See en-Wiki feedback "Citation numbers messing up". This problem is repeatedly mentioned on en-Wiki, confuses editors and hinders editing of developed articles with complex reference structures. I would like to propose the whole issue with "references in templates" and "references generated by templates" as blocker. I am aware, that 5 other tasks are possible related to this problem (See also), maybe the whole topic area needs another fresh look for a solution. - the problem is known for almost 2 years now, and should get a higher priority and more frequent updates on its status.

In the weekly triage meeting on 2015-05-06, we discussed this task. Though we acknowledge that this is moderately confusing for users, fixing this is a very large piece of work (which reflects why it has not been completed in the past two years either). I've marked this as blocked by a piece of work that we hope to finish out this quarter, which will hopefully help make this slightly less epic to fix.

As a stop-gap measure, is it feasible to have the footnotes that are contained in templates (and therefore not "in" the document) be displayed differently? You would get the usual [1] for whatever is the first footnote in the article body, but the first one in an infobox would be marked as [X] or [Template 1] or something that doesn't match the typical ones.

This information is already shown in context and the reference list. If we change the numbering that will probably be more confusing.

Since T114105 was merged into this ticket, is there anything I could do to help solve this issue?

In T52474#1772377, @Halibutt wrote:

Since T114105 was merged into this ticket

In case anyone following that original ticket (or several like it) is confused about why these get merged here:

VisualEditor handles regular "Harvard" (parenthetical) citations perfectly; see true Harvard style at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=521737742&veaction=edit as an example. Plain Harvard is just plain text, after all; a proper Harvard citation is just (Author Date) with an optional page number. Any system that lets you type common characters can handle plain Harvard citations.

The problem is when it's not truly Harvard citations, but instead it's a non-Harvard short citation wrapped up in ref tags using a template such as {{sfn}} – when the system is presented with {{sfn|Author|Date|123}} instead of <ref name="Author Date">Author Date, page 123.</ref> (which VisualEditor can handle) or (Author Date, page 123) (which VisualEditor can also handle).

In that case, the main technical issue is exactly the same as {{infobox|field=data<ref>Source</ref>}}: the ref is stuck in a transclusion rather than in the article being edited. This has multiple effects, including impossible numbering and bad displays (because the transcluded doc gets its own <references /> list; see T114105 for a screenshot). As I understand it, some of these problems will be solved here, and others may be fixed through other mechanisms, e.g., T110909: Parsoid tripped up by extensions that process wikitext. But the bugs get merged here, because it's not possible to merge them to multiple related tasks.

Solving this (and its subtasks) would be a huge success. I'd be grateful.