At the moment, someone who wants to create a bibliographical reference to add at the bottom of an article can do that:
Have a Special:Citoid page would be helpful to generate these references without the <ref> tag. It will be very useful when T1084 will be ready.
Feedback sent by email.
Hmm... this approach is reinventing the wheel a little bit I think. We've
postponed adding citoid to wikitext - T130400 - for the time being, until
wikitext has Surface, at point which case the approach would be to add a
citation using surface in wikitext and just deleting the tags. We also have
citoid in ref tool bar which allows you to delete the ref tags since it's
wikitext editing, but that's only on en wiki due to localisation issues.
I'm not sure how we'd write the special page that doesn't use either the
ref tool bar approach (hard coded for en wiki) or the surface approach
(multi-lingual and using the power behind VE). I know this is annoying and
"just wait until we have surface" is pretty unsatisfying but I don't see
the Special page yielding sooner results than Surface for wikitext ^-^
I'm going to mark this decline but feel free to comment additionally if I
haven't addressed things sufficiently.
Also might be of interest to you: T95702
In there there is the suggest of double clicking on the reference, which opens up the reference dialog instead of the template dialog, and you can cut and paste from there. A bit inelegant.
Obviously duplicate of T95702: Be able to use the auto-cite tool to insert a citation template outside of a reference. Thanks @Mvolz!