Community Wishlist/Wishes/Better VE automatic reference names
< Community Wishlist | Wishes
Better VE automatic reference names
Submitted
Description
Currently, when reusing a citation in VisualEditor, the software changes the reused citation's name to something like ":0" if it doesn't already have one. This looks pretty awful, and the automatic reference should instead be something based on the citation's content.
For example, one approach could be "{{{work/website}}}-{{{word in title that would be uppercase in title case}}}", with the author's name, the source's date, etc. inserted after if disambiguation is needed, only resorting to numbers when the reference name would be too long.
Filing this wish was the recommendation of the WMF's 2021 response to a 2019 wish for named references.
Assigned focus area
Unassigned.
Type of wish
Feature request
Related projects
All projects
Affected users
editors who actually use citations (i.e. 84%)