Thomas Dalton wrote:
If people are going to be able to put all the references at the end so they don't clutter the article (something people seem quite keen on),
Not everyone. I'm still leery of the notion ever since spending a while converting old {{ref}} templates (which worked that way) into the new <ref> format and finding a lot of orphaned or broken references that had been produced by unnoticed typos or subsequent editing. Sometimes I had to go back through many months worth of previous versions trying to find ones with unbroken references to salvage. I'd only support switching back to such a system if it were coded in a far more robust manner that made it obvious at a glance when something had gone wrong. What I'd like to see:
*A <ref/> tag with no body anywhere in the article should have some sort of glaring red warning to that effect, in the same sort of manner as we see when a <math> tag is fed badly formatted TeX. The current system produces a blank reference, which is better than nothing but still kind of easy to overlook. *A <ref> tag whose body is defined but not actually used anywhere in the article should still appear in the <references/>-generated list, with a bullet instead of a number. This is already done manually in a lot of cases when people add references directly to the references section.
This way nothing would ever get "lost" and broken stuff would get spotted and corrected more quickly and easily.