User talk:Isochrone

Sub-referencing: User testing

Hi I’m Johannes from Wikimedia Deutschland's Technical Wishes team. We are making great strides with the new sub-referencing feature and we’d love to invite you to take part in two activities to help us move this work further:

1. Try it out and share your feedback

   Please try the updated wikitext feature on the beta wiki and let us know what you think, either on our talk page or by booking a call with our UX researcher.

2. Get a sneak peak and help shape the Visual Editor user designs

   Help us test the new design prototypes by participating in user sessions – sign up here to receive an invite. We're especially hoping to speak with people from underrepresented and diverse groups. If that's you, please consider signing up! No prior or extensive editing experience is required. User sessions will start May 14th.

We plan to bring this feature to Wikimedia wikis later this year. We’ll reach out to wikis for piloting in time for deployments. Creators and maintainers of reference-related tools and templates will be contacted beforehand as well. Thank you very much for your support and encouragement so far in helping bring this feature to life!

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Johannes Richter (WMDE) (talk) 14:53, 28 April 2025 (UTC)

Sub-referencing: News and request for feedback

Greetings from WMDE's Technical Wishes team. Today we've deployed sub-referencing to German Wikipedia, our first pilot wiki. A great milestone after so many years of work!

We'll continue to improve the feature based on community feedback and want to deploy to other pilot wikis in the upcoming months, once we've solved a couple of issues affecting many non-dewiki projects. You are invited to try sub-referencing on betawiki in the meantime.

We are currently thinking about how we could improve VisualEditor support for templates in sub-references if that's desired by the community. Read more about it on our talk page and share your feedback!

As always thank you very much for your support!

PS: You are receiving this message, because you signed-up to our sub-referencing newsletter. If you don't want to receive further updates, just remove your name from the list.

Johannes Richter (WMDE) (talk) 16:46, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

Sub-referencing: Update

Sub-referencing example

Greetings from WMDE Technical Wishes! In September 2025 we deployed sub-referencing to German Wikipedia to make re-using references with different details easier. Thanks for piloting and helping to improve the feature!

We recently published our insights and next steps in our report. Some highlights:

• Over 6,000 Wikipedia articles use the new feature, with a total of over 15,000 sub-references created to date.
• There are both experienced editors in featured articles (e.g. de:Explosion des Oppauer Stickstoffwerkes) and relatively inexperienced VisualEditor users (e.g. in de:Schmerzhafte Muttergottes (Guido Cagnacci)) using the feature. The majority of all sub-references (approx. 90%) are created in wikitext, yet over 300 editors have used the function in VisualEditor alone.
• Workarounds like <ref name="Miller" /><sup>p. 44</sup> (in the reader view ^{[1] p. 44}) have been replaced entirely by sub-referencing, which means that the complete reference information – including the page number – is now visible in both the reference list and in Reference Previews.
• Sub-referencing is used with lots of different citation details – predominantly page numbers, but also details such as chapters, paragraphs, quotes or video / audio timestamps.

What has happened since September?

• We ensured that re-used sub-references actually appear as re-used in the reader view and in VisualEditor.
• We've made some cosmetic changes to the reference list: Initially, multi-line sub-references (e.g. quotations) were not displayed ideally, and two-digit sub-reference numbers were not indented correctly.
• In VisualEditor, we have provided a feature to choose whether changes to re-used sub-references should affect all uses of the same sub-reference or only the one currently edited.

What's next?

• We will deploy sub-referencing to additional pilot wikis next week: Polish Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipdia and seven smaller wikis (phab:T414094). All of these projects have been notified in advance.
• We are working on technical adjustments to make sub-referencing usable in all wikis that use variants of the {{Reflist}} template.
• We are continuing to address community feedback: Among other things, we are currently exploring various ideas for visually improving reference lists with lots sub-references (e.g. de:Liste der Straßen in Bad Honnef#Einzelnachweise und Anmerkungen).
• In addition to sub-referencing, we are looking at other reference-related improvements: We are considering general improvements to Reference Previews or solving issues with automatically created reference names in VisualEditor – there will be announcements and community consultations on this in the near future.

More information about sub-referencing on our project page, more about our learnings and next steps in our report. All the best from WMDE Technical Wishes!

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--Johannes Richter (WMDE) (talk) 15:35, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

Sub-referencing: Global deployment

Sub-referencing example

Greetings from the WMDE Technical Wishes team!

We've deployed sub-referencing to most Wikimedia wikis in the past couple of months (phab:T414094). Thank you for supporting us with valuable feedback or by participating in user interviews / onwiki testing.

As of today there are more than 25.000 pages using sub-referencing across WMF wikis, most of them on Polish Wikipedia and German Wikipedia. We've learned a lot and saw a great variety of use cases for sub-referencing. You can more about them in our report on sub-referencing in German Wikipedia. We've fixed a number of bugs and edge cases in the past couple of months, now we're ready to deploy sub-referencing to the remaining wikis:

We'll deploy to English Wikipedia on October 14 (phab:T440243) and to Wikisource and right-to-left language wikis by end of October, most likely on October 21 (phab:T440304). If you want to try the feature and it hasn't been deployed to your wiki yet, you can do so on testwiki (example page) or on most other projects, e.g. French or Spanish Wikipedia. Our FAQ lists possible actions to take on your wiki to support the deployment.

What's next?

We'll continue working on sub-referencing, e.g. by investigating possible improvements to the reader view. We are also working on other improvements to references:

• We'll deploy new options to change VisualEditor auto-generated reference names next week, allowing wikis to define their preferred ref name pattern instead of using <ref name=":1" />. See our help page for instructions. You can already try most of these changes on testwiki (example page).
• We're also working on enabling Citoid to create references even if the URL is a PDF link.
• Other projects we're currently considering are improvements to the reference template dialog and supporting wikis to identify / prevent the insertion of retracted scientific papers. We've shared some mock-ups in this presentation.
• We've launched a new research series. Please read our project page m:WMDE Technical Wishes/Continuous research and sign-up if you're interested in supporting us by doing an interview.

All the best from WMDE Technical Wishes!

PS: You've recieved this message because you subscribed to our newsletter. Remove your name from the sign-up list if you don't want to receive further updates.

--Johannes Richter (WMDE) (talk) 17:01, 6 October 2026 (UTC)