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If Citoid fails to generate a citation from a URL, should pre-fill that URL in the Manual citation template
Open, Needs TriagePublic

Description

Steps to reproduce

  • Edit a page with VisualEditor
  • Either:
  • Or:
    • Click on an existing reference that is a bare URL which Citoid can't convert
    • Click "Convert"
  • Wait for Citoid to try and do its magic
  • Receive the message "We couldn't make a citation for you. You can create one manually using the "Manual" tab above."
  • Click Manual tab and select one of the templates: Website/Book/News/Journal

Expected result
The URL is already filled in the relevant field in the template editor

Actual result
The URL field is empty.

If inserting a new reference, it's not too bad as the URL is likely still in the users clipboard. When ​trying to convert an existing one it's particularly annoying, as need to quit out of the template editor to get back to the URL, copy it, then either go through the Convert process again or just delete the old reference and start a new Manual one.

Event Timeline

Thank you for filing this, @Pcoombe – we agree the change you are suggesting here would be beneficial.

While we cannot prioritize work on this in the near-term, we are focused on the Talk pages project.

I agree this would be helpful, but it requires us to pick a citation template since we don't actually have any way of deciding one in the absence of the itemType field from the returned metadata.

Could do Cite web or maybe Citation as default, but this would have to be configurable on a per-wiki basis.

There is not currently a good way to switch between citation templates, either, if we get it wrong.