Using external reference list in MediaWiki

Question

I am making extensive use of the Cite extension in my own wiki. I have a lot of references per page, most of which will be also used in other pages.

What I am doing at the moment is defining the list of references at the end of the wiki page:

<references>
<ref name="ref1">Ref. 1</ref>
<ref name="ref2">Ref. 2</ref>
<references />

Then, whenever I need to refer to one of them I use them in the following way:

It has been previously shown by Group of Authors 1<ref name="ref1" /> that bla bla bla...

This works fine. However, defining the list of references is extremely tedious, and it is a waste of time needing to define the list for every page in the wiki when some of the references are the same among pages.

It would be very helpful if I could define a "master copy" of the reference list that could be accessed from each wiki page by just giving the reference's name. This is much in the same way that bibtex works, where you have a bibliography.bib file and you can just use the cite package in latex and include the reference in any of your documents by using \cite{ref1} and specifying the master file's location with \bibliography{bibliography}.

As a matter of fact, I would ideally prefer to use a solution in which references in mediawiki can be accessed directly from an external bibtex file, rather than with the Cite extension.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

References work even when they are put in templates, so that would allow you to have a “master list” of references.

If you want to be able to view all your references in BibTex format, Semantic MediaWiki has a function for that, using the Semantic Result Formats extension. That would also allow you to do more advanced processing of your references, though admittedly the threshold for starting to use SMW is a bit high.