Steve Bennett wrote:
Now, where the hell does meta information about individual or groups of effectively unrelated articles go? Bizarrely, the category namespace seems like the closest one! What else is there?
It should go into those individual or groups of articles, IMO. Possibly a template, that's part of the encyclopedia content and is often used for material that is common to a large group of articles.
I don't see how this helps. Putting <ref>s into an infobox is dangerous, as there's no guarantee the including page will actually have a <references> section...
I'm not suggesting an infobox. In the case of these Rambot articles, I'm proposing that the links to the [[Geographic references]] page be replaced (probably by a bot) with the references themselves, wrapped in <ref> tags. A part of this operation would of course be to ensure that there's a <references/> tag in the article to display them. I suppose you could make the individual cites into templates since they'll be so widely used, so that for example the bot would go around inserting the text <ref>{{cite 2002 US census}}</ref> or whatever.
Pretty much all articles should have a references section anyway, so this would be a very positive step IMO.