Forum:CT Archive/Amending the Manual of Style to counter a problem with reference tag sourcing

I am proposing this CT to slightly change the layout of the Manual of Style to deal with a problem that come to light several months ago. In November, while coding reference tags for the article Dar Keyis, I noticed a strange occurrence; the ref tags for the succession box were not being picked up by the Reflist template. I directed the problem to over on the IRC channel, and she took a look but could not find an answer. In turn, she directed the problem to.

Uberfuzzy's response was that it is expected behaviour, as the ref tag was designed to go at the bottom of the page, and therefore would not pick up anything below it. However, because of errors in the old parser, it worked that way anyway, picking up ref tags below the template, taking advantage of the bug. The bug was recently fixed, and the tag works as expected now.

Compare the references section in this edit, to the references section in this one. Notice how the second example picks up the extra reference information, while the first does not.

So the problem now is that all articles with succession boxes are improperly sourced&mdash;especially many of our Featured and Good articles. To combat this, I propose a slight amendment to the MoS; namely, that the Succession Box Section is shifted to before the Notes and References Section.

Instead of an MoS like this:
 * 1) Title/Eras/Infobox
 * 2) Main article
 * 3) Stub
 * 4) Behind the scenes (notice the capitalization)
 * 5) Appearances
 * 6) Sources
 * 7) Notes and references
 * 8) See also
 * 9) External links
 * 10) Succession box
 * 11) Category
 * 12) Interwiki links

We would have it like this:


 * 1) Title/Eras/Infobox
 * 2) Main article
 * 3) Stub
 * 4) Behind the scenes (notice the capitalization)
 * 5) Appearances
 * 6) Sources
 * 7) Succession box
 * 8) Notes and references
 * 9) See also
 * 10) External links
 * 11) Category
 * 12) Interwiki links

Please note, this is not an attempt to change the MoS merely because I believe that it would look better this way. This is an attempt to cover a serious problem that has come to light, and to maintain our Sourcing policy. Obviously, if this CT passes, a bot will be needed to apply the needed layout changes to all articles.

Also, I apologise for the lateness in tabling this CT; illness and an enforced break from the Wook over the Christmas period did not help matters. - Cavalier One ( Squadron channel ) 12:53, 16 January 2009 (UTC)