Talk:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Display Total Number of References Next to Language Links

This page is for discussions related to the Community Wishlist/Wishes/Display Total Number of References Next to Language Links page.   Please remember to: Sign posts using the four tildes (~~~~) Remain civil and polite during discussions. Place new text under old text (start a new post).

Would cram too much info into the bar

There also is another wish somewhere in the wishes about adding something to the language links. Adding anything, especially counts, would make it harder to oversee and more cluttered with more info crammed into things. However, it would be great if a gadget enabled this albeit it may also be a problem if it fetches data like that for so many pages which is probably how gadgets would implement this rather than loading it from some cached count. Maybe one could also display a tooltip with some metadata but it probably wouldn't be so easy to fetch and store the count of refs for tooltips. Moreover, it may facilitate contributors to use excessive numbers of refs or to consider the count of refs too much when that's not necessarily a good metric by which to assess the quality of articles. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:53, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective Thank you for your reply. I’m not very familiar with the technical aspects, but I think it’s great if the tool can be toggled on or off at the user's discretion. As for the concern about potentially encouraging contributors to add excessive citations or focus too heavily on citation counts, I believe this may happen to some extent. However, considering that the community is generally vigilant about preventing overly intentional citation inflation, I don’t see it as a major issue. If such behavior does occur, it can be addressed as needed. It's easy to see which articles receive little attention versus those where at least someone has added references. I believe the convenience this tool could provide makes it worth developing. Thank! Aizag (talk) 16:25, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Thank you

@Aizag, your wish has been well noted. The wish is specifically asking for this feature to be placed into the sidebar and there will be merits and demerits of that, one of which user Prototyperspective has pointed out. Community Tech will look more into it.

Asking, just by the way, have you checked out reference count on XTools under the "Prose" section in the "General statistics"? –– STei (WMF) (talk) 13:33, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

Hey @Aizag thanks for this wish. You mention a couple of benefits for solving this wish, and I want to better understand your goal. Is it to improve the number of references per article, or to compare references across different language versions of the same article or topic? JWheeler-WMF (talk) 15:15, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

@JWheeler-WMF Hello, thank you for your reply. My main goal is to quickly see which language version has the highest number of references. I understand that this is not an accurate or perfect measure of article quality, but it is relatively effective as an indicator of where contributors may have invested time in providing citations for each statement. I realize this isn’t the best solution, but I do see a need for it.

For example, consider the 1941 Battle of Kyiv during the German invasion of the Soviet Union. It would be natural to assume that the German or Russian versions would contain the most detailed content, but after opening these pages, this often isn’t the case. Then, we might notice the GA (Good Article) icon on the Korean Wikipedia, only to find upon review that it has few references and is missing some content. I know that on Vietnamese Wikipedia, there is a user who has spent years developing Eastern Front articles, so that version is likely rich in detail, but this wouldn’t be immediately apparent. Similarly, few would expect the Persian article to be so comprehensive, and I might not realize this without checking each language version individually.

If such a tool existed, I believe it could help avoid these kinds of issues to some extent. Thanks! Aizag (talk) 16:13, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

@STei (WMF) Hello, and thank you for your response. I am aware of the 'References' section under Prose; however, I feel it is somewhat inaccurate. For example, in the 'Siege of Tsingtao'(青島戰役) article on zh.wikipedia, the reflist shows 108 references, but the count displayed is 197, which may include bibliographies that are also being counted. What I am looking for is the count from the reflist, specifically the references actually cited in the main text, rather than something like en.wikipedia’s 'Spanish Civil War,' where some sources are listed in the Sources section but aren’t actually cited in the text.

I understand the issue raised by Prototyperspective. I’m not too particular about the display layout; if it were a small section showing only the top 10 languages with the most references, I’d be fine with that as well. Thanks! Aizag (talk) 16:02, 6 November 2024 (UTC)

The related wish is Add size of every Wikipedia article language version on a list of all language versions. I will make a comment about this wish over there. Commander Keane (talk) 02:49, 14 November 2024 (UTC)

And also En Wikidata valoración calidad articulos en diferentes idiomas which is I think the best of the three as this could go into Wikidata and gadgets could use this data from Wikidata. Prototyperspective (talk) 16:16, 14 November 2024 (UTC)

Baselang seems wrong

@JWheeler-WMF, this isn't related to the wish but I noticed that the baselang parameter is "zh-tw" but the wish is written in English. A rare case. This means that the Related projects listed are not in English, and I don't know how you would mark this for translation. Commander Keane (talk) 01:34, 14 November 2024 (UTC)

This happens when the language of the wish doesn't match the user's prefrence language (Community Wishlist encourages and expects people to write in their native language). This isn't that rare, in my opinion. I think anyone should be allowed to change it to fix it. Cookai🍪 _(💬talk) 02:50, 14 November 2024 (UTC)

Added to a focus area

Hello everyone and Aizag, this wish has been added to the Reference Management focus area. Please note that grouping wishes into focus areas allows for a focused/centralised discussion on a problem area. Whatever comments of support or disagreement or further discussion you have about this problem space, please leave it on the talk page. You can also show support for the focus area on the area's page, the support button is at the bottom. –– STei (WMF) (talk) 19:47, 29 January 2025 (UTC)