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removal of principal named reference silently breaks others
Closed, InvalidPublicFeature

Description

Author: wikipedia

Description:
Unwary editors occasionally remove a principal named reference (<ref name="foo">bar</ref>) in an article where it is still being used elsewhere in the form <ref name="foo" />, thus silenting breaking references & often leading to another (or the same :p) editor simply removing all instances of the reference, presumably under the assumption that the initial inclusion was improper.

A check — & subsequent warning, if prudent — for remaining references with a name matching a non-empty reference being removed in the current edit would likely prevent most such happenings.


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz18103

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 21 2014, 10:33 PM
bzimport added a project: Cite.
bzimport set Reference to bz18103.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

This error check has been in place for some time. The base Cite.php message is Cite error references no text. On en.wiki, this shows as "Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named $1; see Help:Cite error."

wikipedia wrote:

That's after the damage is done. There should be a check before the edit is allowed to be committed.

(In reply to comment #2)

That's after the damage is done. There should be a check before the edit is
allowed to be committed.

I can see a check if you edit the whole article, but I don't see how it can be done if you edit a section. That will take someone with some programming smarts.

wikipedia wrote:

Yes... fixing bugs in software requires programming knowledge...

  • Bug 57364 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Feb 4 2022, 11:01 AM
Aklapper removed a subscriber: wikibugs-l-list.
thiemowmde subscribed.

While we can agree that this issue exists, I'm afraid the existence of this ticket here is not doing much to improve the situation. There always was and still is discussion if certain mistakes in the wikitext should make it impossible to save a page. The answer always was and still is that there is no such thing as "invalid wikitext". Everything can be saved (with very few exceptions) and fixed later. What makes Cite special is that it shows error messages in the middle of the article. These should be as good as possible. But according to T20103#224616 this is not what this ticket is about. Other tickets for improving the error handling exist.