Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Editing/Easily add page numbers with "cite" automatic button for books and then easily "reuse" listed book references with/without new page number(s) if needed.

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Easily add page numbers with "cite" automatic button for books and then easily "reuse" listed book references with/without new page number(s) if needed.

  • Problem: Adding book references is more difficult than adding press articles with an url in Wikipedia's articles with the "cite" button.
  • Proposed solution: Why ? It is best described with an example :

Use the "Cite" button ; add the ISBN of a book ; click generate (until there it is working fine!) ; But now you can't add the page number(s) of the book (*) ! This must be available easily for the average user. After that, all the things can be automated by code!

Bonus: once you have added the book in the References section, you should be able to use the Cite button/reuse to reuse the book with the same page number or not!

Voila! No need to use complex templates (create sfn template with anchors,...). edit: (*) For ebooks, we could use chapter number and/or start/end of the relevant citation.

Discussion

Thanks for suggesting this. I too get a big headache when I use books rather than websites specifically because I can't easily place page numbers! I usually use Google Books and Visual Editor. When I paste the link into the auto-cite, I too wish it automatically detected the page number, as it's included in the URL. The ability to copy-paste the same reference but only change the pages would be helpful too. I appreciate your wish as it would help virtually all editors and hope this gets the attention it deserves. Evedawn99 (talk) 15:07, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Evedawn99. Thanks for your kind comment . It is a good idea too to automatically add page number for Google Book urls. I believe the same idea can be done for archive.org book pages. Maybe this can already be done with Web2Cit ? Example for the url of a french article? If you are a coder, you can create your own here and you can see the list of already done urls with Web2Cit monitor. Jurbop (talk) 16:13, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Something might already by covered by Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Citations/Prompt for page number(s) for compatible cite sources (e.g. book, journal) and Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Larger suggestions/Re-use citation with different page number in VisualEditor. --Matěj Suchánek (talk) 09:02, 2 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Matěj Suchánek Thanks for pointing these existing suggestions that I haven't seen before. They are right to the point (Thanks User:Femke). By reading them, apparently, these kinds of suggestions were already made several times over the previous years! The answers of the coding teams are always, it seems, along the following : 1) not a priority as not enough people vote for them in the International Community Wishlist request (maybe only with some regional one, like DE-wiki that uses the Visual Editor by default)! 2) Technically, it is difficult to do in visual editor!
Ok. For 2) maybe some things can be easily implemented inside Web2cit (I am notifying User:Diegodlh)? For instance, adding page numbers like this photo (excerpted from a 2019 phabricator ticket by User:ESanders (WMF)) inside the second part of this photo from a random New Yorker article (you get the idea if it was a book) ? It should be easy as Web2Cite take the data by default from another provider! Jurbop (talk) 10:18, 2 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, @Jurbop! Thanks for thinking of Web2Cit to help address this. However, I think its usefulness in this case would be very limited.
Visual Editor's automatic citations are generated based on Citoid response to a URL, ISBN, or other unique identifiers. Web2Cit is used to collaboratively improve Citoid responses to URLs.
Currently Web2Cit supports a limited set of citation fields, not including page numbers. Adding page number support to Web2Cit would be possible; this has already been proposed in T321669. However this would be useful in cases where page number(s) can be inferred from the URL or from the corresponding target webpage's content. That is, it should always return the same page number(s) for the same URL. For other cases it would still be useful to have a prompt to add page number(s), as suggested in T216817. Either case, as I see it, Web2Cit would not be useful to "reuse book references with/without page number(s)" either. Diegodlh (talk) 18:07, 13 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

See also: WMDE Technical Wishes/Book referencing --Wargo (talk) 23:43, 13 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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