Quoting Angela beesley@gmail.com:
On Dec 12, 2007 10:52 PM, River Tarnell river@wikimedia.org wrote:
so, the first thing i notice when editing Wikipedia articles these days is that they're full of <ref> tags that make it nearly impossible to find the actual text of the article. the problem seems to be that the entire reference is inline in the text. while this is useful for locality of editing, wouldn't it be nice if it would be close to the text, but not inline?
I think this, along with {{fact}} and other tags, should be moved out of the edit box completely. People should be able to add meta data, interlanguage links, references, trust values, feature stars, AfD notices, stable version flags, and whatever else they like in a separate overlay which readers and editors can turn on and off and can edit in a separate place.
Angela
One somewhat ok solution I've seen is at [[Intelligent design]] where the large number of references in the lead necessitated the use of commenting REFERENCES right before each string of refs.