Put Citoid in the regular Cite menu anyway
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	• Whatamidoing-WMF
	Apr 15 2015, 6:58 AM

Description

Problem: Clicking on the book-with-bookmark icon gives one behavior; clicking on the apparently-the-same-thing dropdown gives completely different, non-overlapping behavior. If you click the icon, it directs you to the other options, but if you click the dropdown, Citoid might as well not exist.

Temporary solution: Please put a second copy/link to Citoid in the dropdown menu. Instead of "Website, Book, News, Journal" etc., I want to see "Magic, Website, Book" etc.

Long-term solution: Fix the design so that we don't have any unlabeled dropdowns anywhere.

Details

	Subject	Repo	Branch	Lines +/-
	Put the Citoid tool in the menu as well as the toolbar	mediawiki/extensions/Citoid	master	+38 -2

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		Status	Subtype	Assigned	Task
		Declined		Jdforrester-WMF	T96118 Put Citoid in the regular Cite menu anyway
		Resolved		• Nirzar	T86693 MediaWiki theme: Alter the toolbar and dropdown menu design

Event Timeline

• Whatamidoing-WMF created this task.Apr 15 2015, 6:58 AM

• Whatamidoing-WMF raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.

• Whatamidoing-WMF updated the task description. (Show Details)

• Whatamidoing-WMF added projects: Citoid, VisualEditor-ContentEditable.

• Whatamidoing-WMF subscribed.

Restricted Application added a project: VisualEditor. · View Herald TranscriptApr 15 2015, 6:58 AM

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Mvolz set Security to None.Apr 15 2015, 7:16 AM

Mvolz added a subscriber: Mooeypoo.

@Whatamidoing-WMF: yes, I found this behavior pretty mystifying as well.

According to @Jdforrester-WMF, this confusion is partly due to the fact that VisualEditor's dropdown menus aren't clearly anchored to their parent icon (T85998). In this case, the manual citation tools dropdown is supposed to be anchored to the down arrow icon, but not to the book/"Cite" icon to its left, which is supposed to be a separate button for automatic citation. You can see this in the fact that the manual tools dropdown is left aligned with the down arrow, not the book.

Screen_Shot_2015-04-16_at_5.10.07_PM.png (518×310 px, 33 KB)

Hopefully, this will be at least partially addressed by T86693, so we can reassess after that's implemented.

nshahquinn-wmf triaged this task as Low priority.Apr 17 2015, 12:56 AM

nshahquinn-wmf added a subtask: T86693: MediaWiki theme: Alter the toolbar and dropdown menu design.

Jdforrester-WMF moved this task from To Triage to Freezer on the VisualEditor board.Apr 17 2015, 4:48 PM

@Neil_P._Quinn_WMF, I don't want "wait until a multi-quarter design project, which may or may not solve this problem anyway, is finally finished". Instead, I want "temporary patch to duplicate the link, live on my wiki no later than five minutes from now".

The confusion about where to find the thing is prompting complaints. It's very frustrating for good editors to find the magic citation button, and then have to go hunt for it the next time becaues it's not where they think it should be. We broke the design model by making the citation button be separate from the citation dropdown menu. Let's patch our mistake, by making the magic citation link be present in both the button and the dropdown menu. That will help editors today, rather than (maybe) next quarter (assuming that the design work in 86693 addresses this problem).

@Jdforrester-WMF, I think that's a fair point. It seems like we should put this simple bandaid on the problem right now, in addition to finding a better long-term solution.

Aklapper mentioned this in T96946: Remove dropdown for other cite options from the toolbar. Options will be accessible from the auto-cite tool.Apr 23 2015, 9:53 AM

Mvolz moved this task from Backlog to Service: Scraper & Validation on the Citoid board.Apr 23 2015, 4:34 PM

Mvolz moved this task from Service: Scraper & Validation to Extension on the Citoid board.

• Elitre subscribed.Apr 24 2015, 3:49 PM

gpaumier subscribed.Apr 24 2015, 6:59 PM

Change 206484 had a related patch set uploaded (by Jforrester):
Put the Citoid tool in the menu as well as the toolbar

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/206484

gerritbot added a project: Patch-For-Review.Apr 24 2015, 11:59 PM

We've decided instead to not do this, but do a wider re-design.

Change 206484 abandoned by Jforrester:
Put the Citoid tool in the menu as well as the toolbar

Reason:
We've decided instead to not do this, but do a wider re-design.

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/206484

Deadline for this? Task #? (The irony of Ed commenting in the other task several weeks ago that <<[...] Instead of fixing the issues identified we end up coming with larger redesigns which don't get implemented because their increased scope increases complexity.>>) Thank you.

@Elitre Task is T97390

Mvolz removed a project: Patch-For-Review.May 5 2015, 2:30 PM

Thank you!

Jdforrester-WMF closed subtask T86693: MediaWiki theme: Alter the toolbar and dropdown menu design as Resolved.May 11 2015, 5:01 PM