Talk:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Improve VE references' automatic names and reuse

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Thank you

@Femke thanks for submitting this wish, and I understand it has been proposed in various forms for previous wishlists. Back in 2019, it looks like CommTech evaluated this for the 2021 wishlist, however it wasn't adopted. Community Tech/Allow references to be named in VisualEditor.

If I'm reading this correctly, the major painpoint is that users can identify a citation as "New York Times, 2012," but find it next to impossible to remember "123456." There's some need to help users make sense of citations when they're used across multiple articles.

I'm curious how often you encounter this use case. What is the common pattern you find yourself in? JWheeler-WMF (talk) 20:31, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

I edit roughly 80% with VE, 20% with source, which means I confuse myself a couple of times a week with odd citation names. In terms of conflicts between editors, I've seen people complaining at each other a fair few times, for instance this conversation between a new editor editing in source with an experienced editor in VE. The third issue, of having duplicated names when moving content from one article to another, I see maybe once a month?

The wish that wasn't adopted before was slightly more complicated: allowing users to set the names from VE. I agree with community tech that this may break the design idea of simplicity behind the VE. This idea aligns better with the smaller scope, that community tech noted as more feasible. Femke (talk) 16:57, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Duplicate wish

There was a duplicate wish for this, called "Better VE automatic reference names," which has since redirected to this wish. JWheeler-WMF (talk) 20:35, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

@JWheeler-WMF Thanks for spotting that! I feel like the duplicate name was clearer, though. Maybe rename the wish to "Better VE automatic reference names in souce wikitext"? Aaron Liu (talk) 22:47, 30 May 2025 (UTC)

Visual Editor reference renaming to me would be more succinct, as terms like improve/automatic are opinion/implementation details. Whether automatic or manual, it should be possible to update the reference. The bugs specifically come from source/VE switching but use case is beyond that. Shushugah (talk) 09:05, 31 May 2025 (UTC)

Manual renaming was previously rejected to favor some automatic name: Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Status report 1#Named References in VE.
Anyways, I'll boldly move this soon! Aaron Liu (talk) 16:56, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

Nevermind, I can't move it. I would've moved this to "Improve VE references' automatic names and reuse". Aaron Liu (talk) 16:58, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

I had the same problem when I tried to move it to something more clear.. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 15:52, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

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Could someone move this to "Improve VE references' automatic names and reuse"? Under the same subpages, obviously. Thanks. Hopefully that's the right edit request template. Aaron Liu (talk) 16:02, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

To rename wishes in the older Wishlist editions, you needed to move the page. In the new system, you just change the "title" field. The problem is that moving pages with translations requires assistance from a translationadmin. I am one of those so I have gone ahead and moved it, but generally speaking, I don't think page moves are necessary for minor changes to the title. Just change the "title" field itself and leave the page where it is.

As you can see in the revision history, I made a mistake a moved this to wrong title (now fixed). Anyway, this just further reinforces that page moves are something we want to avoid.

In the upcoming extension, we give auto-incrementing page titles to wishes and focus areas, similar to Phabricator. So this page would become for example, Community Wishlist/Wishes/W123. Then the title field of the wish, and only the title field, will dictate what people see. This way, we won't ever need to move pages, or worry if the links to pages are correct. Page titles will be static.

The extension is still under development but I think we hope to roll it out some time next month, or maybe August. Hope this helps, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 21:15, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

The mistake move somehow caused chaos (even after the wish moved to the correct title), and somehow got fixed just now. Cookai🍪 _(💬talk) 14:29, 12 June 2025 (UTC)