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Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Citations

< Community Wishlist Survey 2022
Community Wishlist Survey 2022
Citations
11 proposals, 249 contributors, 427 support votes
The survey has closed. Thanks for your participation :)



Use automatic references outside of citations

  • Problem: When I use the "Source" button, I can choose an automatic mode where I enter an ISBN number and a complete reference is generated. It's very convenient. When I have to write the bibliography, I would like to have the same automation rather than manually completing all the fields of the "Book" or "Article" template (or inserting a dummy note with the Source button, copying the generated reference and delete the note).
  • Proposed solution: Make the automatic tool available other than via the "Source" button.
  • Who would benefit: Editors when editing a bibliography.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: AdM (talk) 23:46, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Voting

Automatic duplicate citation finder

  • Problem: I'm a fairly heavy editor, but I mainly do smaller copy edits (capitalization, metric units, ndashes) and fairly often I hoist content into a lead that fails to summarize. It's only a small percentage of my edits where I add new material with citation, so I haven't gone hardcore on citation tools. But what surprises me in the raw out-of-the-box edit window is that you can add a citation with a known URL, and when you press "submit" for your partially completed citation, it never says, "hey, someone else on this or another page entered a citation with the same title or URL, would you like to crib some of those fields?" Citation is supposed to be a default activity on Wikipedia, like breathing. So it strikes me that I shouldn't have to install something or activate a special/fancy/cozy/streamlined edit mode (fie to all of them) to get basic assistance in not duplicating prior work.
  • Proposed solution: URL and/or title of incomplete citation templates automatically checked for duplicate citations on same or other pages when doing a preview submission. (There could also be a dedicated button to preview citations only.)
  • Who would benefit: Anyone who wants to add cited material who isn't already an expert in the citation system.
  • More comments: I don't want to create another ticket for this, but it's very clearly a barrier to entry and self-evident paper cut how annoying it is to reuse an existing citation (from the same article) amending only the quotation field or page number fields on subsequent reuse. In my own editing, 90% of the time I notice resources that have been exploited by others, and that's how my bag of tricks expands over time; only in rare instances do I do a deliberate deep dive into the documentation pages. If an easy way to re-use a citation exists, amending only the page number, I sure haven't seen much evidence of other editors making use of this in the thousands of pages I visit in a typical year. Another aspect of citation that should be as painless as breathing. Also, when editing a section and some of the named citations won't resolve (because they are defined outside the section) would it be crazy to offer an button to *really* preview the edited section in the context of the whole page (as found when clicking "edit" on the current section heading? (The section edit URL would somehow need to capture the source page ID to make this work.)
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: MaxEnt (talk) 04:30, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • I also get irritated when I see that there several independent references to the same work. If the references use the same URL or ISBN or DOI, they seem easy to recognize as duplicates. Otherwise it can be hard to identify.
    I think that there is a way to produce references to the same work that differ only in the page number, but they are difficult enough for me that I don't remember how to find them. --Error (talk) 18:22, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    @Error See WMDE Technical Wishes/Book referencing. This has been a top items on wishlist surveys for the past 10 years, but was abandoned by the Technical Wishes team in July 2021. See also phab:T100645. -- Ahecht (TALK
    PAGE    ) 23:48, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • find duplicates Hack: open wikitext in a text editor, for every http, insert NEWLINE, then sort file. 0mtwb9gd5wx (talk) 10:13, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes, please! I have been using refill to fix this for ages, which works pretty well. I think that AWB might do it automatically too but I'm not as familiar with that. It might be possible for visual editor to automatically fix this on publish, which can be done manually by copying and pasting the same citation. It would be nice to see a citation tool that can automate bibliography-style citations as well. Asukite (talk) 16:03, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • https://tools.wmflabs.org/refill/ "had" worked well, before the developer forced only en.wikipedia.org to use an unstable version, then stopped developing and abandoned his work on wikipedia.org, due to some interaction with users with higher privileges. .... 0mtwb9gd5wx (talk) 16:40, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • w:User:Kaniivel/Reference Organizer might be partly helpful. ~~~~
    User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk)     10:24, 14 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Take into account that there might be nearly equal entries which only differ in page, section etc. This should be handled too.—Hfst (talk) 06:54, 20 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Yep, that's something that makes this a little trickier than it might at first seem. But it's still worthwhile, I think. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 19:13, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Why is this a problem that needs to be addressed? If a page has say:
    Here is some text ... here is some more <ref>ReferenceA</ref> ... maybe a few paragraphs of text ... some more text <ref>That SAME ReferenceA</ref>...more text...more text.
  • I'm missing why having a "duplicate" full reference is a problem. Specifically because of this use-case: I edit that page and just delete the first referenced text along with the reference attached to it. If the second instance was just some sort of pointer to the first, now the second statement that I, the editor, didn't even see has a broken reference. @Ahecht: can you explain a bit more? — xaosflux Talk 16:22, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    @Xaosflux Not sure why you pinged me on this, as I neither created nor supported this proposal (yet). That said, the issue is that it clogs up the references section, making it longer than necessary, and makes it difficult to "browse" the references or assess notability. In regards to your use case, at least on enwiki, en:User:AnomieBOT/source/tasks/OrphanReferenceFixer.pm will automatically search for and fix those broken references. -- Ahecht (TALK
    PAGE    ) 16:38, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    @Ahecht: oops, bad copy and paste from above, that was meant for @MaxEnt: - but thanks for the input, feel free to stop replying to this. I don't think it would be a good idea to implement a software feature that may lead to a situation that would be dependent on other editors (even if via bots) to clean up orphaned reference labels (where the immediate affect from that use case is that readers will have no reference provided). — xaosflux Talk 16:50, 2 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Logic to do this would appear to be in AWB (same page), as AWB will correlate dupes. Neils51 (talk) 10:57, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Maybe this could be added inside the VisualEditor business-logic. --Valerio Bozzolan (talk) 14:45, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

Preventing VE from silently omitting co-authors

  • Problem: When using the Visual Editor for adding citations (e.g. using a DOI), it only considers the first 5 (de.wikipedia) or 11 (en.wikipedia) co-authors. Hence, all other co-authors are silently omitted, i.e. no et al. draw attention to the fact that there are more co-authors.
  • Proposed solution: If the number of co-authors is considered too long so that some of them is omitted, et al. needs to be added by default.
  • Who would benefit: All readers of Wikipedia articles who would no longer be misled by incomplete listings of co-authors.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Leyo (talk) 09:23, 20 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • As far as we can tell, this logic exists solely in the citation templates, for instance en:Template:Citation. It's not VisualEditor truncating the authors but the template, hence if you want more authors you need only to update the template (probably following some broader discussion with your community). As such I'm going to archive this proposal. Thanks for participating in the survey! MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 21:25, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I think I know what the problem is here: TemplateData doesn't support arbitrary authors, which I would guess Citoid is using to support the number of authors it is adding.
    There are two separate wishes here I think, which are both technical in nature:
    1. Citoid to use the presence of |display-authors= in TemplateData/Citoid configuration and equivalent to add a distinct et al (which is one of its keywords for a truncated list); so far as I know no task exists on this dimension;
    2. TemplateData to support enumerated parameters better (and Citoid to appreciate them), the former of which is phab:T54582.
    MusikAnimal (WMF), consider un-archiving? Izno (talk) 21:43, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    @Izno Apologies for the late reply, and for my misjudgment of this proposal. I'm happy to un-archive this if we can iron it out into a single proposal. It sounds #2 is the better one to focus on? Pinging the proposer, @Leyo for input. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 19:14, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I am not sure if I understood the technical considerations correctly. However, it isn't any template truncating the number of authors. VisualEditor does not add any authors above the numbers stated above to the source text of the articles. Should you wish to test it yourself, you may consider using doi:10.1021/acs.est.1c04158 (14 authors). --Leyo (talk) 12:49, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I don't think I fully understand the technical considerations either! Hence when Izno said it sounded like two wishes, I was hoping to narrow it down to one. But either way the reasoning for archiving was wrong, so I shall unarchive now. I apologize we misunderstood and this was so late to go into voting! Kind regards, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 15:08, 1 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

More capacity for Citation bot

Discussion

Voting

New reference-filling tool

  • Problem: All the existing citation-filling tools have major flaws, and are unsupported
  • Proposed solution: A new tool which addresses all the issues with existing tools such as WP:Reflinks, WP:Refill, ReferenceExpander. Headline features: a) 2 modes: fill all refs, or only bare refs; b) interactive mode to allow editor to select which changes to accept; c) support for the thousands of websites which Reflinks cannot fill because it fails to complete a secure login; d) ability to fill refs with "|title=Archived copy", using the archived link e) tagging of dead links, which only Reflinks supports
  • Who would benefit: Any editor who adds a reference, or tries to improve an existing reference
  • More comments: This tool is crucial to upholding the en.wp core policy of verifiability. The history of existing tools is of great work being done by volunteer editors who later reduce their commitment to Wikipedia, leaving the tool to rot. This crucial functionality needs active maintenance, to cope with evolving internet protocols, developing community standards for referencing, and the bizarre ways in which so many websites mangle metadata.
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: BrownHairedGirl (talk) 18:25, 10 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • For the records, the maintenance status of mw:Citoid is being discussed in phab:T294236. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 18:59, 10 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Whilst not exactly what you want, a lot of the feature you requested are included in the advanced reference editing gadget ProveIt, which also allows you to edit code manually and supports most reference templates. — Berrely • Talk∕Contribs 19:53, 10 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • See Web2Cit for an ongoing effort in that direction.--Strainu (talk) 12:25, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • @BrownHairedGirl: Please cite Phabricator tickets or other discussions for the bugs you claim exist; and please explain why you think we need a new tool, rather than to fix those bugs. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:44, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • A citation consists of two parts. One which is the same for couple of citation (static) like author, title, url and one which variable like section or page. What I need is a tool which helps me to handle it and which avoids that I have to type in the static part several times.—Hfst (talk) 06:50, 20 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think this should be updated because often there are repeat references, but it's often hard to find the code for those references in the backend code so that means multiple windows if the section it first appears is in a different section.. So having a list and clicking from that list so it inserts that one. And then figuring out where to insert pages for the same reference, but different page numbers needs to be smoothed out. If it's yadda Yadda author, then the page difference shouldn't force the user to retype it and also create a new line below. There has to be a neater way of doing it so it indicates it's a different page number. Also, auto fill by ISBN (Which is done on some other sites) would be useful too. It definitely needs an overhaul.--KimYunmi (talk) 20:06, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I wish to The interview of the eminent person should be mentioned as a reference. Mahmud (talk) 19:39, 29 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • This is part of a larger set of reference services that would be helpful. Would love a broader consideration of reference management. E.g., PDF handling, consistent use of conventions such as sfn and rp, appropriate use of templates such as google books and youtube, making citations for pure text refs, etc. Lfstevens (talk) 06:00, 31 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

Change wikitextEditor insert of wikitext

  • Problem: encourage use of ref labels
  • Proposed solution: change: <ref></ref> to <ref name="" ></ref>
  • Who would benefit: wikitextEditor users
  • More comments: "Cite your sources:"
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: 0mtwb9gd5wx (talk) 09:51, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Voting

Add support for the 'Cite Q' template to Citoid

  • Problem: Cannot use Cite Q template in Citoid
  • Proposed solution: When a user enters a QID into Citoid, then Citoid should (or should offer to) generate a reference using the 'Cite Q' template (if it exists on that wiki), with the QID as its first parameter value. When the user enters some other PID, such as a DOI, ISBN, or PubMedID, Citoid should check whether there is a corresponding QID, and if so then proceed as above.
  • Who would benefit: Editors wishing to cite documents whose metadata is in Wikidata
  • More comments: Template:Cite Q en:Template:Cite Q is a wrapper for Template:Citation, which it populates on-the-fly using data from Wikidata. Initiated on the English-language Wikipedia, using Lua, it has been developed to be as portable as possible to other projects and to work with minimum setup and translation on those projects. More details in the Phabricator ticket.
  • Phabricator tickets: T289287
  • Proposer: Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:06, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

The first stew would be to make Cite_Q working on all wikis. We tried to copy it to cs.wikisource, but still not working as expected - too much submodules and templates needed.

This is far from insurmountable - its already used on about 40 projects. Please ask on en:Template talk:Cite Q if you need assistance getting it working on your project. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:24, 17 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

It would be great if this project could be accompanied by some basic fixes to Cite Q and/or Wikidata to make it so that Cite Q conforms with CITEVAR. See en:Template talk:Cite Q for many reports of CITEVAR problems that should be fixable. Jonesey95 (talk) 22:16, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As is made clear in the template's documentation, you - or indeed anyone else - are welcome to make such changes, in the template's sandbox. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:40, 9 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
But cite Q must be implemented in the software; else wikis where the template does not exist could not use citoid. --Matthiasb (talk) 15:08, 20 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
This is an archival page, so discussion would be better directed to the template's talk page; but are all the other templates used by Ciotid also "implemented in the software"? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:20, 20 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

Cite extension enhancement

  • Problem: I would need a way to control the visibility of text depending on whether the <reference group=… /> yields an empty list or some references are in the buffer.

On Wikisource the typical pages in the main space are rather very short themselves however they transclude a huge chunk of text.

Some information about the
title,
author etc.
<pages index=… from=… to=… />
==References==
<references/>

[[Category:…]]

==References== ⏎ <references/> (or a simillar template) is however desirable if and only if the there is some output. On the other hand a bare references list does not look neatly without a proceeding headline.
Changes in the trancluded pages can make the references section necessary or superfluous. On the other hand due to the work flow it is not always clear in advance whether the section will be required or not. The third reason is when preparing a series of pages (chapters of a book), it is desirable to make them automatically only adjusting the page numbers in the <pages ...> tag.

  • Proposed solution: an additional parser hook for the cite extension. Let us call it <refEmpty>.


 

so

<refEmpty group=ABC >==References== ⏎ <references/></refEmpty>
would hide the content when the references buffer is empty or show it if required.

Discussion

Voting

Expose Citoid to all editors

Discussion

Voting

  • Problem: Citoid doesn't solve the url when the link is a PDF document, giving an error message.
  • Proposed solution: Enable citoid to get the metadata from the PDF and fill the fields required.
  • Who would benefit: All editors, especially the users of the VisualEditor.
  • More comments: As user Mvolz commented, maybe it is tricky to automatically assign which kind of cite corresponds to the file (journal, book, etc). If the metadata doesn't provide this information, a solution could be to let the user select the appropriate one.
  • Phabricator tickets: phab:T214038 (also related phab:T136722)
  • Proposer: Alexcalamaro (talk) 17:03, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Voting

Improve VisualEditor toolbar

  • Problem: VE toolbar auto-fill-ins are often CAPITALIZED from source
  • Proposed solution: set most fields to Title Case after Preview
  • Who would benefit: lazy, frequent citers
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: 0mtwb9gd5wx (talk) 10:25, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • Automated conversions are generally just as buggy as anything else. This will indiscrimently cause iPhone to be turned into Iphone for instance, and COVID-19 into Covid-19. It's also very much language dependent. However, maybe there could be some sort of "if amount of capital letters is more than 8 sequential characters, then Title Case the contents". —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:12, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    I think languages are different from each other. In some languages, there are not any capitalized characters; but however, bands and popular names must to be stated as exception to the capitalization rule. Thingofme (talk) 12:43, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Another approach to the detection rule could be “only fix case if all characters in the field are upper-case”. (It would still fall over trying to distinguish between author-last=NATO versus author-last=SMITH. But it would leave alone title=“The BIG BLUE GROUP to perform in New York” and title=“UNICEF–UNHCR collaboration in 20th-century Farnorthistan”.) How a sequential-characters rule treats those titles would depend on what it does with intervening whitespace and punctuation.) Pelagic (talk) 00:11, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Also I suggest you retitle this proposal as at first glance its like this is about the UI of the toolbar itself, rather than the functionality of Citoid which happens to be part of the Citation function of the toolbar. Better titles have better responses in the next phase generally. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:13, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    AFAIK this problem affects RefToolbar as well as the VE citation edit-card. Perhaps a better title could be “Provide ability to correct ALL CAPS citation data”? Pelagic (talk) 00:20, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Rather than have Citoid always do this in the background, how about button(s) in the insert-ref UIs (VE and RefToolbar)? There will be exceptions in titles (iPhone) and in personal names (van der Ergens), but it's easier to correct a couple of characters than to retype the whole dang field because the publisher decided to style METADATA ALL IN UPPER CASE (not shouting, just an example). Some fields should be in sentence case instead of title case, and if you toggle to sentence case you do have to go back and re-capitalise the proper nouns and acronyms. It's an open question how best to locate the buttons. One per field may be messy. A single “fix all-caps” button that applies to all relevant fields in the form? Pelagic (talk) 00:11, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • But again, please be cautious in different languages: In Dutch: when the character combination "ij" appears in a capitalizable position both should be capitalized, eg "IJzer" ("Iron").T.vanschaik (talk) 10:00, 20 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hello, maybe this current project "Web2Cit: Visual Editor for Citoid Web Translators" (photo) would solve this request? --Jurbop (talk) 07:24, 23 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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