This only addresses a minor part of your (legitimate) complaints, but fwiw, it's okay to add references without using the appropriate templates. You can just wr

This only addresses a minor part of your (legitimate) complaints, but fwiw, it's okay to add references without using the appropriate templates. You can just write the reference, in plain text in whatever format you want, between the <ref></ref> tags. Someone else can fix up the formatting later if they want. The only really important thing is to mention where the information came from in some kind of readable way, with something like: <ref>A. Author. Article title. In Proceedings of Conference 2012, pp. 11-12</ref>