As an avid writer on the wiki, I am always frustrated by the current system for REFs (et all). They have little expressive power, break easily, and made editing _extremely_ difficult in certain circumstances. I consider this to be one of the biggest problems with the current MediaWiki software, it costs me perhaps as much as 15% wasted time on every article -- and a check over my contributions list should let you calculate what sort of real-world time that represents! The good news is that I don't think any of these problems aren't fixable. For argument's sake, here's some of the problems I'd like to see fixed: 1) CITE tags are _extremely_ large. Since the REF system requires them to be embedded in-line in the article body, they can make editing of the articles very difficult. For instance, look at the article at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_memory Now click edit. Even trying to figure out what is part of the body, as opposed to the REFs, can be very difficult. Of course one can mitigate this problem, slightly, by removing the vertical white space, but that doesn't _really_ help the issue as much as you would like, and has the side-effect of making the CITEs themselves harder to edit. 2) REFs should be _represented_ as footnotes, REFs, however, are _not footnotes_. It seems whoever built the REF system seems to have forgotten this fact. Footnotes can be used for all sorts of different purposes, but with the current REF system the two become synonymous. I like to add notes about pronunciation and "trivial" links to other articles using footnotes, but there's simply no way to do this with the current system. 3) There's no way to reference different page numbers! This is a _serious_ problem, because it means if you want to use different portions of a single work, like a book, you have to put in a different CITE for each one. In reality, people just don't bother. 4) I can't fold hand-edited refs into the REFLIST. For instance, let's say I used a book for most of the body of an article, so I didn't bother putting lots of REFs inline. I did, however, add a half dozen different REFs inlined to support specific facts. Now how do I make the REFLIST look right? I can't! I end up with some numbered ones, and some bulleted, and due to the default styles, they look different. Uggg. 5) REF should not be picky about position. Right now if you want to use the same REF in more than one place, you can use a named ref. Generally the idea is good. However, this system demands that the body of the named ref be placed in the very first place that ref is used. This works great until you want to actually edit the article, at which point it because terribly easy to break _all_ the references with something as simple as a cut-n-paste. Here's my suggested solutions: 1) named refs should work no matter where the body of the reference is placed. That would immediately fix most of these problems. I could, optionally, place only <ref name=x/> into the body, and remove all of the ref bodies to the ==References== section of the article. This would even allow me to fold "non-inlines" into the references list, using exactly the same mechanism. 2) there should be another, similar, tag for "real" footnotes. <note> would be great. They would operate identically to (1). 3) named REFs can have another parameter, "page=". These would be collected into the references at the bottom, with each lettered reference appearing. How would I use this? Well using the water memory article as an example, I would... 1) remove all the CITEs into the ==References== section, surrounded in REF tags with a name. 2) place name ref placeholders in the body of the article, some of these may optionally include page numbers 3) some of the comments would be surrounded with <note> tags, and optionally removed to a new ==Notes== section. Is there anything technically impossible here? Maury