[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Mediawiki-l] that awful <ref> syntax

[joshua.zelinsky at yale.edu]

Quoting Angela <beesley at gmail.com>:

> On Dec 12, 2007 10:52 PM, River Tarnell <river at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> so, the first thing i notice when editing Wikipedia articles these days
>> is that they're full of <ref> tags that make it nearly impossible to
>> find the actual text of the article.  the problem seems to be that the
>> entire reference is inline in the text.  while this is useful for
>> locality of editing, wouldn't it be nice if it would be close to the
>> text, but not inline?
>
> I think this, along with {{fact}} and other tags, should be moved out
> of the edit box completely. People should be able to add meta data,
> interlanguage links, references, trust values, feature stars, AfD
> notices, stable version flags, and whatever else they like in a
> separate overlay which readers and editors can turn on and off and can
> edit in a separate place.
>
> Angela

One somewhat ok solution I've seen is at [[Intelligent design]] where 
the large
number of references in the lead necessitated the use of commenting REFERENCES
right before each string of refs.