In T130148#2200465, @Jdforrester-WMF wrote:

That's not how wikilinks work. If you click away without clicking 'Done' it will discard.

That's not quite analogous. First, the wikilink doesn't show up until it's actually inserted. In addition, as you type a wikilink, it starts showing you a list of autocomplete options. Clicking any of them adds the link, as does clicking "Done"--there is a single affirmative action (heh). In the citation workflow, clicking "generate" is already an affirmative action. I don't think it's abnormal for the user to mistakenly think that it's sufficient, especially given that it already shows up as a preview.

(and users quickly learnt, in our testing)

I suppose the existing workflow can be learned if the user edits on a near-daily basis, but I kept hitting it within a single session, and had to relearn it every time I used VE for the first time in a while.

This is strange behaviour. If the normal behaviour is to just have stuff insert and show up immediately (like link behaviour), it needs to be consistent across tools. And given that the entire VE session is a preview anyway, with its own final 'save' action, the normal behaviour of immediate insertion makes more sense anyway - if folks want to cancel a specific thing, that's what deleting it or undo is for. An extra step when adding stuff is inconsistent with user expectations that they're working within a non-final environment.

@Jdforrester-WMF : We got another complaint about this behaviour in the German Wikipedia (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Technik/Text/Edit/VisualEditor/R%C3%BCckmeldungen#Betreff_Plazierung_eines_Buttons), and I agree with the creator of this task: Discarding all changes without warning when leaving a dialog window should not be the standard behaviour. Especially when the same dialog window is modal for all other types of references (i.e. you can't discard a manually entered reference by leaving the window).