Last modified: 2014-11-01 07:26:36 UTC
When a reference is first added to the page, the list of references at the bottom should be appended automatically using the format that is appropriate (e.g., {{reflist}}). The purpose of this request is to make life easier for editors. Currently, when an editor adds a citation to an article using the <ref></ref> syntax, the citation is not visible to readers until the editor also manually adds the wiki syntax (e.g., in enWP, {{Reflist}}). Also, in order to create a title for the references section in normal article style, the editor needs to manually add ==References== above {{Reflist}}. I do not believe there is any use case in which an editor would add a citation to an article, without also wanting to append the list of references at the bottom of the article. Therefore, I think the list of references should be appended automatically whenever a reference is first added to the page. This would save editors two rote manual steps.
This may be hairier than it sounds: * whether the appropriate thing to use is <references /> or {{reflist}} or something else would need to be configurable somehow * the name of the ==References== section would have to be similarly configurable (and translatable) * it's not entirely clear where the references list and section should be added. If you look at https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=Albert_Einstein&action=edit , the References section is not the last section on the page, and there's a bunch of invisible (language links, categories) and visible (various navigation boxes) things below the last section even. A dumb append to the bottom might be good enough, though, so people can move it elsewhere if they really care.
I think really the proper thing to do is to go a little farther: * create a sensible inline/popup view for references; use that for web output instead of an inline list of footnotes * continue to output the footnote-style list for print view, but... * let the *entire* printable reference list, including section title, be added and maintained by the plugin, at the end. For back-compatibility, explicit use of <references/> could continue to output the footnote-style list inline (and like forcing the TOC location, this could suppress the auto-appended section/list).
Bug 66860 means that this a references list now /shown/ if there is no <references />, but *not inserted* into the wikitext. Re-labelling this to be clear, and reducing priority as the main cause of demand (broken pages) is now moot.
