Thanks Benoit,
This sounds like a good step in the right direction. We'll need to try out several of these approaches, but also improve our own documentation on nl.wikipedia. My impression is that it is currently far too hard to add a reference, to expect that this is done by most new contributors.
Do we know more about:
* How many new contributors know they should add a reference, e.g. when writing a new article
* If they know that they should add a reference, how many know how to recognize a good reference from a poor one
* How many new contributors, if they know that they should add a reference, can figure out how to actually make this happen (assuming they know the url already)
* Assuming that they can find the reference button, and know their URL, in how many cases does the auto-convert feature work? (we could test this by taking a random sample of reference URLs, and entering them in the reference insertion tool)
These are not just technical problems - some of them are more about awareness (we can focus for example a little less on copyright, and more on other quality aspects) or good documentation (how to recognize a good source?). I also suspect that these numbers might vary quite a bit across communities/countries.
In my personal experience, it is hard to add references to articles even if all the 'social' steps work smoothly (they often dont!). Maybe my sample is biased, but it feels like I get much more often an error in nlwiki when I try to convert a url to a citation, than in enwiki. Does anyone know if this is indeed the case? Is anyone tracking statistics on this?
Best,
Lodewijk