$re = '/(\.\[[^][]*\])\s*/m';
$str = 'It reported the proportion of the edits made from America was 51% for the Wikipedia, and 25% for the simple Wikipedia.[142] The Wikimedia Foundation hopes to increase the number in the Global South to 37% by 2015.[143]';
$subst = "\1\n";
$result = preg_replace($re, $subst, $str);
echo "The result of the substitution is ".$result;
Please keep in mind that these code samples are automatically generated and are not guaranteed to work. If you find any syntax errors, feel free to submit a bug report. For a full regex reference for PHP, please visit: http://php.net/manual/en/ref.pcre.php