<ref> tags are not only used for footnotes that are literally "references", but for other notes as well. Some find the headline "Reference" confusing then.
Reported here:
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Vp795y9lq80l4eir
- https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2021/Untranslated/请求修正“NoteTag”模板的预览
Example articles:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_(film)#cite_ref-interstellar_141-0. When hovering the "[nb 1]", the popup should say "Note" or nothing.
- https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/图书馆信息学#cite_ref-1. When hovering the "[註 1]" ("note 1") in the first line, the popup says "Reference", but users expect it to say "Note" or "Comment".
Analysis:
- The enwiki example uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Refn. It looks like this template contains nothing that allows us to distinguish it from other references.
- The zhwiki example uses https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:NoteTag. This template wraps the <ref> in <span id="noteTag-cite_ref-sup"> (yes, it reuses the same id multiple times). It goes together with https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:NoteFoot which wraps the <references> tag in <div id="references-NoteFoot">.
Possible ways forward:
- The extension is able to detect a few special reference types, namely "book", "journal", "news", and "web", along with the generic one. We could add a "note" type for the community to use. Note this currently only works when the wikitext looks like <ref><cite class="book">…</cite></ref>. It's possible to change both examples above to match this requirement, but this is up to the community.
- Ask the communities to change the relevant templates accordingly. Example: <ref><cite class="web">…</cite></ref>
- Check if it makes sense to implement auto-detection for some of the most frequently used note templates, if possible. E.g. detect that id="noteTag-… when it's used on more than one wiki?
- …