Last modified: 2014-02-27 22:47:25 UTC
One of the major advances in wiki editing in the last few years has been support for the short template-based referencing systems like SFN. I've made it a basic rule to use SFN if a reference is used more than twice within the article, and an inline only in the rare case where it is used once or twice. I realize my editing patterns are not normal, but I think support for these templated refs would improve the editor greatly. Perhaps a "toolbar-like" editor to one side of the main editor could list of global references created so far, and allow the user to drag a handle from them into the article to place the ref in the body. Even better, perhaps the use could drag URLs or text into the bar to create semi-filled out master refs.
As discussed previously, supporting this wikitext hack is exceptionally difficult to do, and it would be much more sensible to spend the effort on a proper cross-page, cross-wiki citations system instead which would solve the same problem (and lots more). However, it's not impossible, so keeping open as a lowest-priority enhancements.
Cite.php is designed a certain (bad) way. It has issues, and we will replace it at some point, but the way to fix its issues is not to make horrible hacks in wikitext using loopholes over-looked when the code was written to try to re-design in. This is one of those cases, and is not sanely supportable in VisualEditor, so I'm going to mark this as WONTFIX. I know I previously said "lowest", but I don't think that that's a justifiable direction for the product to go in.
