I'm also forwarding this to the wikitech-l list.

On Dec 3, 2008, at 8:46 PM [Dec 3, 2008 ], Thomas Larsen wrote:

Hi all,

The current <ref>...</ref>...<references/> system produces nice references, but it is flawed--all the text contained in a given reference appears in the text that the reference is linked from. For example:

It was a sunny day on Wednesday<ref>David Smith. ''History of Wednesdays.'' History Magazine, 2019.</ref>. The next day, Thursday, was cloudy.

== References and notes ==

<references/>

(That's a very simple example, too. References start to become a lot larger once they start to include other information and/or are produced via a template.)

Once way I could conceive of correcting the problem is to have a reference tag that provides only a _link_ to the note via a label and another type of reference tag that actually _defines_ and _displays_ the note. For example:

It was a sunny day on Wednesday<ref id="smith"/>. The next day, Thursday, was cloudy.

== References and notes ==

<reference id="smith">David Smith. ''History of Wednesdays.'' History Magazine, 2019.</reference>

This makes the raw wikitext easier to read, since the text of the actual reference is in the _references_ section instead of in the page's primary content.

I think this could work ...

--Thomas Larsen

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