WMDE Technical Wishes/Reusing references

Re-using references
Re-using references
Status	In progress
Duration	2022 – 2024
Origin	Technical Wishes Survey 2022
Phabricator	project board
Responsible	Technical Wishes Team

In the 2022 Technical Wishes survey on German Wikipedia, community members selected „make re-using references easier“ as the next focus area for Wikimedia Deutschland’s Technical Wishes team. This page documents our research and development progress on this topic. Comments and questions are welcome on the talk page!

Focus: Re-using references within an article

Through our research and input from community members, we found many problems in different workflows around re-using references: problems with re-using them from external sources, from another wiki, from another article, or from within the same article. To get more work done in the timeframe that we have for this project, we are focusing on the issues around re-using references within the same article. Our research has shown that this is where most problems are. Working on this area, we will also be able to tackle the wish that was brought up the most: re-using a reference with different details (e.g. a different page number) on the same article.

Our team has worked on this project before, but could not finish it. In the past years, we gained experiences on Visual Editor and references, e.g. by working on templates and Reference Previews, allowing us to deliver a solution for this project.

Projects

Confirmed projects

Project	On some wikis	On all wikis
Sub-referencing Re-using a reference with different details (e.g. page number) in wikitext and VisualEditor	In development	In development
Bug fixes	Done	Done

Main project: Sub-referencing

Our research has shown that one of the most pressing issues when it comes to re-using references is that it is not possible to re-use references with different details within an article, in a simple way. More reasons why this is our main project:

There is currently no solution in MediaWiki for re-using references with different details. There are community-built solutions via templates, but those solutions do not exist across all wikis and cannot cover all use cases of references with different details.
A solution is highly desired by the wiki communities, regardless of editing style, editor preference or level of experience.
We want to improve feature parity: re-using references with different details is significantly more complicated and more error-prone in Visual Editor.
Many of the other problems identified in our research are caused by the lack of a solution for this problem. Some other problems might be addressed as a byproduct of an improved Visual Editor citation workflow.
Readers will also benefit from a solution to this problem, as citations with different details will be grouped, similar to re-used identical references, making it easier to assess the overall quality of an article's sources.

At this point, it is unclear if we’re going to solve other problems in this area. Read more about our work on this problem.

History and research

The original plan was to start working on this focus area shortly after the survey in February 2022 and finish our work towards the end of 2023. Due to several longer, unplanned absences in key roles in the Technical Wishes team, we are currently behind schedule and plan to be working on this focus area until the end of 2024.

We’ve kicked off our research with a call for problems in 2022. We analyzed those problems – as well as lots of open Phabricator tickets around re-using references, which had been submitted over the years –, sketched user workflows and tested referencing in different wikis ourselves, resulting in this problem collection in 2023. After taking a break due to several absences, we conducted user interviews in early 2024 which confirmed many of our assumptions.

Summary of user interviews in early 2024

A total of 9 participants were interviewed to help us understand their challenges with re-using references. The participants were selected based on diverse backgrounds with a final selection of:

Experience
- Editor level (self-reported): 1 beginner, 5 medium, 4 expert
- Editing hours per week: 0-2 (3), 3-10 (2), 11-20 (2), 21+ (2)
- Experience working with references (multiple answers possible): adding (9), re-using (8), editing (8), template maintenance (2), automation (2), policy (2)
- Tech-savviness (self-reported): 0 beginner, 2 intermediate, 3 proficient, 4 expert
Regularly used editors (multiple answers possible): Visual Editor (6), wikitext 2010 (5), wikitext 2017 (2)
- Comfortable with Visual Editor: Not comfortable (2), somewhat (3) very (4)
- Comfortable with wikitext: Not comfortable (3), very (6)
Active on projects (multiple answers possible): Wikipedia (9), Wiktionary (2), Wikiquote (1), Wikisource (3), Wikiversity (1), Wikivoyage (1), Commons (6), Wikidata (6), Wikispecies (1), Metawiki (1)
Editors on 8 different language wikis: German, Italian, Spanish, English, Kannada, Tulu, Gujarati, French
6 from the Global North (4 from German-speaking areas), 3 from the Global South
4 women and 5 men
Age: <25 (2), 25-40 (3) 40-60 (1), 60+ (3)

The results have shown the following:

Adding verifiable and reliable references requires a time investment and is a cumbersome task, often leading to high cognitive load.
There are multiple workflows for adding references. Wikimedians use a combination of wikitext and Visual Editor to add references. They employ combinations of copy-and-paste and user interface elements. Even experienced wikitext 2010 editor users switch to Visual Editor in order to use the Automatic Reference Maker (Citoid), as they find it very handy and easy to use.
Inconsistent experience across editors
- There is a lack of feature parity across all three editor types (Visual Editor, 2010 wikitext and 2017 wikitext editor). Some workflows are easily achieved in wikitext but are disadvantageous in Visual Editor.
- One notable issue is that wikitext users can use copy-and-paste to create a new reference with different details, while Visual Editor users need to resort to clicking through footnote markers or moving between the footnote marker and the reference area to manually copy the information piece by piece.
Duplicate references: Resolving duplicates is a cumbersome task. Among other things, because duplicates are difficult to find in Visual Editor.
Named references: The Visual Editor auto-generation of named references (:0) poses a challenge for wikitext users, because it does not convey information about the source, making it harder to identify a reference.
Simple insertion via Automatic Reference Maker (Citoid) doesn’t always work well
- The Automatic Reference Maker is used by most of the interviewees.
- It has issues, such as not always finding enough metadata or any metadata for the entered identifier.
Citing the same reference but with different details
- Most notably for re-using references with different details, such as page numbers, there is currently no clean way to do so without using templates.
- All workarounds known to us can result in errors or duplication.
- Many users just add duplicates instead of using existing solutions like {{sfn}} and rely on others for wikitext cleanup.
- Template-based workarounds are not very compatible with Visual Editor at the moment. Overall, Visual Editor users are mostly in a disadvantageous position, with regard to existing solutions for re-using references with different details.

Thank you to everyone who participated in tests and interviews or offered to participate, as well as everyone who took the time to comment on our talk pages over the years. It is deeply appreciated! If you have further suggestions, ideas or feedback, please leave it on the talk page.