Improve VE references' automatic names and reuse (Community Wishlist/W17)
Long-term opportunity
Description
Currently, citations in VE (Visual Editor) get assigned a number as a name. This poses problems when you use the source editor:
- If you copy-paste to a different article, the name is likely to duplicate, leading to errors. Even worse, some of these errors will go unnoticed.
- If you read the article in source mode, you will not know which source is used.
- Worse than verbose errors are silent errors. For example copying
<ref name=":1"/>from one article to another article will silently fail if<ref name=":1"/>exists which is more likely to occur with numeric increments. - Sub-referencing proposal WMDE Technical Wishes/Sub-referencing would repeat the same confusion/limitations, if re-naming references is not resolved. Whatever solutions are implemented for regular references should also potentially be incorporated for sub-references. The development of sub-references is not a blocker here.
A better system would be to automatically use the lastname_year or publisher_year if available, with sensible fallback options if unavailable. This would reduce conflict between people who tend to use VE with those using the source editor. This was 6th most popular wish in 2023.
Assigned focus area
Type of wish
System change
Tags
Affected users
editors
Phabricator tasks
Other details
Voting
This wish currently has 11 supporters. Voting for this wish is open until it is completed.
Supporters of this wish
Support Matěj Suchánek (talk) 18:49, 9 October 2025
Support even just basic heuristics would seem to work well here BrokenSegue (talk) 02:33, 14 October 2025
Support Even just allowing the user to manually enter a name would be a huge improvement. Nardog (talk) 10:08, 22 October 2025
Support better default names would immediately reduce bugs. Allowing editing of name in VE would be ideal, but require names to be updated elsewhere then Shushugah (talk) 05:11, 20 November 2025
Support Generally agreed. Look at the RefRenamer script on enwiki as both a viable approach to ref naming and as a great way to fix these enumerated ref names today. StefenTower (talk) 04:41, 21 November 2025
Support this is one of multiple things to improve regarding automatic ref names – see related wish W440: Unique and useful automatic reference names instead of ref name=":1" etc which lists additional issues alongside this, which is specific to the VisualEditor that most active editors usually don't use Prototyperspective (talk) 12:41, 21 November 2025