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Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Citations/Enhanced conversion of bare references using VE

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Enhanced conversion of bare references using VE

  • Who would benefit: Every VE user
  • Proposed solution: When using VE and clicking a bare reference, the following notice currently appears: This reference consists of just an external link. You can use the “Convert” button below to generate a properly formatted reference. I would like to propose that for articles containing multiple bare references, an option “Convert all bare references” (that is based on the current VE functionality) is introduced to efficiently convert all bare references in an article. The result of the conversion may be reviewed by the user before saving.
  • More comments:

Discussion

Endorse: As I am dealing daily with this mess. We need better tools to reduce this clutter! Sheriff | ☎ 911 | 01:32, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

will refill help?--Cohaf (talk) 16:02, 14 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I am aware of the existence of reFill, but the proposal refers to create a built-in functionality for VE. --Leyo (talk) 11:10, 16 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
This is something that should be done by a bot or a game, because it would take a long time to run on all the references in page. Sometimes even a single request takes too long unfortunately. Mvolz (WMF) (talk) 13:44, 16 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Given we have various gadgets (e.g. Expand citations, Refill) that already do this with the source editor, and, yes, they can be slow to run, I see no reason why we can't have the same tool built into the VE (until such time as we have a solution to allow gadgets to work within the VE). I don't understand the argument that it takes "too long". Yep, Refill can take a long time and source users wait for it, or get bored and interrupt it (their choice). I know the VE does seem to time-out sometimes on converting a single naked URL citation, but I presume that time-out is a decision that someone programmed into the VE. We could do a "Abort or Wait a Bit Longer" dialogue as an alternative and if we provide some progress information (e.g. "Done 3 of 10"), the user may be able to an intelligent decision. Or keep the time-out on each individual citaiton being expanded and show a progress dialogue "Done 1", "Done 2, "Time-out on 3", "Done 4" etc. I note that the VE user has a disadvantage over the source user in expanding such citations. The source user can just search for patterns like <ref>http to find the naked URL citaitons. The VE user can't do this but must open each citaion individually (which is when VE offers to expand it with Citoid) so it seems a pretty reasonable thing to let the VE user do this to the whole article. I'd see this as something that could go on the "Whole of article" menu (the 3 horizontal bar icon) where you manipulate categories, redirects, etc. I think there may be a need for a progess indicator to manage the human impatience factor (and there needs to be either a hardcoded timeout on individual conversions or a Abort-or-Wait dialogue to deal with it). — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Kerry Raymond (talk)

Voting

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