Editing MycoTaxa:Village pump (technical)/Archive 1 (section)

===Editing a section===
Say you edit an article section to add a new &lt;ref> item.  When you '''Show Preview''', the preview shows the article text but not the references, so you don't actually see the change you made. Or if you added text and a reference, you see part of the change you made, but not all of it.

When I run into this problem, I usually work around it by temporarily adding &lt;references/> at the end of the section.  Then I '''Show Preview''', fix any errors, remove &lt;references/>, and '''Save Page'''. But that's obviously error-prone, because one's instinct is to '''Save Page''' as soon as the errors are fixed, and it's  all too easy to forget to remove the &lt;references/> tag [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Barnard%27s_Star&diff=165507795&oldid=165507676 and have to go back and do it afterwards].

A technical workaround occurs to me.  I suggest that if a section being edited contains a &lt;ref> tag but not &lt;references/>, the software should append a template reference like <nowiki>{{preview-references}}</nowiki>, which would expand to something<references/> like
<pre>
    ---
    ''The section being previewed contains the following references, which in ''
    ''the complete article will appear at the &amp;lt;references/> tag:''

    <references/>
</pre>
Of course, if you're editing only the text of the section and not the references, you don't really need to see them expanded, and they're just an annoyance. An alternative approach would be a separate '''Preview References''' button, but that seems like overkill to me.<references/>