But in a 3rd-party context, I don't want to have to know or understand any of that in order to accomplish the simple task at hand: creating a citation/footnote in a standard format.
And, from a competitive landscape perspective, if Drupal, WordPress, and writers tools like Scribbr have Citation generation "built-in"<ref>Check how these other projects use CSL and/or perhaps use a library for CSL like Citation.js? https://citationstyles.org/</ref> then why doesn't MediaWiki?
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Without an easy '''existing''' solution, users will simply not adopt the software, or not reference information that should be referenced. You could ''maybe'' resort to third-party tools to help you create parenthetical referfences (e.g. [https://www.scribbr.com/citing-sources/citation-styles/ Scribbr]), but that is a failure from the MediaWiki project perspective if users need to use other tools for basic functionality.
'''Top One idea'''
We can develop a basic set of templates and possibly Lua code, system messages and Project namespace content bundled into a Page Exchange bundle.
== See Also ==