Reference management (Community Wishlist/FA12)
References are an integral part of Wikipedia. They enable volunteers and readers to verify that the information the project offers is reliable.
To increase the ease and grow their capacity to ensure Wikipedia includes information people can rely on, volunteers are seeking to expand the ways in which they can work with, manipulate, and display references (and information about them).
Volunteers listed some visual improvement suggestions, such as a consistent way to add footnotes and references at the end of a page, and they'd like to see reference details and add sub-chapter content previews, as well as updating the reference syntax to indicate which part of the text was sourced. Additionally, volunteers submitted wishes that would help improve meta information, which could increase editing and patrolling efficiency. Some examples include: understanding how many sources are used for an article and how often a source was reused. Lastly, volunteers would like us to find ways to automate actions, such as replacing category tags to standardize their use across articles, and they would like to see easier options to link to other language versions. Current limitations include that the sfn template isn’t intuitive in VisualEditor and that cite-achor limitations restrict internal cross-referencing.
- Created: 12:50, 26 January 2025
- Last updated: 03:09, 5 October 2025
This focus area currently has 6 supporters. Voting for this focus area is open until it is completed.