Oliver Keyes asked whether the visual editor will include a citation generator, and Trevor's response is useful enough I figured it should go on this mailing list for reference.

-Sumana

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: Question for the devs... Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2011 09:46:37 -0700 From: Trevor Parscal tparscal@wikimedia.org To: Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org CC: Sumana Harihareswara sumanah@wikimedia.org

Our plan for this kind of thing is pretty simple initially, we are just going to have a way to create and edit <ref> tags. Because citations are important, you might expect we would want to integrate a solution problem into the editor. However, citation templates are templates, which means they exist on-wiki, not in the core software. Because of this, it's important to make sure the software that helps users make use of these templates and the templates themselves live in the same places and can be changed by the same people.

This is our plan to support the kind of work you are talking about:

- Templates will be editable as forms, automatically generated by inspecting the transclusion code - Not all possible parameters will be shown - The order of named parameters may vary from one transclusion to another - The labels will be crudely converted to title case (zip_code becomes Zip Code) - No localization is possible for labels - All fields are treated as text boxes - Templates will be able to be supplemented with additional information to influence the way they are edited - All parameters can be shown, categorized, ordered, etc. - Labels can be defined independently of parameter names - Labels can be localized - Fields can have basic types (such as text, distance, coordinates, etc.) so the form can provide appropriate input types and helpers (input boxes, conversion calculators, maps, etc.) - Gadgets will be able to hook into the editor to provide additional functionality - Toolbars and dialogs can be customized - New template editing input-types and helpers can be added - Many other things will be able to be customized using an extensive API

So, essentially, we are looking to keep the software support for on-wiki things (like templates) also on-wiki. We also expect that over time, all major templates will have some meta information, improving the overall experience for users of the wiki, so not all templates will require a complex gadget to make use of them.

I hope this answers your questions. If not, please feel free to continue poking.

- Trevor

On Wed, Nov 2, 2011 at 8:22 AM, Oliver Keyes okeyes@wikimedia.org wrote:

Thanks! A citation generator - I assume they're referring to something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Apoc2400/refToolbar, which adds an extra button to allow for easy reference formatting. It gives you all the fields ("Author name" "book title" "ISBN" whatever), you fill them in, hit enter and it churns out a properly formatted reference in wikimarkup.

-- Oliver Keyes Community Liason, Product Development Wikimedia Foundation