Community Wishlist/Wishes/Adding the RefToolbar to Wikipedias that don't have it to make citing sources quick & easy (eg DEWP)
Description
In English Wikipedia, when editing an article in the wikitext editor, there is a dropdown for references, the RefToolbar. It allows entering a citation by just entering an URL which is then turned into a filled-out citation template such as cite web or cite journal. This is very useful and allows convenient time-efficient editing and results in good-quality references rather than for example just bare links. Several Wikipedias have adopted this feature such as Spanish Wikipedia where one can use the same feature.
However, on several Wikipedias like German Wikipedia and French Wikipedia one apparently still needs to enter everything manually for each source, whereas in the English Wikipedia you have usually only had to make two clicks for over a decade.
It takes a lot of time to enter everything manually (even just for a single source instead of 20-300 which are common counts), even though the autofill in ENWP has been working great for a long time. Note that if the autofill is missing, you can always open the individual reference again to copy the data, but this is rarely necessary and can usually be done largely automatically via Citation bot and/or reFill.
This burns a lot of volunteer contributor time which could be used for new translations or corrections instead. It massively harms non-English Wikipedias and takes a lot of fun out of editing, makes it more difficult, more time-consuming, and demotivates.
Yes, there are proposed workarounds. The issues with these are that they don't work well and most importantly most users, especially new users don't use and don't know about them nor should be expected to do some tinkering to get this functionality which is readily available.
I previously asked about this on German Wikipedia here but could not find out the specific reason why this feature is not available there and if I didn't understand something or somebody knows, the reason could be added here. The possible workarounds include (more could be added):
- Having an English Wikipedia tab open and using its RefToolbar tool to create the citation template and then switching back to insert it
- Uses the English templates, does not add some parameters like
language=en, does add some parameters not available in DEWP, is inconvenient and distracting and time-intensive as one has to continuously has to switch back and forth, is not known to new users or users who don't edit ENWP much
- Uses the English templates, does not add some parameters like
- Tools like [1] [2] (can also be used with a bookmarklet)
- Is inconvenient and distracting and time-intensive as one has to continuously has to switch back and forth, is not known to new and most users, does not create the proper citation template in many cases like cite book for a Google Books link, can't handle very many links
- Using the mw:2017 wikitext editor that has a very similar feature
- Is not known to new and most users, needs a config change, that editor is not as nice to use, that editor has major bugs such as removing text at multiple places at once when deleting/selecting text (e.g. couldn't be used in this edit I meant to make), various gadgets don't work with it, needs further testing but I think the autofill doesn't work as well as with RefToolbar
- Browser addon de:Benutzer:Rjh/wikipedia-reference-creator
- Is not known to new and most users, needs an addon to be installed, only works for Firefox, just 73 users use it, one needs to visit the site (again) rather than just adding the ref, probably not working as well but haven't tested it
- The script de:Benutzer:PerfektesChaos/js/citoidWikitext
- Is not known to new and most users, just an elite few users use it, needs a config change, that tool is not as nice to use as the RefToolbar GUI, the editor text field has display issues at the bottom when using it, when inserting a ref it scrolls to another location making inserting a ref or multiple a hassle every time as one needs to reorient to find and move back to the prior location, needs further testing but I think the autofill doesn't work as well as with RefToolbar [currently testing this]
Why all the hassle when the optimal solution already exists and can be just customized and integrated (as has been done e.g. on Spanish Wikipedia)? Please just integrate the established well-known well-tested tool – which in addition people using ENWP are already familiar with – into the wikitext editor. This is an important feature that should be available to all editors, not just a 0.5% of highly active techie users who after usually long time somehow learned about the suboptimal script that can be used instead.
In addition, a page about the reFill tool (which apparently also works with DEWP) as well as the Citation bot to convert bare links and optimize incomplete citations are also missing (that may be within the scope of this wish or a separate issue).
Assigned focus area
Unassigned.
Type of wish
System change
Related projects
Wikipedia
Affected users
Wikipedia editors and readers of nonenglish Wikipedias
Other details
- Created: 14:31, 26 April 2025 (UTC)
- Last updated: 10:33, 27 April 2025 (UTC)
- Author: Prototyperspective (talk)