I find inline links offputting to read so want to use wikipedia style foot-of-article references with incremental numeric linking to the external link reference.
I can just stick the HTML in but on the off chance is there any plugins on WP for semi-automating the process?
I think Netblog plugin seems to be what you’re looking for.
There is a plugin called Footnotes which adds the ability to add links or notes in the code that are extracted to a References section.