2008/9/25 phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com:
I was going to say as well, what happened to that proposal to define references at the bottom of the article instead of inline? And then Pathos posted a nice implementation above. It does make a whole lot more sense from both a reader and an editor's point of view to have reference metadata in a single place, away from the wikitext. Defining refs with a "refname" in the text doesn't seem too bad... other than the mess of trying to get a different stylistic system going, is there some reason we don't do this?
-- phoebe
Basically it results in a high maintenance cost with a fairly high chance of errors. It means you have to keep the article text and the end section in sync rather than just keeping all the stuff in one place.