James Hare wrote:
I think it should be reformed -- that is, it should be done the other way around.
<ref name="foobar"/>
then, at the bottom,
<references> foobar=When "Thingamajig" Isn't Enough: A History of Foo Bar. Jim Cadigan. 1997 </references>
or something like that
The old {{ref}}/{{note}} template system was like that and I've developed a strong distaste for it. I've done a lot of cleanup since cite.php was introduced and there were a lot of articles with dangling {{ref}}s that pointed nowhere or orphan {{note}}s that were no longer referenced. Cite.php isn't perfect but I like that those errors either can't happen at all (orphan footnotes don't exist) or produce obvious visual effects that allow them to be easily noticed and fixed (refs with no content appear as empty footnotes).
I suppose it's possible that by having it built into the wiki code explicitly rather than tacked on with a template hack will allow some of these issues to be made less of a problem, but my gut reaction is still negative at the thought of going back to a system similar to the old one.