User:Puxlit/Experiments/BetterRefs

The goal is to make  even easier to use. Whilst the template is a huge improvement over manually specifying  tags, there's still room for improvement.

The biggest issue is that references must still be manually named for deduplication to work. Editors must remember to define named references before invoking them, but this strict ordering can easily be disrupted when articles are refactored. Additionally, no consensus exists on how to format reference names; for example, is it "ch1p1" or "c1p1"?

Additionally, VisualEditor has a knack for adding more whitespace than necessary. Thus, whilst those who use the source editor will write, others who use VisualEditor will inadvertently change those references to. It would be desirable to avoid this kind of noise in our diffs.

One approach, based partially off, would be to elide the plethora of named parameters in favour of a terse mnemonics-based code, with referencing naming (for deduplication) handled automatically. An non-exhaustive table of examples follows.