I saw bugs that are similar to this one, for example Bug 51289, but nothing exactly like this one.

References that are added by templates are not recognized by the references tool. I am not talking about templates like the English Wikipedia's {{cite web}}, which go inside the <ref> tag, but about template that add the <ref> tag itself (with {{#tag:ref}}).

This can be in infoboxes (Bug 51289) or in any other template. The Hebrew Wikipedia, for example, uses such a template, {{הערה}} very extensively, because mixing right-to-left text with left-to-right XML tags like <ref> is very hard to edit. This means that most of the references there are not usable for reusing in the "Use an existing reference".

(This also means a bunch of other things, but I'll report them separately.)

Version: unspecified
Severity: normal