Talk:Reference readability

First Impressions
I like the structure, but I'm not sure if the progressive disclosure is necessary, its already hidden behind a popup… I could imagine something like hovers get you the lightweight version and click gets you a more feature rich popup, but have to interact with elements inside the popup while hovering seems like it could be a little awkward.

In Context another thing I'd like to think about is what the references look like in context, while originally I felt like the numbers were super important, I wonder if "confidence" or strength of a references might be a better indicator to have in context in many articles you get statements supported by multiple references could this be collapsed into a single indicator with some kind of trust score, based on the number of refernces, and out metrics of if they are reliable, broken, etc?

Sorting of sources How do you imagine the different categories of references to be sorted? I feel like there could be some interesting other ways so sort, like publication date, confidence, etc Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 22:03, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

Tooltips

 * I'm not entirely convinced that expanding the reference to show details will really help. We actually provide much more detail than is common in many academic settings. Many journal articles use cryptic abbreviations for journal names and omit article titles entirely in their references. But I'm not sure how telling a lay user what volume or issue a particular article is from really helps them to understand anything. If there's a link (typically via DOI/PMID), that will help more than anything, as they can actually read the abstract. I doubt making it clearer what volume and page it's from will really help them find the article if they want to look (if I'm looking for an article and I don't have a link, I just Google the title, it works 95% of the time and is way faster than digging through archives on a publisher's website). It won't hurt, but I don't know how much it will help either.
 * As for including an image representing the source, again, I'm not really sure what the gain is. If people don't know what a particular magazine or newspaper is, how will a random picture of the front cover/page help them? A link to a Wikipedia article about the source would probably be more useful. Images also have copyright issues and (unless they're loaded on the fly when the tooltip is opened), overhead issues. Mr.Z-man (talk) 02:30, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

Icon in article

 * Even if you're not familiar with academic publications, a thing in a superscript is pretty much the standard way to indicate a footnote/endnote. The proposed symbol means absolutely nothing to me. It looks like a ribbon. Which in the context of the middle of a paragraph is just confusing. Mr.Z-man (talk) 02:34, 23 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Having a positive identifier for each reference (a letter or a number as opposed to a generic icon) is useful if and when articles are printed or viewed in another non-interactive form. While many features of the article are lost when presented offline, verifiability is such a fundamental tenet of many mediawiki-based projects that it should be preserved to the greatest extent possible. I would be opposed to a generic reference icon. --Ahecht (talk) 20:51, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

List

 * The proposal for the list is more readable, but I'm not sure that it scales adequately to deal with pages like Schizophrenia, much less Barack Obama (which I believe is the current record-holder for the number of citations). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 16:38, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks
 * Thanks for the feedback! Those kinds of pages are exactly what I think could be helped by more organization and sorting features. Do you think that it will be technically more difficult to scale? KHammerstein (WMF) (talk) 17:49, 23 April 2014 (UTC)


 * You might be able to get away with skipping the horizontal separating lines. The result would be more compact, but perhaps at a (tiny?) decrease in first-time comprehension of what's going on.  --Joe Decker (talk) 23:17, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I actually like the dividing lines, because the main readability issue I personally encounter with references is difficulty in visually separating one citation from the next one. I'm tempted to say that references should be columns of boxes—imagine a sheaf of cue cards—which might go well as a visual metaphor with the proposed tooltip design. Of course, lots of boxes together might cause its own problems… {&#123; Nihiltres &#124;talk&#124;edits}&#125; 02:57, 25 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Including the total number of references with the references section title is confusing, because it's not obvious what the number represents, and it's presented as part of a header rather than part of the section content. If my assumption is wrong, and the "13" pictured isn't a reference count, that's simply more evidence that that element is confusing as presented. {&#123; Nihiltres &#124;talk&#124;edits}&#125; 02:57, 25 April 2014 (UTC)

Linker personae tasks
Updating deadlinks, including checking for archived versions at the Internet Archive and Webcitation, are very common tasks, and even a link and a little URL magic could go a long way to making that task easier. --Joe Decker (talk) 23:11, 23 April 2014 (UTC)

How we use references
What are additional ways you use references/citations?


 * Notability assessment (part of: AfD, DRV, AfC, and NPP) - Task: "I want to look at all the sources and assess which of them is (a) reliable, (b) independent from the subject, and (c) contains significant coverage of the subject.  I've used ENWIKI processes and terminology here, but I expect that similar tasks exist on most of our other 'pedias.
 * Many times a glance at the reference source (name of book or newspaper, etc.) gives a fair hint for (a) and (b), and you have to actually go into the source to assess (c). Not sure what could be cone to improve things here, but it does suggest a minimum set of factors (author, publication, possibly publisher, date) that probably want to be shown in any condensed cite display.  --Joe Decker (talk) 23:23, 23 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Afterthought: The temptation to build a database of "generally ok" and "generally not okay" sources and display an indication of those to editors is strong, but probably misguided on my part. I don't know that it's possible to do in an effective way, and it wouldn't necessarily be independent of which WP was using the technology, but a hint as to whether a source is reliable, like the red/yellow/green marks at en:Wikipedia:External links/Perennial websites, would still be of interest to me, and could provide some guidance for new editors who, on the whole, are stunned to find out that IMDB is not generally considered reliable.  --Joe Decker (talk) 23:28, 23 April 2014 (UTC)