Ting Chen wrote:
I believe sometime we will go in this direction. But at the moment this would mean that the edit would be more complicated. The problem is if I edit a section, I put in <ref id="smith" />. But at the same time I cannot add <reference id="smith">...</reference> into the References and Notes section. I must do that either in two separate edits or I must edit the article as a whole. Also here we need a new technical solution.
Worse, someday the section may be moved to another article, or to its own article, and then <ref id="smith" /> becomes meaningless.
Back before the cite extension was added to Wikipedia, references were done almost entirely using a set of templates that behaved just as this proposals described. When the cite extension was added I spent a lot of time converting articles over to use it, and in the process I found a lot of broken references - links in the text that had no associated footnote, footnotes that had no associated links. It was a mess. With the current system it's impossible for a mess like that to happen since references are entirely self-contained.
Personally, I prefer the current system. Much more robust. If we were to split references and links again it would need to have a lot of warnings in 18-point red letters appear whenever breaks like this occurred.