Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Archive/Clean up Visual Editor wikitext output

Random proposal ►◄ Archive The survey has concluded. Here are the results!

Clean up Visual Editor wikitext output

Problem: VisualEditor creates a lot of noise and hard to read syntax, e.g. adds a lot of white spaces to templates, uses numeric references <ref name=":0"> that become hard to maintain later on.
Proposed solution: Only edit lines where content changes were done to keep the diff clean. Use human-readable references names based on author last name and year or let the user define it with some sane defaults.
Who would benefit: Editors
More comments:
Phabricator tickets:
Proposer: Matthias (talk) 16:38, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Matthias: Could this be a duplicate of VisualEditor: Allow references to be properly named? MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 04:18, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Matthias: Regarding the adding of lots of whitespace, could this be related to some templates having custom formats that dictate extra spaces, and when these are saved with VE the whole template is given the format? SWilson (WMF) (talk) 05:19, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Looks like both of us pinged the wrong user! Let's try again :) @Matthias M.: MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 21:11, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I am okay with closing this as a duplicate if that is possible at all. Matthias (talk) 21:13, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, done! Thanks, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 22:44, 25 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]