As sophisticated as the citation templates are, which kick the crap out of dead tree media, they're not 100% completely good enough for digital :) I mean they are 80+%, which is really good and impressive, covering lots of esoteric scenarios. The templates like {{cite book}} allow multiple author names and editor names, but only one url and one edition and one ISBN lol.  And other hardcoded limitations like that. I have found a lot of examples of citations which bend all the rules.

Named references are good like <ref name="foo"/> but multiple locations can either be in the form of {{rp}} or {{sfn}}. These are each a different kind of mess, but at least they can be automatically converted to a unified format in the future. There shouldn't be multiple ways to do the same thing.

The output of {{rp}} is not hyperlinked, so i have the page number in one place in the body and i have the reference material in another place in the References section. But it's unified in terms of the amount of output text.  It's not redundant output text. And it's fairly easy to edit and maintain its wikicode.

The output of {{sfn}} is clean in the rendered body but it creates a huge mess of redundant output text in the References section, especially in an article that cites one giant tome or bible a thousand times.  The References section becomes an exercise in "hey you wouldn't believe how many pages this guy wrote in this here book. Let's count!"  Why doesn't it render as page numbers beneath one single shared reference? And its wikicode syntax unbelievably names the citation *only* by two weirdly generic and redundant pieces of metadata: the author's last name and the year!  So... different authors are not allowed to have the same last names, nor to publish more than one item per year, wtf? It's the ultimate in fallacious hardcoding. In terms of editing the wikicode, I have to mentally track that weird metadata pair together, neither piece of which are named as a sensible shorthand like a named ref is.

Using that template is just so surreal. It's so insanely hard to edit. It's quite an ordeal lol.

Also we need an app that aids in the proper digital metadata formatting of all the random bullshit citation formats that people use. particularly the dead tree formats. It can help us line up each different piece of source metadata, strip out the stupid delimeter punctuation ("," and "."), and maybe even give hints as to what some of the manual metadata means. This could become increasingly helpful over time, as a common database of citations is built.  It'd help you match up your mishmash citation to existing properly formatted citations.

For example, Wikipedia is full of the following garbage, and I don't care if it's a long-standing institutional standard. Because Wikipedia is not a dead tree.  <ref>Something. Whatever. This thing goes here. Another. XI. N. X42. 7937. 23. 1. LastThingIPromise. Oops. 4.</ref> So a tool could parse that according to a number of different established institutional standards, and provide premade blanks for the target metadata of "first1= last1= title= volume=". If there's a url, it can launch it in a frame or another tab, so we can preview it for more clues. In a scrollable box, it can suggest a list of possible premade citations in the unified database that seem to match as you build your new output.

I'm just crying for any of this to be done, even just expanding the existing templates. But i'm not a programmer, sorry. It's brutal manual labor for the wikignome lol.  So is this the right irc channel, and is WikiCite completely covering what i'm talking about?