When I watch new users editing with VE, I very often see them trying to edit footnotes (a.k.a. "references" or "citations") where they are. Of course, this is impossible because they can be only be edited by clicking the reference number, but is there really a good reason for it?
It actually makes a lot of sense to make them clickable and editable right where they are:
- In general, they are just content like any other, so it should be possible to click them and edit them.
- While editing wiki syntax, their text can be clicked and edited where it is seen on the screen.
- While reading an article, you can click the little arrow near a reference, and the article will scroll to where its number appears in the text, so it is easy to go from a footnote's number to its location in the text. But this link doesn't work while editing in Visual editor: Clicking a footnote just selects the whole corresponding references section.