Community Wishlist/Wishes/Improve VE references' automatic names and reuse
Improve VE references' automatic names and reuse Open
Description
Currently, citations in VE 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 list from last year.
Assigned focus area
Unassigned.
Type of wish
System change
Related projects
Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons
Affected users
editors