Collect and move references to reference section on bottom of article
Problem: For translation, it may be helpful if all references are coded in the reference section, not inline.
Proposed solution: Tool
Who would benefit: Editors (check duplicates) and translators. Moving all reference content to the bottom speeds up manual translation a lot and text has better readability.
More comments: Of course, the tool will need to be adaptable for different language conventions (e.g. English Wikipedia and German Wikipedia do it differently)
This would be great! References can clog the text and make it unreadable. The only advantage of having references in the text is that they can be copy-pasted together with the text. Sylvain Ribault (talk) 13:25, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Of course. I have translated some 200 articles, mostly about viruses, from en to de. For the reason you mentioned, I meanwhile move all reference contents to the reference section at the bottom of the article, end then do the translation. Whilst the the move process is boring, the translation process is so much easier! A tool performing the moving or supporting it might ease the first part. However, chosing proper reference names might be a complication. A second problem might be sorting of the references. I personally prefer a combination of the 1st author family name and the year.This might be difficult for automation. But these names could be renamed later using the find-and-replace-tool, e.g. as provided at the right upper corner of the edit field (iPad). --Ernsts (talk) 19:31, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
It's like using the references template, with refs= parameter; and only the names are used in the body. It would mean better readings; however, we can't edit the citations in VisualEditor. Thingofme (talk) 11:41, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Thingofme References defined at the bottom of the article can be edited using VisualEditor, but only if you use the <references>…</references> syntax, rather than a template. Matma Rex (talk) 03:58, 22 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Thingofme Can you share a link to a page or diff where it isn't working correctly? (I'm one of the VisualEditor developers, and we'd like to fix it if it's broken.) I just tested and I was able to edit the references here: [1]. Matma Rex (talk) 05:08, 22 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
This exists at least on the English Wikipedia, with the References Segregator tool. According to its documentation, it can also work on any other MediaWiki project. Ɱ (talk) 04:33, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Neutral I think more context is needed as we have WP:CITEVAR. Having references moved to the References section is only one citation method. If you mean a way for references to be hidden within the text then I see no issue. The Grid (talk) 13:50, 3 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]