Improve VE references' automatic names and reuse (Community Wishlist/W17)
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Description
Currently, citations in VE (Visual Editor) get assigned a number as a name. This poses problems when you use the source editor:
- If you copy-paste to a different article, the name is likely to duplicate, leading to errors. Even worse, some of these errors will go unnoticed.
- If you read the article in source mode, you will not know which source is used.
- Worse than verbose errors are silent errors. For example copying
<ref name=":1"/>from one article to another article will silently fail if<ref name=":1"/>exists which is more likely to occur with numeric increments. - Sub-referencing proposal WMDE Technical Wishes/Sub-referencing would repeat the same confusion/limitations, if re-naming references is not resolved. Whatever solutions are implemented for regular references should also potentially be incorporated for sub-references. The development of sub-references is not a blocker here.
A better system would be to automatically use the lastname_year or publisher_year if available, with sensible fallback options if unavailable. This would reduce conflict between people who tend to use VE with those using the source editor. This was 6th most popular wish in 2023.
Assigned focus area
Type of wish
System change
Affected users
editors
Phabricator tasks
Other details
Voting
This wish currently has 23 supporters. Voting for this wish is open until it is completed.
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Supporters of this wish
支持Matěj Suchánek(留言)2025年10月9日 (四) 18:49
支持even just basic heuristics would seem to work well hereBrokenSegue(留言)2025年10月14日 (二) 02:33
支持Even just allowing the user to manually enter a name would be a huge improvement.Nardog(留言)2025年10月22日 (三) 10:08
支持better default names would immediately reduce bugs. Allowing editing of name in VE would be ideal, but require names to be updated elsewhere thenShushugah(留言)2025年11月20日 (四) 05:11
支持Generally agreed. Look at the RefRenamer script on enwiki as both a viable approach to ref naming and as a great way to fix these enumerated ref names today.StefenTower(留言)2025年11月21日 (五) 04:41
支持this is one of multiple things to improve regarding automatic ref names – see related wish W440: Unique and useful automatic reference names instead of ref name=":1" etc which lists additional issues alongside this, which is specific to the VisualEditor that most active editors usually don't usePrototyperspective(留言)2025年11月21日 (五) 12:41
支持Escargot bleu(留言)2026年3月19日 (四) 12:41
支持With short names, otherwise it's bad in another way. I use LastnameYear (beginning with capital letter) for literature and for web sources including newspapers the main part of url (small letters), so the proposal seems to be quite similar to that. Additionally, if the full references are defined at the end of the article inside a references block instead of within the article text, any new reference should be automatically moved there as well to avoid chaos for editors who don't use VE.Lupe(留言)2026年3月30日 (一) 16:40
支持This is a major annoyance, especially so as someone that exclusively edits with the 2010 wikitext editor.Garzfoth(留言)2026年5月21日 (四) 16:30
支持1234qwer1234qwer4(留言)2026年5月21日 (四) 23:35
支持SnorlaxMonster(留言)2026年6月27日 (六) 16:47
支持Addonian1123(留言)2026年8月4日 (二) 09:10