Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Citations/Improve VisualEditor toolbar

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

Improve VisualEditor toolbar

  • Problem: VE toolbar auto-fill-ins are often CAPITALIZED from source
  • Proposed solution: set most fields to Title Case after Preview
  • Who would benefit: lazy, frequent citers
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: 0mtwb9gd5wx (talk) 10:25, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • Automated conversions are generally just as buggy as anything else. This will indiscrimently cause iPhone to be turned into Iphone for instance, and COVID-19 into Covid-19. It's also very much language dependent. However, maybe there could be some sort of "if amount of capital letters is more than 8 sequential characters, then Title Case the contents". —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 11:12, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I think languages are different from each other. In some languages, there are not any capitalized characters; but however, bands and popular names must to be stated as exception to the capitalization rule. Thingofme (talk) 12:43, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Another approach to the detection rule could be “only fix case if all characters in the field are upper-case”. (It would still fall over trying to distinguish between author-last=NATO versus author-last=SMITH. But it would leave alone title=“The BIG BLUE GROUP to perform in New York” and title=“UNICEF–UNHCR collaboration in 20th-century Farnorthistan”.) How a sequential-characters rule treats those titles would depend on what it does with intervening whitespace and punctuation.) Pelagic (talk) 00:11, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Also I suggest you retitle this proposal as at first glance its like this is about the UI of the toolbar itself, rather than the functionality of Citoid which happens to be part of the Citation function of the toolbar. Better titles have better responses in the next phase generally. —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 11:13, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    AFAIK this problem affects RefToolbar as well as the VE citation edit-card. Perhaps a better title could be “Provide ability to correct ALL CAPS citation data”? Pelagic (talk) 00:20, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Rather than have Citoid always do this in the background, how about button(s) in the insert-ref UIs (VE and RefToolbar)? There will be exceptions in titles (iPhone) and in personal names (van der Ergens), but it's easier to correct a couple of characters than to retype the whole dang field because the publisher decided to style METADATA ALL IN UPPER CASE (not shouting, just an example). Some fields should be in sentence case instead of title case, and if you toggle to sentence case you do have to go back and re-capitalise the proper nouns and acronyms. It's an open question how best to locate the buttons. One per field may be messy. A single “fix all-caps” button that applies to all relevant fields in the form? Pelagic (talk) 00:11, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • But again, please be cautious in different languages: In Dutch: when the character combination "ij" appears in a capitalizable position both should be capitalized, eg "IJzer" ("Iron").T.vanschaik (talk) 10:00, 20 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hello, maybe this current project "Web2Cit: Visual Editor for Citoid Web Translators" (photo) would solve this request? --Jurbop (talk) 07:24, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Voting