WMDE Technical Wishes/Sub-referencing/zh: Difference between revisions

We need your feedback to make sure we build the right things. Feedback or questions are always welcome on this project’s talk page.

The prototype is available on beta wiki. Currently, we primarily invite you to test the wikitext solution:

In Wikipedia articles, it is common to reference a source multiple times. But while you can re-use a reference exactly as it is, you currently cannot re-use the same reference with different details (e.g. different page numbers). Your only option is to create a whole new reference or to use workarounds.

If you want to re-use a reference in wikitext, you can turn it into a named reference and refer to that name at another point in the article. The named reference can be placed in the article text or in the references section. In Visual Editor you can use the option "re-use" in the citation dialog. In the references section, references with the same name are grouped together.

If you want to re-use an existing reference with different details in wikitext, you currently need to copy and paste the existing reference and change the details of the duplicate or create a new (almost identical) reference from scratch. Some projects use workarounds like short citations or template-based solutions like shortened footnotes. In the references section, the original reference and the new one you created are not grouped together.

If you want to re-use an existing reference with different details in Visual Editor, neither the option "re-use" in the citation dialog nor the copy-and-paste method will work, because both lead to identical re-uses, and changing details of the re-used/copied reference changes both instances of that reference. Instead you’ll need to create a new (almost identical) reference from scratch. In the references section, the original reference and the new one you created are not grouped together.

References created by template-based workarounds like {{sfn}} cannot be edited from within the references section and don’t appear in the citation re-use tab; but it is possible to edit them manually when locating them in the article text.

workaround with {{sfn}}:

Template-based workarounds are not properly displayed in Reference Previews, Reference Tooltips and mobile reference pop-ups.

{{sfn}} workaround with previews for references:

• The experience of Visual Editor and wikitext users is very different.
• Most workarounds for reusing references with different details don’t work properly in Visual Editor.
• Creating lots of almost identical references with different details makes the wikitext longer and potentially harder to read.
• Template-based workarounds are not equally accepted by all communities and thus not globally available.
• Some users try to avoid this issue by putting sources in the bibliography section without using them as references at all, which makes it harder to verify sections of the article.

Our team has worked on this problem on and off for some time now. Here is an overview of this project’s history, including our research.
Thank you to everyone who participated in tests and interviews and who showed interest, 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 feedback, please share it on the talk page.

We are aware of other problems in the focus area "reusing references", and we will try to address them along the way. Our focus, however, remains on creating a solution for sub-referencing.

A tracking category called Category:Pages that use extended references is added to any page where sub-referencing is used, allowing you to explore or fix pages using the new feature. The name of this category might change.

Yes, you can use sub-referencing with citation templates. We’ve tested the most common citation templates (e.g. cite book or cite web) and don’t expect any issues. But your favorite template might need some updates in order to work with our solution. Some gadgets/scripts related to references might also need an update in order to properly work with the new sub-referencing solution. Because templates, gadgets and scripts are in the hands of the wiki communities, we are unable to adapt them.

Please let us know, on the talk page, if you discover any problems or need some help updating citation templates to make them work with the new feature.
You are also invited to come to our Wikimania workshop "A brand new citation option – What does this mean for citation templates?" (hybrid) or watch the recording later.

We don’t know yet. Currently, the attribute name for creating sub-references in wikitext is extends. We decided on this name some years ago after discussing with communities and stakeholders at the Wikimedia Foundation. However, we have received some feedback that this name might not be the best option. Before we will deploy this feature to the wikis, we want to get more feedback on the attribute name and are planning to put some alternatives up for discussion. We’ll let you know when that happens.

When we first started working on the wikitext implementation of this feature, we discussed different options. Adding a new tag (e.g. <subref>) was discussed carefully, but we wanted to stick to the existing <ref> approach, to minimize the amount of new syntax users have to learn. Besides, introducing a new tag would require many updates to existing community software (tools, gadgets, bots etc.) for referencing.

One proposal (from 2008) was to specify the subreference’s details within the <ref> tag: <ref page="page 2" name="Miller"> or later <ref detail="page 2" name="Miller"> using the name attribute to refer to the main reference. This is similar to what users know from working with templates like {{cite book}}.

The main issue with this approach is, however, that it causes problems with templates and is very likely to cause errors. Another problem with this syntax is that it does not allow to re-use a sub-reference, because the name attribute has already been used to refer to the main reference and cannot be used a second time.

A way to avoid both these issues is to create a new reference attribute and put the sub-reference’s details in the area between the opening and closing <ref> tags, the same way it is already done for the content of references. This is what our approach does.