I believe trying to apply a reference-based system in the wiki as a whole is an unrealistic ideal at best. The coding required to do that isn't advanced at all, no, but the sheer amount of people who'd accidentally mess it up due to not being used to do it would be tremendous, and one single letter you get wrong messes up the entire chain of references. The staff's clean-up work would be boosted several fold with these 'minor" hiccups, not to mention new users who have no experience with source mode edits.
It may look good, but we're talking efficiency here. People should abandon any "looks good, but would be either really inefficient or would not actually change anything and would just change a system that already works fine to something that is just as good, but we have no experience on" kind of ideas.
Efficiency > aesthetics, always.