Talk:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Improve reuse of citations between VE and source

This page is for discussions related to the Community Wishlist/Wishes/Improve reuse of citations between VE and source page.   Please remember to: Sign posts using the four tildes (~~~~) Remain civil and polite during discussions. Place new text under old text (start a new post).

Thank you

@Femke thanks for submitting this wish, and I understand it has been proposed in various forms for previous wishlists. Back in 2019, it looks like CommTech evaluated this for the 2021 wishlist, however it wasn't adopted. Community Tech/Allow references to be named in VisualEditor.

If I'm reading this correctly, the major painpoint is that users can identify a citation as "New York Times, 2012," but find it next to impossible to remember "123456." There's some need to help users make sense of citations when they're used across multiple articles.

I'm curious how often you encounter this use case. What is the common pattern you find yourself in? JWheeler-WMF (talk) 20:31, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

I edit roughly 80% with VE, 20% with source, which means I confuse myself a couple of times a week with odd citation names. In terms of conflicts between editors, I've seen people complaining at each other a fair few times, for instance this conversation between a new editor editing in source with an experienced editor in VE. The third issue, of having duplicated names when moving content from one article to another, I see maybe once a month?

The wish that wasn't adopted before was slightly more complicated: allowing users to set the names from VE. I agree with community tech that this may break the design idea of simplicity behind the VE. This idea aligns better with the smaller scope, that community tech noted as more feasible. Femke (talk) 16:57, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Duplicate wish

There was a duplicate wish for this, called "Better VE automatic reference names," which has since redirected to this wish. JWheeler-WMF (talk) 20:35, 24 July 2024 (UTC)