Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Archive/Reference tools in the source editor

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Reference tools in the source editor

NoN Proposes existing solution

  • Problem: In the French source editor (I don't know others), we can't make references automatically (with an ISBN or a Doi for example). We have to make it manually or use the visual editor. However, making it manually is time-consuming and the visual editor is too greedy on computer resources as CPU and internet speed for old computers and bad connexions.
  • Who would benefit: Contributors with old computers and bad internet connexions, as well as contributors who don't like writing with the visual editor.
  • Proposed solution: Make a lightweight reference tool in the source editor. Before the creation of the visual editor reference tool, I used to write references with this external tool : Refswikipedia by Lebronj23 (fr). But it doesn't work anymore.
  • More comments: Thank you for your work and have a good day.
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Abalg (talk) 09:54, 17 November 2020 (UTC) (fr:utilisateur:Abalg)[reply]

Discussion

Hello. I cannot say anything about the difficulty of implementing such a tool in the source editor. I also do not know how many people have problems using the visual editor. I stopped maintaining the tool mentioned above for ISBN and DOI notably because the visual editor is already doing a good job there. I preferred to focus on web links, where the tool really has an added value compared to the visual editor. If many people are interested, I could implement some patches to get the DOI and ISBN working again when I find some time for that. It should not be too complicated. It will not solve the problem on the long run however. Regards, --Lebronj23 (talk) 21:41, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Can we generalize this beyond the French wikis, Abalg? Many other wikis (including English Wikiversity) do not have Citoid facilities either, which is a bit discouraging and reduces their appeal. Anywhere that Visual Editor has the tools the source editor should too. HLHJ (talk) 01:13, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Hello HLHJ, I'm agree with you. --Abalg (talk) 01:45, 24 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Note that Citoid is available in the mw:2017 wikitext editor. ESanders (WMF) (talk) 13:25, 26 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The wikitext editor is what I name the visual editor. The problem concern only the source editor. Regards. --Abalg (talk) 13:34, 26 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

There is en:Wikipedia:ProveIt and en:Wikipedia:RefToolbar in enwiki for old wikieditor which sounds same --Zache (talk) 16:07, 27 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Zache, ProveIt seems to work good (I just install it and taste it). But it's not a native solution. The reftoolbar seems to be a great solution too. And a native one. Except in the French wikipedia. Do you know how can we transfer it on the French wikipedia and other languages? Regards. --Abalg (talk) 14:31, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Technically yes, in fiwiki it is gadgets (under label testing and not supported) and it more or less works. However, there is currently some case sensitivy issues with template parameter names which would require checking why they dont work. We had some users who used this couple years ago and now i just updated the code and copied it to gadgets to see if it would still work. However, there are our fiwiki files and configs as for an example if you want to try it out in frwiki.
--Zache (talk) 19:23, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
To load the gadget from enwiki (mw.loader.load( '//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Gadget-MediaWiki:RefToolbar.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript' );) it would require changes to enwikis version. This is how the most of the smaller wikis would like to do it so the upkeep would be centralized. --Zache (talk) 20:42, 30 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm merging a similar wish:
  • Problem: Fully completing all the information for a good citation referencing a URL can be daunting for new or inexperienced users
  • Who would benefit: Pretty much all editors, I think.
  • Proposed solution: When someone adds a citation using the shortcut (ref/ref insertable markup), either:
    1) automatically recognize when a URL has been cited, format it properly (perhaps even test it), add a retrieval date and take care of other housekeeping, or
    2) bring up a dialog box to allow the editor to (optionally) complete the citation

Ping the proposer: @Patrickwooldridge: SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 14:52, 4 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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