WMDE Technical Wishes/Sub-referencing/History

Where a solution to this problem was requested – examples

Via Bugzilla as early as 2008: T15127 Page number attribute for <ref> tags
WMDE Technical Wishes survey on German Wikipedia
- 2013 (10 Support; top 20 wish)
- 2015 (17 Support; top 20 wish)
- 2022: German wiki communities vote „Make reusing references easier“ as the new focus area (468 Support; No. 1 wish).
  In a call for problems around reusing references in 2022, a majority of dewiki users mentioned this problem specifically. Our research in 2023 confirmed that this was the most pressing issue in the focus area, as did additional user research with a group of international users in 2024.
Wikimedia Foundation’s Community Wishlist Survey
- 2015 (40 Support, 2 Oppose)
- 2019 (13 Support, 1 Oppose)
- 2021 (49 Support, 1 Oppose)
- 2021 (33 Support)
- 2023 (49 Support)
- 2023 (60 Support)

History of our work

Overall, our work on this problem was less straightforward than previous projects. Some general factors that make it very challenging to work on this:

The Cite and Citoid extensions are two separate code bases serving largely the same purpose. This required duplicate work, code clean-up and removal of technical debt.
Due to the large number of extensions (e.g. Cite, Citoid, Visual Editor) and areas of the wikis affected, a lot of coordination with different Wikimedia Foundation teams was necessary.
Unlike most other features we’ve introduced in the past, it’s not possible to release this solution as an opt-in or opt-out feature: Once it’s deployed and used within articles, it’s affecting everyone. And un-deploying the change (in case unforeseen problems arise) would be harder because all the articles where sub-referencing was used would need to be cleaned. Because of this, we want to make extra sure that our solution meets the communities’ standards and needs. We are still thankful for your feedback.
We cannot deploy sub-referencing as long as the feature is not working in Visual Editor. For a long time, we did not have the confidence nor tools necessary to implement the Visual Editor solution ourselves. After successfully working on the Visual-Editor-related focus area “make working with templates easier”, the team now does have the necessary knowledge to build a solution for Visual Editor.

Timeline

2016

First research, e.g. in community discussions at Wikimania.
The Technical Wishes team makes a first proposal for a wikitext solution. Discussions with various stakeholders at the Wikimedia Foundation show: the proposal is feasible from a technical standpoint.
Feedback round on German Wikipedia: 22 people are in favor of the solution, 8 are against it, 2 are neutral.

2017

Development gets postponed because the work on another wish takes up more time than anticipated.
Approval from stakeholders at the Wikimedia Foundation: We can move on with implementing the first proposal.
The proposal is presented to an international audience in a lightning talk at WikiCite 2017 (talk #28), and is perceived very well.

2018

Feedback round on Meta: Editors from all wikis are invited to give feedback. Result: 46% of participants are in favor of the proposed solution. 28% oppose it. 25% can’t be clearly associated with support or oppose.
The same feedback round asks for opinions on the name of the new attribute, but there is no clear majority for any of the suggestions. The Technical Wishes team decides to use the attribute name “extends” for now.
A call for feedback with the technical community shows that there is no opposition to go ahead with the proposal.
The Technical Wishes team waits for progress on the Wikimedia Foundation’s Parser Unification Project because we wanted to make these changes in only one parser instead of two. While waiting, the team works on another community wish.

2019

The Technical Wishes team lays the groundwork for the wikitext solution by rewriting the Cite extension’s code, which at this point is 14 years old.
The team tests the feasibility of the wikitext solution – while also working on other community wishes.
December: The wikitext implementation becomes available on beta wiki – it has been open for testing ever since.

2020

No work on this project. The Technical Wishes team deploys a feature from another community wish and starts working on the new focus area „Make working with templates easier“.

2021

The Technical Wishes team cancels further work on sub-referencing. Main reasons: Visual Editor support has not yet been implemented, and the Technical Wishes team does not have resources for it. We want to avoid contributors using wikitext having a vastly different experience than Visual Editor users. This would create confusion and even bigger discrepancies between wikitext and Visual Editor workflows. Besides, it is unclear how much more work would be required to finish the wikitext implementation.

2022

German-language wiki communities select „Make reusing references easier“ as the new focus area for the Technical Wishes project (468 votes). Research starts with a call for problems on the wikis.
The Technical Wishes team finishes work on the previous focus area, “Better support for geoinformation”.

2023

The Technical Wishes team starts working on this focus area, by diving deeper into the problems submitted on the wikis, as well as looking at Phabricator, where lots of technical problems around reusing references had been reported over the years. The team sketches user workflows around reusing references, and also tests the referencing system themselves, bringing more problems to light.
Decision to focus on improvements for reusing references within an article. This is where most problems have been found, and the wish that was mentioned most often also falls into this category: reusing a reference with different details (e.g. a different page number) on the same article.
Due to several longer absences in the project team, work on the focus area is put on hold for most of 2023 and gets extended to 2024.

2024

The team is complete again and continues working on the focus area.
User interviews are conducted.
- Goals:
  - find out whether new, more important problems have surfaced around reusing references since our last research, or changes in user behavior and user needs;
  - understand the workflows and problems around reusing references within an article better; especially for new team members;
  - diversify the group of people we interview to learn about those problems from users with different experience levels, languages, generations, genders, cultures and from sister projects.
- Result: There are several problems in this area, but reusing references with different details within an article is confirmed as one the most pressing issues. Our proposed solution is positively perceived.
- Decision to implement our solution for reusing a reference with different details (sub-referencing).
The existing wikitext solution is tested with community members in order to evaluate its usability and desirability. Anyone can still test the solution on beta wiki and give feedback.
Because of the delays in 2023, the new plan is to finish our work on this focus area by the end of 2024. The survey to determine our next focus area is scheduled for the beginning of 2025.