Community Wishlist/Wishes/Improve reuse of citations between VE and source
Improve reuse of citations between VE and source Open
Description
Currently, citations in VE get assigned a number as a name. This poses problems when you use the source editor:
- If you copy-paste to a different article, the name is likely to duplicate, leading to errors. Even worse, some of these errors will go unnoticed
- If you read the article in source mode, you will not know which source is used
- Worse than verbose errors are silent errors. For example copying
<ref name=":1"/>from one article to another article will silently fail if<ref name=":1"/>exists which is more likely to occur with numeric increments. - A better system would be to automatically use the lastname_year or publisher_year if available, with sensible fallback options if unavailable. This would reduce conflict between people who tend to use VE with those using the source editor.
- Sub-referencing proposal WMDE Technical Wishes/Sub-referencing would repeat the same confusion/limitations, if re-naming references is not resolved. Whatever solutions are implemented for regular references should also potentially be incorporated for sub-references. The development of sub-references is not a blocker here.
- This was 6th most popular wish list from last year
Assigned focus area
Unassigned.
Type of wish
System change
Related projects
Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons
Affected users
editors