Looks like the order in which citations are generated are not deterministic and ordered in terms of how they are seen on the page wikitext. So, the first citation on the page might start with [39] instead of [1]. This is so today @ http://parsoid.wmflabs.org/enwiki/Barack_Obama?oldid=614710126 -- it appears that the citations are ordered based on the order in which Parsoid's Cite implementation receives them which in turn depends on how subpipelines fire, etc. and is non-deterministic.
Our citation implementation needs fixing to match wikitext order -- perhaps by sorting on top level dsr for top level citations and template dsr for citations that are generated by templates.
This should also fix the irritating rt-test variations we occasionally see (and which had baffled us till now) where semantic diffs are triggered because of cite numbering changes.
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Severity: normal