In T289287#12410596, @Pigsonthewing wrote:

I can no longer reproduce this issue, perhaps Zeit.de made some changes? Current example of a link working: https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2026-10/spd-bundestagsfraktion-protest-antifaschismus-afd-sachsen-anhalt

Looks like arwiki community members created a Citoid-style gadget for CiteQ: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2026/10/06/autocitewikidata-making-automatic-citations-connected-with-wikidata/ / https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:حبيشان/AutoCiteWikidata

Not considered a blocker for global deployment

Closing the ticket again, this has been resolved months ago by the patches above which I have verified in production.

Added the following entry to Tech/News:

It's even more complex. Assume two articles without sub-refs:

Appears to be fixed for <references /> / {{Reflist}}, but not for list-defined references

I recently mentioned this work in conversations with English Wikipedia editors. Summarizing their feedback:

In T414094#12227325, @Ragesoss wrote:

Great, thanks! If there details about those remaining edge cases on Phabricator, I'd love to follow along.

In T414094#12224048, @Ragesoss wrote:

When are we expecting to roll out to en.wiki? Wiki Education is trying to strongly encourage page numbers in citations, and we're trying to figure out whether it's worth it to update our training modules to explain how to use the {{rp}} template for the Fall 2026 semester that is starting soon, or whether we should just wait for this to deploy and build our new instructions around it.

The same issue also affects other wikis, see e.g. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Johannes_Richter_(WMDE)/Test/fa where the main reference correctly shows as ۱ instead of 1, but sub-reference numerals are just Latin numbers. There might be more affected wikis, especially when looking at right-to-left languages.

Consistent to Tuesday's demo on fr-betawiki the issue is now fixed on frwiki.

Discussed this during Wikimania: Sub-referencing will be supported in the version 3 of IABot,

In T432596#12169339, @Thuvack wrote:

Hey @Mvolz and @Johannes_Richter_WMDE

I have now created template documentation pages with Template data for all four templates (Cite web; Cite book; Cite news and Cite journal) and then I restores the first revision of the MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json.

After doing a null edit on each of the templates that I added the template documentation for, It now works for all the templates!

@Thuvack I've created https://ts.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Citoid-template-type-map.json (but I only used the four templates mentioned in https://ts.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Cite-tool-definition.json given that some of the other enwiki templates don't exist on tswiki or are even less likely to get TemplateData some day. Feel free to change the page, e.g. if you believe that https://ts.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Citation should be used – but in that case I highly recommend adding TemplateData (copying TemplateData from enwiki might help). Citoid is now enabled on tswiki.

In T431544#12100818, @stjn wrote:

I thought this was thoroughly rejected in Meta survey about it. If you do end up implementing this in some way, please provide a way for communities to fallback to reference-1 or whatever instead of using frequently meaningless template names (cite web tells nothing about the source other than that it is a website, and some template names can be extremely long, like https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Шаблон:Книга:Сосудистые_растения_советского_Дальнего_Востока).

In T429568#12103150, @thiemowmde wrote:

This specific error is also rather inconsequential and unlikely to have much impact on real-world wikis. The fact that the main ref is empty is clearly visible. The red error message is not needed to see this. The only relevant impact is that the tracking category is not set, which makes it impossible to systematically track such mistakes and clean them up.

Thanks for offering your help @Shashwatojha369. You might want to look for tasks tagged as good first task, those are usually a good way to start getting familiar with the code in Wikimedia projects. We'll work on this task ourselves.

I believe the issue is caused by VE's issues with references inside of templates: T52474 / T350064 / T405156

Turns out I was mistaken, this never used to work.

While commenting in T427520 I realized that wikis lacking Citoid might not just be an issue for Article-Guidance (e.g. T426163 / T425549) but also for EditCheck and VisualEditor Suggestion Mode (e.g. T408427 / T331946) – @Pginer-WMF @ppelberg fyi.

Only ~100 Wikipedia language versions have enabled the VisualEditor citation tool (that's also true for Citoid – although these numbers are not identical, some wikis don't enable both tools) and only 23 wikis enabled the "citation needed" feature.

In T424501#11902518, @Johannes_Richter_WMDE wrote:

I also checked T395872: Disable non-functional edit button(s) in ref/sub-ref ContextItem: It appears this edge case affects mostly wikis using templates like {{refn}}. We know that Hebrew Wikipedia and a couple of other RTL wikis are using similar templates a lot but hewiki is already excluded from our group 1 deployment. It seems like enwikisource might be affected by this issue -> once again excluding Wikisource might be an option.

Testing on betawiki shows that the issue now appears on betawiki with synthetic refs turned off. Using the button to edit a main ref in VE will lead to broken references: Example from de-betawiki:

We should consider excluding RTL wikis from our group 1 deployment, similar to how we're waiting with group 2 deployments to RTL wikis until we've thoroughly validated RTL support – unless we're assuming that sub-ref usage will be low on non-Wikipedia projects anyway. Also Wikisource projects might be an issue per T424501#11902518.

We should re-evaluate T406115: Disallow reusing/sub-referencing <ref follow> in VE given that we want to deploy to group 1 wikis soon (T425662) which will include Wikisource. Wikisource wikis are basically the only WMF projects that uses <ref follow>. Excluding Wikisource projects from our group 1 deployment might be an option if we can't fix this ahead of deployment.