Topic on VisualEditor/Feedback

In many cases we cannot tell the first from the last name of an author, especially in different localization.

In many cases we have more than one author and Author field is very handy for completion of all authors.

Last name and first name entries sometimes make contributor's life hard and push back to wikimarkup copy-paste solution for filling in citations of missing fields.

Flexibility should be provided.

1. checkbox for the contrinutor to declare if he/she knows, for the author, which part of the name is first and which is last, and suggestion, if possible, or switching to author field to fill in
2. select the number of authors to fetch the needed fields to fill in

Can you please specify which template you are talking about? Thanks.

All templates. Author field is not there for any of them (web, book, news and journal).

Which Wikipedia (or other wiki) are you talking about?

Greek Wikipedia and English Wikipedia do not have the "Author" parameter to fill it in, in VE citations. Instead there is only First name and Last name to fill in. Author parameter cannot be called from inside VE, or at least I cannot find it.

In case we cannot tell first from last name, author should be used instead of first and last.

In case of many authors (i.e. cite journal), selecting the number of authors should automatically go and fetch first2/last2, first3/last3, first4/last4 to fill them in and not go fetch them one by one by hand, or provide to fill in just the "Author" filed for all authors.

Most of the citation templates were re-written at en.wp a couple of years ago. One result is that |last= and |author= (and several other things: last1, surname, surname1, author1) are the same thing. If the Greek Wikipedia has copied the Lua modules from en.wp, then it's the same thing there.

The request for automatically selecting first and last fields is T52407. I believe that it's stalled on design issues.

I could instruct my students to always use the last= fileld in case they cannot tell first from last name, and move to visual editor.

If pre-fetching hidden fields to be filled in, by selecting number of authors, to save extra mouse clicks, sounds like a good idea, please implement it. It is especially useful in cite journal.

My favorite way to deal with {{Cite journal}} is to paste in a PubMed URL and let the citoid service fill it out for me. ;-)

I've filed the idea of selecting the number of authors as phab:T119423 . Feel free to "Edit Task" to explain it better.