omega wrote:

Yes. Please give this some priority. It would be a great improvement to some of
the better articles to be able to have two sections, I believe. Right now, it's
still possible to do so, but only with a deprecated template (because of the new
<ref> system).

It would be great if this were done!

cyp wrote:

*** Bug 11899 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

cyp wrote:

Copy of comment seen at m:Village pump (proposals):

• The problem might be solved more elegantly/generically (and without more html tags) by categorizing refs with a pseudo-"class type". For example, one would have... <ref class="n">... something in class "n" (e.g. a note)... </ref> <ref class="x">... something in class "x" (e.g. some other category of ref)... </ref> <ref>... something without a class (e.g. a regular citation)... </ref> The balancing <references /> would look like this: <references class="n" /> to dump all <ref>s with class="n". <references class="x" /> to dump all <ref>s with class="x". <references /&gt; to dump all <ref>s with no class. This way, a page could have as many "notes" (or whatever) sections as necessary. For example, examples on a wiki help page.

• Another option is to give <references/> a regex filter function: <references name="n*" /> dumps all refs whose name= starts with 'n' <references name="x*" /> dumps all refs whose name= starts with 'x' <references name="[^nx]*" /> dumps the rest This is however not suitable For refs that need different numbering schemes (e.g. notes vs citations).

• One way to resolve the autonumbering problem would be to use an alpha prefix for the numbering, perhaps even using the first letter of the class name (or restricting the length of the class name to 1). Another way would be to give each group N numbers (e.g. 1000), so the default would be 1-999, the next 1001-1999 and so on.

• The problem with using any autonumbering format except numbers and a-b-c is that Citephp depends on ordered lists (&lt;ol&gt; tag). Thus, while prefix + number (e.g. 'n1') would be the most flexible way to solve the autonumbering problem, it would require Citephp to emit CSS magic to simulate a numbered <ol>. It would still be ol (with list-style-type:none & hanging indent formatting), but the li's would need to provide numbering. Tables are another option.

• Fullstop (talk) 22:27, 30 December 2007 (UTC)

cyp wrote:

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 6271 ***

This bug never should have been merged with T8271, as what this bug is asking for is fundamentally different. The most fundamental difference is that footnotes frequently require references within them, and since it isn't possible to include references within references, the most common use case doesn't work with reference groups. This is why you will almost never see the <ref group...> syntax on Wikipedia. Instead they resort to complicated templates like {{efn}}, {{notelist}}, {{NoteTag}}, {{NoteFoot}}, etc. that use the obscure {{#tag:ref}} trick behind the scenes. Many Wikipedias don't have these templates, so there is no obvious way to create separate footnotes and references.

I think there is still a valid use case for having <note> and <footnotes/> tags, in addition to the <ref> and <references/> tags.