References often contain information such as book titles that often does not make sense to translate, even if the user is using machine translation for the rest of the contents in the paragraph.

Currently most references use templates to structure the information. Those already keep the information untranslated since the information in the parameters is copied over. However, references that contain information directly inside the <ref> elements, are automatically translated and they should not.

We propose to avoid translating the contents of the ref elements.

Further improvements can be consider in upcoming tickets to make this process smarter by adapting date formats (T196990), letting users translate the references when needed (T197688), and more.