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Screenshot3

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Please look at how RefToolbar behaves (I choose whether my ref is a website, book, etc; I get offered a set of useful boxes into which to input the data; I click on "Preview citation" to see that it looks OK; I click on "Add citation". Job done.), and give this sort of useful guidance to editors adding references in VE.

Thanks for these comments; obviously the references system is a work in progress and we had already planned to undertake (at least most of) these improvements, but we hadn't had the time to write it down in bugzilla - will use this to track those improvements now.

gwaw_2003 wrote:

I'd have to agree with PamD above. If anything, just steal the RefToolbar code, and make it work with VE as a temporary fix for enwp. This cannot be rolled out to new editors the way it is, or we'll have a ton of "well I hated how the references worked so I stopped trying to use them at all" edits from new editors.

Please don't roll this out to everyone until this is fixed, as until it is there is going to be a lot of cleanup work needed. I agree with those above who say this might mean less references. I quickly disabled it the first time I tried to create a new citation.

Yes, I think the "wiki-specific workflows" is key. On wikis (including English Wikipedia) that use:

<ref>{{some template|firstparam=a}}</ref>

with a few key some templates, it's worth allowing a simplified flow for those (while still providing the full flexibility of arbitrary references and arbitrary templates where needed).

Within a template, it's also verbose due to the screen layout. E.g. I would consider keeping parameter name and value on the same screen (for named parameters), and making it easy to add the next parameter without going up to the root. The latter can be done without the former.

I'd recommend trying ProveIt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ProveIt_GT) on English Wikipedia if you haven't. I don't expect you to take the same approach we did (and don't look at the "parser"). The reference browsing part also probably doesn't apply, but the add mode in particular shows how the GUI can be streamlined when it doesn't attempt to be fully general.

The "what do you want to reference?" field, which exists solely to filter through existing references, still displays if there are zero existing references.

Change 74191 had a related patch set uploaded by Jforrester:
Reference dialog commingling

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/74191

Change 74191 merged by jenkins-bot:
Reference dialog commingling

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/74191

At en.wp user:Risker reports on feedback she received running an editathon. Relevant to this bug is:

To a person, they all said that VE was *more* difficult to use than wikitext, especially with respect to references. Now, they had all had reinforced to them the importance of referencing factual information, so they were all trying to include references. They pointed out that at least with the wikitext editor, they could pull up templates that were complete and they didn't have to try to figure out the parameters. They were using mostly printed sources, not websites, so there was no URL to use as a quick-and-dirty reference insertion.

(In reply to comment #8)

The "what do you want to reference?" field, which exists solely to filter
through existing references, still displays if there are zero existing
references.

This sounds like bug 51848

• Bug 51184 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

This was resolved with the new citation system released last month.