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?
The problem at the moment is that you would end up with links to each
ref at the bottom of the article and each ref would have an extra
letter linking back to those links. I'm looking at the code now to see
how easy it would be to allow hidden refs - it should be doable.