Editing Elixir/HTML dump scraper (section)

=== Obstacles to finding references in wikitext ===
A raw reference is straightforward in wikitext and looks like: <code><nowiki><ref>This footnote.</ref></nowiki></code>.  If this were the end of the story, it would be simple to parse references.  What makes it more complicated is that many references are produced using reusable templates, for example: <code><nowiki>{{sfn|Hacker|Grimwood|2011|p=290}}</nowiki></code>.

If "<nowiki>{{sfn}}</nowiki>" were the only template used to produce references then we could search for "<nowiki><ref>" tags and "{{sfn}}</nowiki>" templates in wikitext.  But a [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=insource%3A%3Cref%3E+insource%3A%2F%5B%3C%5Dref%5B%3E%5D%2F+-insource%3A%2Finclude+%5B%3C%5Dref%5B%3E%5D%2F&title=Special:Search&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns10=1 search for reference-producing templates] unveils over 12,000 different ref-producing templates on English Wikipedia alone, and these are unique to every other wiki and language edition.