Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-06-17/Technology report

I hope someone is addressing the user experience flaws in the current new VE features, prior to rolling it out. So many extra steps now for basic citations with the new "automatic citation" feature. New editors will not notice the issues since the system is producing this data and most likely this will go unnoticed. Jooojay (talk) 09:34, 20 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Hi Jooojay, yes, it's a little different now that the mw:Citoid service is available to automatically fill in citation templates for you. It used to take two clicks to get to that place (one on the 'Cite' menu, one on the Basic item), and now it takes three (one on the 'Cite' button, one on the 'Manual' tab, and one on the Basic item).  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:04, 20 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Whatamidoing (WMF) yes, I get that two clicks was the goal. But unfortunately the reality of editing with this new automatic VE citation tool now has proven it does not meet it's goal, some major design issues. I have used this tool many times only to find that it never ends at only two clicks because websites are not parsing data in a way that is compatible with this tool and I have to now do four clicks and carefully check everything to properly cite. Designing new tools needs to also address all types of UX issues including tool failures, this tool definitely needs some more work! Jooojay (talk) 23:09, 20 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Maybe we're talking about different things. The "Basic" citation still exists and hasn't changed.  ("Basic" is a free-form citation field; it was the last item before Re-use in the old menu.)  The only change for "Basic" is to its location, which now requires three clicks to reach instead of two.  Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:10, 21 June 2015 (UTC)


 * I am specifically talking about the mw:Citoid service, it is not working as it should. Jooojay (talk) 02:44, 21 June 2015 (UTC)


 * - If you're hoping for a process where one click starts the Citoid citation process, and then, after pasting a URL, a final click completes the process, then yes, that's not how VE works, and it's never going to work that way. Citoid depends on the Zotero translation server; lesser-used sources are likely to lack Zotero translations. In those cases, the "automatic" citation process is likely to generate, at most, a page title and an accessdate. So the standard citation-generating process must include an editing step, to review which parameters of the cite were correctly created, and which are wrong or missing. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:55, 25 June 2015 (UTC)


 * The June 17 pageview statistics at stats.grok.se/ did not compile. I have just noticed the June 17 Labs outage, but the underlying data seems to be uncorrupted. Please join the discussion at Village_pump_(technical) if you can help us understand the issue. I am not watching this page.--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 10:39, 30 June 2015 (UTC)