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It's been a couple weeks since the text "A summary will be posted here soon." was added to the page. Is this still going to be posted? --Yair rand (talk)19:48, 27 June 2018 (UTC)

@Yair rand: Absolutely. It's taking us longer than originally planned, but it will happen. Sorry for the delay. Best,Johanna Strodt (WMDE) (talk)07:23, 28 June 2018 (UTC)

@Yair rand: A summary plus the conclusion and next steps can now be found on theproject page of the wish. -- Best,Johanna Strodt (WMDE) (talk)09:26, 1 October 2018 (UTC) 

I suggested something similar during the Esino Lario Wikimania. Not sure where that ended up.Rich Farmbrough 20:12 5 August 2018 (GMT).

Just a little note: the syntax I proposed for ref tags (because I think it's nicer!) was something like this:

<ref name="Foo" pages="12-24" />

Rich Farmbrough 12:37 2 March 2019 (GMT).

Whatever is done the sub-reference label shouldnot be called anything that could be confused with a template parameter likepage= |pages= |at= |location= because you would have people that expect

Lorem ipsum<ref name="Smith" at="p. 12">Foo, J. (2005) ''Book of Things''</ref>

^[1]

to generate

^[1] Foo, J. (2005)Book of Things, p. 12

and

Lorem ipsum<ref name="Smith">Foo, J. (2005) ''Book of Things''</ref> Foobar barfoo.<ref name="Smith" at="pp. 12-13"/>

to generate

^[1] Foo, J. (2005)Book of Things

^[1.1] p. 12-13

This is why you need to have<ref name="Foobar" subname="Barfoo"> which emphasizes that these things arelabels, rather than parameters.

Headbomb (talk)21:12, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

The 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 notation is clumsy. The outcome should be 1, 2, 3 as usual:

The Sun is pretty big.<ref name="Miller" | page=121>E. Miller, ''The Sun'', (New York: Academic Press, 2005)</ref> In fact, it is very big.<ref name="Miller" | page=123></ref> Don't look directly at the sun!<ref name="Miller" | page=42></ref>

This should result in:

1. E. Miller,The Sun, (New York: Academic Press, 2005), p. 121
2. E. Miller,The Sun, (New York: Academic Press, 2005), p. 123
3. E. Miller,The Sun, (New York: Academic Press, 2005), p. 42

--Pp.paul.4 (Diskussion) 01:59, 31. Dez. 2021 (CET)

Assuming this is implemented, there is a large legacy of old systems in use - literal duplication of the book cite, various template solutions, etc.. a real treat for bot writers who want to automate conversion. Anything that can be done with conversions in mind would be appreciated (I don't know what that would be, if anything) --GreenC (talk)15:44, 6 August 2018 (UTC)

I useshortened notes linked with {{sfn}} and citation templates, styledSudirman, (the featured article on the day I joined). The benefits I find using {{sfn}} are nolarge interruptions in prose when editing, and {{citation}} for the alphabetization of sources. The only detriment is the auxilliary set of references in addition to sources.

A script, loaded during publishing, which scans the page, and matched {{sfn}} with {{citation}}, generating a BACKREF suffix, after the appropriate citation. By using {{sfn}} and {{citation}}, built the way I've described, there will be no two-level Bibliography, saving page space, no large interruption in prose, making it easier to read, and an organized, alphabetized bibliography.

In the case of pages, or locations, they will be added in the suffix, and linked to the selected citation via CITEREF, (example, p. 25, highlighted in blue), after clicking.

*Ricklefs, M.C. (1993).A History of Modern Indonesia Since c.1200 (2nd ed.). London: MacMillan.ISBN 978-0-333-57689-2. ,^{^a} p. 12^bp. 25^c p. 74

IF {{sfn|Ricklefs|1993}} AND {{citation|last=Ricklefs|date=1993}} THEN: CITEREFRicklefs1993a AND BACKREFRicklefs1993a

AND (a second reference is used)

IF {{sfn|Ricklefs|1993}} AND {{citation|last=Ricklefs|date=1993}} THEN: CITEREFRicklefs1993b AND BACKREFRicklefs1993b

For the prose: [[CITEREFRicklefs1993a|[[1]] ]]

For the Bibliography: [[BACKREFRicklefs1993a|a]]

(this way posted at WP:TPV before this post) -NorthPark1417 (talk)20:18, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

@NorthPark1417: If I understand you correctly your main problem with the<ref> is the Interruption in prose of the text by having all the information within the wiki code of the paragraph to be sourced? This is actually already fixed since quite some time by the possibility to define them at the bottom:

Within hours, the Paris prosecutor's office had opened an investigation into the fire, led by the Paris Region Judicial Police.<ref name="La Provence Staff-2019"/> The cause of the fire was not immediately known. The investigation most strongly suspected a case of "accidental destruction by fire", but had not ruled anything out, saying it was too early to know the cause of the fire.<ref name="ladepeche"/><ref name="six_questions"/> ==References== <references> <ref name="La Provence Staff-2019">{{cite news |title=Notre-Dame de Paris : une enquête a été ouverte pour "destruction involontaire par incendie" |url=https://www.laprovence.com/actu/en-direct/5459359/notre-dame-de-paris-une-enquete-a-ete-ouverte-pour-destruction-involontaire-par-incendie.html |accessdate=15 April 2019 |website=La Provence |date=15 April 2019|language=fr }}</ref> <ref name="ladepeche">{{cite web |url=https://www.ladepeche.fr/2019/04/15/incendie-a-notre-dame-lorigine-de-lincendie-reste-inconnue,8132982.php |title=Notre-Dame : la piste accidentelle privilégiée, les ouvriers du chantier entendus en pleine nuit |trans-title=Notre-Dame: prioritized accident investigation, construction workers heard in the middle of the night |website=La Depeche |accessdate=16 April 2019 |language=fr}}</ref> <ref name="six_questions">{{cite web |url=http://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/six-questions-sur-l-incendie-de-notre-dame-de-paris-15-04-2019-8054094.php |title=Six questions sur l’incendie de Notre-Dame de Paris |trans-title=Six questions about the fire of Notre-Dame |website=Le Parisien |accessdate=16 April 2019 |language=fr}}</ref> </references>

Is this already doing what you want? It would also be possible to embed the refs in Templates to auto-generate the names – that would be up to the communities to do. --Michael Schönitzer (WMDE) (talk)11:18, 23 April 2019 (UTC)

For those using the wikitext editor, and ref tags, the format is critical to making this easy to use.

• <ref extends="Pierson">p. 123-163 </ref> is absolutely confusing, not to mention dissimilar to anything else in Wikipedia. (And "extends" is a word that programmers use, not the vast majority of editors)

• <ref name="Foobar" subname="Barfoo"> has been suggested, but there is no reason to add another label ("Barfoo") - that not only forces the editor to define the subname (but just in one place), but also means that subsequent edits need to include a search for which subnames are in use.

• <ref name="Foo" pages="12-24" />, also suggested above, is problematical, as noted by another editor, because sometimes what is being specified is a chapter or part of a book.

Still, the overall approach in the last two examples is a good one - start with a label for the main source, then add something. This has the obvious advantage that if one editor cites <ref name="Foo"/>, it's easy for a subsequent edit/editor to add the additional specification. So, something like this would be good:

• <ref name="Foo" detail="Pages 12-24" />

Or, if that's too much trouble for the parser:

• <ref name="Foo" | detail="Pages 12-24" />

--John Broughton (talk)17:23, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

We can already do this (or something very similar) at English Wikipedia, see for exampleen:Spring Vale railway station references 3, 4 and 6, which useen:Template:Harvnb compared to refs 1 and 5 which useen:Template:Cite book. That method was already possible when I joined Wikipedia more than ten years ago. --Redrose64 (talk;at English Wikipedia)20:18, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

Here is how that might look with the new feature. Personally, I find the organization there easier to follow: it's clear in the article text that all the "1.x" references are to the same source, and in the references list it's easy to find every reference to that source since they're all in one place.Anomie (talk)14:30, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

en:template:sfn fulfils the same purpose as well, and can easily be adapted for use with non-book sources. The template has existed since 2009 and started to gain popularity in 2011 or thereabouts.Diannaa (talk)22:48, 9 December 2019 (UTC)

It's amazing that time and effort is being invested in this with so little community involvement.ANOTHER half-baked (or maybe 23/4-baked) referencing mechanism that sort of addresses some issue but not a bunch of others -- wow, just what we need! It's certainly better than than complicated and verbose sfn nonsense, but you'd get a better result, without the clutter in the reflist, using the {r} template[1] with the|p= option.

And when you are going to make it possible for us to control the order of items in the reflist?That would be useful.EEng (talk)00:55, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

The use of {{r}} with its page option is flatly ugly. --Izno (talk)01:56, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

There izno need to be harsh about it. How isblah blah^[2]:3 uglier thanblah blah^[2.3]? (Though, if it were up to me, I'd change the output of {r} to beblah blah^[2:3].)EEng (talk)02:02, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

See also:Community_Wishlist_Survey_2021/Citations/Configurable_order_of_references_in_references_section --Matthiaspaul (talk)14:35, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

What exactly is {{R}} supposed to do? Its apparent purpose is merely as a shorthand for display instructions to be nested within an HTML tag, but the template lacks documentation. I found a couple of JavaScripts in theWhat links here tool on the left. I was actually looking for the Meta-Wiki equivalent of the Wikipediaen:Template:R from shortcut.— CJDOS, Sheridan, OR, USA (talk)05:34, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

First I think this all looks great. I just wanted to point out that 1.2, 2.2, etc, the '.' is hard to read and I have good eyes. 1-2, 2-2, etc might be more accessible. Has any accessibility testing been done or can a consultant be hired to investigate if it would be an issue? Maybe because they are linked it is less of an issue, in which case an accessibility assessment might not be needed.Kees08 (talk)00:09, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

An option I have thought would be to use themiddot^{[13·2][23·1]} or abullet,^{[22•3][13•1]} but the regullar dot may be just fine.^[22.1][23.2] But if I had to pick one, I would choose the middot as it makes me think they are two numbers, and not a float or decimal.^{[13·3][23·4][25·2][35·1]} —Arthurfragoso (talk)10:55, 28 April 2022 (UTC)

Using letters as mentioned by NorthPark1417before might be even better.

*Ricklefs, M.C. (1993).A History of Modern Indonesia Since c.1200 (2nd ed.). London: MacMillan.ISBN 978-0-333-57689-2. ,^{^a} p. 12^b p. 25^c p. 74

—Arthurfragoso (talk)11:40, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

updates to follow in 2021.

Is it usable yet?--Marc Lacoste (talk)08:48, 7 June 2020 (UTC)

@Marc Lacoste:Thanks for hinting us to the wrong date. I will change that.

Unfortunately, the project has been delayed. We are working on a new plan and will update with more precise information soon. Don't hesitate to get in touch if you need further information.Robin Strohmeyer (WMDE) (talk)19:43, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

@Robin Strohmeyer (WMDE): any update on this? Please ping me.Waddie96 (talk)08:46, 15 August 2020 (UTC)

@Waddie96:Unfortunately, we have to delay our work on the project. We will not implement anything in 2020. Further information will be available in early 2021.

@Robin Strohmeyer (WMDE): This looks really useful. Any news?Chidgk1 (talk)08:17, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

Even though we also would really like to finish and enable this improvement we currently have no resources to fix the outstanding incompatibly of Visual Editor with this improvement. We hope to get resources for this again, but we currently don't know when this might be. We're sorry about that.Michael Schönitzer (WMDE) (talk)11:19, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Doesn't the template "rp" with named long references already solve this problem, sort of?Glades12 (talk)11:10, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

@Glades12: You are right, the template Rp and book referencing serve a similar purpose. Thedocumentation on enwikipedia does even mention Book referencing as a possible improvement.

Unfortunately, Rp has some known inconveniences such as

• some readers deem the citation style decreases readability
• possibly conflicting citation styles within the same article
• lots of scrolling or clicking required to check theexact source for an information as the page number shows within the text, whereas the reference title is in the foot notes.

BookReferencing would improve the situation by displaying the book title and the page number directly in the reference preview. At the bottom you would have extra indentation and a separate list of the page numbers. Hope that helps - let me know if you have further questions.Robin Strohmeyer (WMDE) (talk)20:22, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

Okay. Sounds good.Glades12 (talk)13:51, 12 June 2020 (UTC)

I was just alerted by the system to comment on Book sub-referencing and noticed that the Rp template offers the same functionality already. Rp is a separate template but cooperates with <ref name= something /> citations, as you know. I use rp after each use of a named ref to add additional citations to a video, but to point to different times in the same video, so rp need not be restricted to text annotations only e.g.,<ref name= something />{{rp|minute 10:26}} . Sorry if this is late; I don't follow this specific wiki. --Ancheta Wis (talk)12:50, 5 January 2021 (UTC)

There don't seem to be any inline pop-ups showing the full reference when a citation is hovered atbeta.wmflabs. I find that feature most helpful when it comes to checking references. A reader should never need to scroll up and down on a web page to get that piece of information; wikipedia is not a paper book, we can't use bookmarks, and scrolling back and forth is too inefficient and too distracting.

Citations like cit^[1.1] also seem unnecessary, because a pop-up window could show the page/chapter/section number,^[1] (like here) and when clicked, the exact page number could be highlighted in the list of references. [23] and [23.11] to a reader mean exactly the same (=almost nothing) until full information is shown. The latter form, [23.11], especially when combined with several other citations^{[23.11][3.6][52.7]} will lead to a citation-number-cluttered^{[114.2][4.1][12.7]} appearance of the text. (Hover me^[114][4][12]) I also do not expect many readers to have any of the referenced paper books (remember also that page numbers change between editions, making them even less valuable), so all these page numbers and sub-citation numbers only mean something to those that have—most likely no one but a few wiki editors.To summarize: make better use of the web format, stop thinking of wikipedia as a paper book.Ponor (talk)07:02, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

This looks useful and elegantly-formatted. Feature request? If I am quoting a work, I'd like to be able to cite a different quote for each page reference (or even two quotes from the same page, supporting two different statements in the article text). This would be especially useful for avoiding disputes about verification in controversial content. From suitably-licensed books, reports, and articles, I might make quite long quotes, so ideally a quote should be collapsible.

I hope this is possible to implement; it would make this tool even more useful to me. The "rp" template already does page numbers, but only by duplicating citations can one get multiple quotes from one work. I've spent hours adding and translating quotes to verify disputed content, only to have the quotes removed on grounds that the formatting was ugly (well, it was).HLHJ (talk)23:41, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

This would have been among the use cases for this extension, but now that it has been cancelled unfortunately, I have rewritten ther citation template in the English Wikipedia to feature an annotation system which allows to define various bits of information belonging to the "shortened" local references (like specific page numbers, quotes, commentary, sub-references or even other citations) as part of the local invocation of the reference (so that it can be shown in a tooltip) when hovering over the reference link, but optionally also collect the information and automatically append it at the end of the full citation defined elsewhere. This can become a simple list of annotations, but can also be formatted more fancy over multiple lines, so that the output can be made to look quite similar to what the "Book referencing" extension would have looked like, including grouping of sub-references, seer citation template#R-style shortened references.

(At present, back- and cross-links within those annotations still have to be set up manually via id=, link-id= and leadin= parameters, which is a bit cumbersome, but I'm working on making this more automatic.)

I still hope that some fine day we will also see the cancelled "Book referencing" extension to be rolled out, in which case the new R-style annotation system could be either converted to use the Book referencing extension internally or peacefully coexist with it.

--Matthiaspaul (talk)15:36, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

This r thing looks like a great approximation of book referencing (which, to be clear, I also want -- just saying this for future vote counting purposes). I already use rp a lot, guess this is the next step for now.Artoria2e5 (talk)06:58, 30 December 2023 (UTC)

Not just|quote=, but also, e.g.,|quote-page=,|section-url=. --Chatul (talk)13:58, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Talks about{{r}} are going onhere.Est. 2021 (talk)19:25, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

I see that2023: Work has been resumed. Current focus: Developing solutions for the VisualEditor.

Given the way that shortened footnotes are commonly used to clean the article's body text, this template will likely result in an increase of list-defined references. The documentation even gives a demonstration of that. As of right now, list-defined references don't fully work in the visual editor. (Try editingen:86-DOS in Visual Editor to see.) Isn't it putting the cart before the horse to introduce a new page number citing system, before Visual Editor can handle the list-defined references?Rjjiii (talk)01:56, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

@Rjjiii thank you for your comment. I will consult with the team and get back to you on this. Best wishesThereza Mengs (WMDE) (talk)09:34, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

@Rjjiii thank you again for your comment and your patience on our feedback.

I have a feeling that there may be some misunderstanding here. Perhaps I can clear that up with my response. We are not working on a new or additional template. Instead, we're developing a solution within the Cite extension that will allow you to reference specific pages, chapters, etc. That solution will also work without templates. The problem you were mentioning lies outside the scope of our focus area, which is about reusing references within an article, because it relates to how the visual editor handles templates in general. Nevertheless I hope I could provide some more clarification on this topic. Best wishesThereza Mengs (WMDE) (talk)13:09, 20 September 2023 (UTC)

@Thereza Mengs (WMDE): Thanks for the detailed response. On English Wikipedia, the help pages have for years said that list-defined references can't be edited in the visual editor. I started a discussion there[2] and did some research. It looks like earlier this year, ESanders (WMF) added the ability to edit references within the reference area to the Visual Editor which is fantastic! You're correct that the references are invisible on the page that I linked earlier because they use the "reflist" template. I have intentionally done a rewrite of the Police Jury article on the English Wikipedia, using list-defined references and no templates, to test out how the visual editor would handle the format.

Check out this article in the visual editor:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_jury Changing and re-using references works fine. The following things don't work:

• Adding a reference: I cannot figure out a way to add a reference into the list-defined references section. If I click there and attempt to add a reference, the Visual Editor will place it somewhere else in the article.
• Deleting a reference: There are two problems. First, I don't seem to be able to delete a list-defined reference. Second, if I delete all usages of the list-defined reference, it just becomes invisible in the Visual Editor but emits a big warning in the article output.

Hope that helps,Rjjiii (talk)21:58, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

Hello @Rjjiii,

sorry for my late reply, I was on vacation.

We absolutely understand and recognize your problems. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide or research a solution as the team is currently focused on reusing references within an article. I would suggest that you create a Phabricator ticket and ping ESanders. Since he has already worked on something in this area, you could try to see if he can find a solution to your problem. Anyway, thank you for your detailed message and I hope you will find a solution soon. -- Best regards,Thereza Mengs (WMDE) (talk)12:18, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

Unfortunately, we are unable to provide or research a solution as the team is currently focused on reusing references within an article. Okay, well that's not going to work in the VisualEditor. You are characterizing this as "my problem", but I disagree. Regards,Rjjiii (talk)02:19, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

Phabricator ticket regarding above issue:https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T356471Rjjiii (talk)04:30, 27 February 2024 (UTC)

Hello to everyone watching this page. Our team is seeking to look over the shoulders of some Wikipedians who predominantly use Visual Editor, or switch between wikitext and Visual Editor when editing, especially when working with references.

Sessions will take 30–45 minutes and will include testing an early prototype forsub-referencing (= reusing references with different details) with Visual Editor.Compensation is available. If you are interested, please sign uphere.

Please note that most likely, we won’t be able to have sessions with everyone who is interested. Our UX designer will try to create a good balance of wiki contributors, e.g., in terms of editing experience, tech experience, editing preferences, gender, disability and more. If you’re a fit, she will reach out to you to schedule an appointment.

-- For the Technical Wishes project,Johanna Strodt (WMDE) (talk)11:20, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

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