Unique and useful automatic reference names instead of ref name=":1" etc (Community Wishlist/W440)

Description

Currently, many Wikipedia articles have references that look like so: <ref name=":1">{{Cite web |date=12 March 2025 |title=[…]|website=Reuters}}</ref> where :1 is counted up to :2 etc.

This is problematic because:

When transcluding a section to another article, there is a high chance that some of the ref names in the section is also somewhere in the article which results in references missing
Users often change these ref names which takes away quite some volunteer time and can go wrong
It's difficult to work with references named like so because it has uses of the reference details so one may need to scroll around lots of wikitext to find out how that reference one intends to reuse was named again (or has to first edit the name which may outside the section one is currently editing)

So I propose that:

Automatic ref names are made unique which could already be achieved by instead using some UID like a random series of chars and numbers
They use parts of the reference in a smart standardized way:
- for example the value in the website= or work= parameter minus-sign the date of the date= field in YYYY-MM-DD format minus-sign first x chars of the title trimmed of the spaces, so the above example could be turned into <ref name="reuters-2025-03-12-germanspyagencyconcludedcov">{{Cite web |date=12 March 2025 |title=[…]|website=Reuters}}</ref>
- it may be better at least for many cases to instead use the domain name instead of the value in the work or website field because those are often wrong and also if there is no date one could e.g. leave that out; the domain name here of the url in the url parameter starts with reuters.com so it would also be reuters

Full implementation would consist of four components:

Changing VisualEditor's automatic ref naming (see related wish W17: Changing VisualEditor's automatic ref naming and Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Editing/VisualEditor should use proper names for references)
Changing the reFill tool's automatic ref naming
Identifying and changing the code of any other widely used tools that have automatic ref naming if there's any
Having a bot change the ref-names of articles with this kind of ref names

Assigned focus area

Unassigned

Type of wish

Feature request