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Insert citations automatically after generating and show citation to edit it afterwards
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Authored By
Whatamidoing-WMF
Aug 16 2017, 5:48 PM
Referenced Files
F28472718: image.png
Mar 26 2019, 4:53 PM
F28472715: image.png
Mar 26 2019, 4:53 PM
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Description

Current process:

  1. Click the 'Cite' button.
  2. Paste in a URL.
  3. Click 'Generate'.
  4. See the citation result.
  5. Click 'Insert'.
  6. Click 'Edit'.
  7. Fix the citation.

Or:

  1. Click the 'Cite' button.
  2. Paste in a URL.
  3. Click 'Generate'.
  4. See the citation result.
  5. Looks good, so move on to the next editing task.
  6. Oops, I forgot to click the 'Insert' button. Start over at Step #1.

Desired process:

  1. Click the 'Cite' button.
  2. Paste in a URL.
  3. Click 'Generate'.
  4. See the citation result, already inserted, with the 'Edit' button showing.
  5. If I don't like it, then backspace to delete it. If I do like it, move on. If I need to change it, click 'Edit'.

From User:Jimsmith1978 at enwiki's VEF.

Event Timeline

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald Transcript

This seems reasonable, although in the code it looks like there's a loop that generates result widgets, although I'm not sure in which situations (if any) we actually generate multiple suggestions. Also, we'd have to pass through a flag to the context so we can show the "Powered by Zotero" credit on first insertion.

Based on my own editing experiences, this would be useful. I find I rarely have to alter Citoid's descriptions, so just inserting it would be better. I wonder if others have similar experiences, or if they have to edit things more often?

This is actually the original behaviour of the tool. But I believe it was changed in order to show the rendered citation. However, when the little citation pop-up that displays the rendered citation was added written, it became redundant.

We do have some cases with multiple results, but in this case we can simply show the current dialog, and only auto-insert if there is a single result.

As requested above, yes I have exactly the same experience and would endorse the change requested.

SoWhy renamed this task from Consider auto-inserting citations to Insert citations automatically after generating and show citation to edit it afterwards.Nov 13 2017, 4:43 PM
SoWhy added a subscriber: SoWhy.

An alternative would be to change the rendering of the temporary citation, so that it is more clear that is hasn't been finalised yet, e.g.

image.png (226×433 px, 25 KB)
image.png (152×425 px, 21 KB)

An alternative would be to change the rendering of the temporary citation, so that it is more clear that is hasn't been finalised yet, e.g.

[...]

That would be a kind of fix but I doubt that people will really notice such changes. Also, references are added to be edited in wikitext mode as well, so why should it perform differently in VE?

Change 499471 had a related patch set uploaded (by Esanders; owner: Esanders):
[mediawiki/extensions/Cite@master] Render placeholder citation as […] to show it isn't finished

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/499471

Regardless of potential future workflow changes I think this ^^ is a worthwhile thing to do.