Topic on VisualEditor/Feedback

Citoid - some feedback

2
John Broughton (talkcontribs)

Note: I posted this on the feedback page at en.wikipedia.org, a week ago. There has been no response, so I'm reposting it here.

1. Not particular to Citoid, and so certainly reported elsewhere, but still: It would be really nice, when one adds a citation, to have the new citation appear in the list of citations. It's particularly problematical to have the citations renumber themselves, in the body of the text, as they do, but to have the list unchanged (so now the numbers in the body of the text don't match what is in the list, by number).

2. It's baffling to have the cite icon (castle?) sitting next to the drop-down for cites, and the two of them not behaving the same way as the paragraph, list/indentation, and insert icons and their related drop-downs. By this, I mean that for those three other icons and their adjacent down-pointing carets, it makes no difference whether one clicks on the icon or the caret - one gets the same menu choices. That's not at all true with the Cite icon (clicked on, it opens a dialog, primarily for Citoid) and its adjacent pull-down menu (which lacks a "Cite by URL or DOI" option, but lists six other options).

I understand that (eventually) most people will use Citoid, most of the time, so being able to access it directly on the toolbar (by clicking the Cite icon) saves one click. Fine. But that's no reason to exclude Citoid from the pull-down menu accessible via the caret. If Citoid is not on the regular pull-down menu, it's quite possible that a lot of people won't find it.

3. Clicking on the Cite icon opens a dialog with Citoid, plus this link: "Or use the full citation dialog to fill in the details yourself". That link wording may be technically correct, but it's both verbose and unclear. (A menu list may, technically, be a dialog, but that's not how most people think of it). The wording "Or use another type of citation" is both shorter and clearer.

4. I'm not found of YYYY-MM-DD as a date; I'd rather use Month DD, YYYY. I understand that preferences do vary. But it's going to get really old, really fast, to have to change the date format, every single time I use Citoid, to my preferred format. Is there, or could there be, some way to set a preference, so editors don't have to change the format, every single time they use Citoid?

5. After this sequence: click the "Cite" icon, paste a URL, click "Lookup", and click "Insert", then VE displays the citation in (what appears to be to me, anyway) a dialog, with the option of clicking "Edit". If I'm not interested in editing that citation, then I assume that I should press [esc] to dismiss the dialog - that's what I do with other dialogs. Nope - if I press [esc], VE thinks I'm trying to exit VE, and asks me whether I really do want to exit VE, or not. Such inconsistency is disconcerting.

6. If I insert a citation using Citoid, and click somewhere to avoid the Edit dialog (or non-dialog), then decide I don't like the citation and click Undo, on the toolbar, the citation is converted to an empty Basic citation. It takes a second "Undo" to completely remove it. I don't understand why a single "Undo" doesn't remove it completely.

Rdicerb (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Hi John Broughton, I see you received a response over at en.wp. Sorry for the delay; Community Liaisons assigned to VE have had a combination of reduced hours and high workloads in the past week, which caused the delay in responding.

Reply to "Citoid - some feedback"