Problem: If you want an unambiguous reference to a figure in the text, you currently have to number all figures manually or write "see figure on left/right/below... the second one in this paragraph... the one where the electric field lines are marked in red" and hope that nobody changes the picture or its location and the reader already knows how to distinguish electric from the magnetic field lines. Re-submission of Community_Wishlist_Survey_2017/Editing#Automatically_create_a_reference_id_for_pictures_with_a_label
Who would benefit:
Proposed solution: If you write <figref>Particle-path.png</figref> in the source code, all figures in the article are numbered automatically and <figref>Particle-path.png</figref> is replaced with the number that [[File:Particle-path.png|caption of the figure]] has been assigned. See scholarpedia for an example of how it can be implemented.
Support This will be very useful, especially if it's not confined to pictures: it's good to be able to also reference media files, as well as pieces of text (e.g. theorems/lemmas in maths articles, glossed text in linguistics articles etc.) Uanfala (talk) 19:52, 24 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Support A two-part system consisting of a reference in running text and a unique identifier connected to the referenced element (image link parameter for media, HTML/XML argument for tables and formulae etc.) would address Tgr’s and Uanfala’s concerns. Inline references without a referenced object would get an error message similar to what Cite uses (actually, this functionality might be part of Cite as well). Tacsipacsi (talk) 16:58, 30 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]