[chrisma0]

I really feel like the lack of well-structured citations is what's keeping many Wikipedia articles back. It's just not good enough to throw some paper reference (potentially behind a paywall) or a news article after a full paragraph of text.

Often when editing a page, I am left wondering where exactly the previous editor has gotten a fact from. The Wiki markup even allows "quotes", i.e. short extracts of what exactly you're referring to, but I've yet to see anyone beside myself actually use it consistently.

Having a structured list of references for a given topic in a Wikipedia article is incredibly helpful!

[TheresNoTime]

Great points! In an ideal world, editors would note exactly where in the referenced work they found the information — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources#Ident... has some guidance on how to do that :)

[chrisma0]

I mean, there is even stuff like linking to pages in PDF files... but I feel like it's another feature that's rarely used.

Maybe, in an ideal world, I could imagine an editing experience with a split screen editor with the article text and the references open at the same time. Right now, it does feel like references are an afterthought in the editing workflow.