A lot of different traditions how to cite properly exist and are used extensively in Wikipedia. Some rather popular ones use citations without hyperlinks. This means that clicking through hyperlinked associations is unnecessarily clumsy, because readers need to scroll manually to find references, instead of just clicking back and forth.

The original HTML <a href="..." name="..."> anchor is the universal source and destination of hyperlinks; in essence, it is the raison d' être of the entire WWW, and has been described in the very document that started it all.^{[Berners-Lee 1990]}

So, I'm trying to insert HTML anchors with no extras into web pages generated by wikipedia.

Can I straightforwardly insert <a href="#cite:Berners-Lee 1990" name="ref:Berners-Lee 1990">(Berners-Lee 1990)</a> to implement doubly linked parenthetical referencing?

Not quite; I'll have to use template:anchor that mimics it.

using parenthetical referencing, enabled by basic hyperlinks as proposed in (Berners-Lee 1990).

The basic HTML reference (with two reverse links) is

• ^ ^{(link back to parenthetical reference)} T. Berners-Lee / CN, R. Cailliau / ECP, Proposal for a HyperText Project, CERN 1990 "A hypertext page has pieces of text which refer to other texts. Such references are highlighted and can be selected with a mouse (on dumb terminals, they would appear in a numbered list and selection would be done by entering a number). When you select a reference, the browser presents you with the text which is referenced: you have made the browser follow a hypertext link".