Talk:Community Tech/Allow references to be named in VisualEditor

Comment

Disappointing to see no mention of any progress as yet. Please prioritise this work - trying to edit an article created with multi-used references "named" as ":05" etc is a real headache. PamD (talk) 08:54, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

Problem description

I'm sorry I missed the Survey; I would have added my strong support.

I find the problem description on the Content page to be more about the mechanism that produces the problem, the software locus of the problem, and not a functional description of the problem as users see it. For example, it ignores the knock-on effects that non-VE users experience. If you don't have a good functional description of the issue, you risk having the fix not resolve the actual problem, or only part of it.

When you revisit this project, can you please reformulate the Problem description so that it starts out in functional terms, and leave the discussion of why the problem occurs for lower down, or for a separate label? I could propose some wording, but I suspect that User:PamD, who commented at task T92432 and the 2019 Wishlist Survey page, could formulate the Problem description functionally better than I could, and could also delineate the different ways that this effects VE users, vs. non-VE users who come in behind VE users who have added/changed references using VE.

Finally: any update yet on scheduling? Mathglot (talk) 00:22, 28 September 2019 (UTC)

• Coming here as summoned by being mentioned ... in the English Wikipedia guideline on citing sources, under "repeated citations", it says: To help with page maintenance, it is recommended that the text of the name have a connection to the inline citation or footnote, for example "author year page": <ref name="Smith 2005 p94">text of the citation</ref>. Numeric reference "names" are expressly forbidden. The "colon + number" reference "names" generated by Visual Editor have no connection to the citation: that's the problem. Initially the reference "names" are in the same order as the footnotes, but if the text is rearranged or more citations added, even this collapses. This makes it very difficult for a human editor trying to work out how to amend, correct or re-use an existing citation. It must be possible to work out a simple algorithm to derive a sensible reference name from the content of the reference, if it is anything beyond a bare URL. I can't comment as a VE user, as I haven't used it since trying to do so in its early days and finding it hopeless for my kind of wikignoming editing, so I'm not sure what I can say that I haven't already said. But please ping me if there's anything else I could add. Thanks. PamD (talk) 14:13, 28 September 2019 (UTC)

Naming references & cite Q

Cite Q references are easily added via visual editor, Such references typically may contain only the Qnumber. Thus when trying to reuse them (via visual editor), there is absolutely no clue to indicate that an author is "T.F.Houston" for example, Thus cite Q references added via visual editor are extremely difficult to use when they are not named.MargaretRDonald (talk) 19:32, 10 January 2022 (UTC)