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Community Wishlist/Wishes/Make subreferencing work with inline refs and ((reflist))

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Make subreferencing work with inline refs and {{reflist}} Submitted

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==References==
<references>
<ref name="Miller">E. Miller, ''The Sun''. New York: Academic Press, 2005.</ref>
</references>

The new sub-referencing feature seems really useful. It allows Wikipedia editors to for example use same reference with different page numbers instead of either not specifying the page number or having multiple references for what is actually one ref.

However, it has two key problems:

  • Many if not most WP articles use {{reflist}} instead of <references>…</references>. The main issue with reflist when using sub-referencing is used is that "VisualEditor cannot edit list-defined references if the reflist template is being used, therefore currently cannot add/edit/remove main references". However, people shouldn't be required to change the references syntax/template of an article just for getting subreferencing for one reference to work. The feature usually wouldn't be used if that was required (e.g. when people only want to specify one extra subref to set one pagenumber). So reflist should work with VisualEditor so that using it for subreferencing does not create problems.
  • The currently recommended way of using subreferencing inline refs to first be put into <references>…</references>. The problem there is that when using it inline, it would create e.g. [1][1.1] (two refs 1.1 including the page number) when the desired result would be [1.1] (just the ref with the page number) as can be seen in this example. There are two problem with putting inline refs into the references section (whether or not this needs to be done by the editor):
    1. People shouldn't be required to open the edit view for the whole article instead of for a particular section just for getting subreferencing for one reference to work to add a page-number. It shouldn't need refs to be moved around but also work if the refs are specified somewhere inline which is very common. Furthermore, when the edit is defined inline, the reference can still be seen (also more easily be reused) when editing just a section so inline refs are usually preferable the way things currently are.
    2. Moreover, when named references are put into the references section they don't show up at places where sections or paragraphs have been transcluded (which is a very useful underused feature used by thousands of pages). It would be best if transclusions would automatically somehow retrieve all refs defined outside the transcluded section (maybe with a bot, ideally otherwise) but at least for the near future they don't. Currently, when a ref is missing in a section one intends to transclude to elsewhere (or where somebody already has done so), one can usually fix this with the following workaround: editing the source article to move the named reference to the section that is being transcluded to other article(s). This works because any given article usually has only one section that is getting transcluded to elsewhere. If the named refs are defined outside the section that is transcluded the ref will show the error Cite warning: <ref> tag with name refname cannot be previewed because it is defined outside the current section or not defined in this article at all. at another Wikipedia article (the one where it's transcluded to).

Previously asked about this here (was also raised by other user) where you may find some further info and a user there noted that The only parameter [of the reflist template] whose functionality I see missing from <references></references> is {{reflist}}ʼs liststyle= that facilitates alternate reference numbering systems such as with letters or roman numerals if people are okay with the latter being the standardized way of including refs. For the first problem to be solved it seems like VisualEditor and/or sub-referencing compatibility with VE would need to be improved. Please see the talk page of this proposal for info about the current state of development of this. The second and third probably mainly need changes at the sub-referencing implementation. I try to revise this part with technical details on how the three issues could be solved. According to a WMDE software team member on the talk page of this proposal: We are aware of both the VE drawback with reflist as well as the desire to have a clean way of using inline citations with sub-referencing. […]we are currently exploring different solutions.

Related wish: Including media files set on Wikidata item in Wikipedia articles across languages by default (the proposal here could be an alternative approach or a complementary one that is used in Wikipedias that don't use the former and/or for articles which have been configured to not include Wikidata item media) and Improve reuse of citations between VE and source. I selected Bug report for this wish as it's a problem […] with existing features.

Assigned focus area

Unassigned.

Type of wish

Bug report

Wikipedia

Affected users

Wikipedia editors

Other details

  • Created: 22:17, 19 October 2024 (UTC)
  • Last updated: 15:07, 23 October 2024 (UTC)
  • Author: Prototyperspective (talk)
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