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.