;[[User:Brim|Brim]] 18:54, Sep 19, 2004 (UTC)

Internal link style seems to work sometimes, not always: [[Wikipedia:Help_desk#test]] and [[List_of_countries_by_area#neth]] --[[User:Patrick|Patrick]] 02:22, 2004 Sep 19 (UTC)