Prevent VisualEditor from fabricating sources (Community Wishlist/W420)
When you type in the title (or title + author) of a source in the automatic reference generator (e.g. in Visual Editor), it will have a guess at what the source is. This guess can be wildly inaccurate and for users it is not intuitive that it's a search result. The behaviour is so strange that we've had someone come very close to a topic ban because none of the admins believed this could happen.
For instance, when you type in:
- "Hamas' use of human shields in Gaza' (PDF), NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence"
You get "Mukhimer, Tariq (2013), "Hamas and Human Rights", Hamas Rule in Gaza, New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, pp. 56–126, ISBN 978-1-349-45658-1, retrieved 2025-09-22" (API result)
That behaviour is different from when you enter a url, where it'll sometimes come back with an error if it cannot form a citation with the given information (e.g. when you enter a pdf).
One solution is to show multiple search results + a clear heading showing it's a guess. Another is adding a bit of prominent text such as "Did you mean" to the search result.
Unassigned
editors, admins
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