Last modified: 2014-10-14 23:47:28 UTC
There are a couple of ways to configure references to display differently: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cite/Cite.php#Set_references_to_use_.5E_and_letters_like_Wikipedia we should access these so the rendering in edit mode is consistent with the that in read mode.
*** Bug 51453 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I think that this is the same problem: Footnotes created with the ref group <ref group=lower-alpha> are displayed in the saved page as [a], [b], etc. If you open them in VisualEditor, they display (while editing) as [lower-alpha 1], [lower-alpha 2], etc. instead of [a], [b], etc.
I74d4878 will let us fix this.