User talk:Aaron Liu

Hello I’m Johannes from the WMDE Technical Wishes team. Four months ago, we reached out to the community to discuss the new sub-referencing feature we are currently working on. Thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts and feedback on m:Talk:WMDE Technical Wishes/Sub-referencing or in local village pump discussions!

We would like to ask for your perspective again, because we’ve made changes to the wikitext syntax of sub-referencing, based on the feedback we’ve received and because it’s the only viable way of dealing with some technical limitations. Please visit m:Talk:WMDE Technical Wishes/Sub-referencing#Request for feedback to read more about our approach for inline sub-referencing and share your thoughts. Thanks for your effort!

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Hi I’m Johannes from Wikimedia Deutschland's Technical Wishes team. We are making great strides with the new sub-referencing feature and we’d love to invite you to take part in two activities to help us move this work further:

1. Try it out and share your feedback

   Please try the updated wikitext feature on the beta wiki and let us know what you think, either on our talk page or by booking a call with our UX researcher.

2. Get a sneak peak and help shape the Visual Editor user designs

   Help us test the new design prototypes by participating in user sessions – sign up here to receive an invite. We're especially hoping to speak with people from underrepresented and diverse groups. If that's you, please consider signing up! No prior or extensive editing experience is required. User sessions will start May 14th.

We plan to bring this feature to Wikimedia wikis later this year. We’ll reach out to wikis for piloting in time for deployments. Creators and maintainers of reference-related tools and templates will be contacted beforehand as well. Thank you very much for your support and encouragement so far in helping bring this feature to life!

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Greetings from WMDE's Technical Wishes team. Today we've deployed sub-referencing to German Wikipedia, our first pilot wiki. A great milestone after so many years of work!

We'll continue to improve the feature based on community feedback and want to deploy to other pilot wikis in the upcoming months, once we've solved a couple of issues affecting many non-dewiki projects. You are invited to try sub-referencing on betawiki in the meantime.

We are currently thinking about how we could improve VisualEditor support for templates in sub-references if that's desired by the community. Read more about it on our talk page and share your feedback!

As always thank you very much for your support!

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Greetings from WMDE Technical Wishes! In September 2025 we deployed sub-referencing to German Wikipedia to make re-using references with different details easier. Thanks for piloting and helping to improve the feature!

We recently published our insights and next steps in our report. Some highlights:

• Over 6,000 Wikipedia articles use the new feature, with a total of over 15,000 sub-references created to date.
• There are both experienced editors in featured articles (e.g. de:Explosion des Oppauer Stickstoffwerkes) and relatively inexperienced VisualEditor users (e.g. in de:Schmerzhafte Muttergottes (Guido Cagnacci)) using the feature. The majority of all sub-references (approx. 90%) are created in wikitext, yet over 300 editors have used the function in VisualEditor alone.
• Workarounds like <ref name="Miller" /><sup>p. 44</sup> (in the reader view ^{[1] p. 44}) have been replaced entirely by sub-referencing, which means that the complete reference information – including the page number – is now visible in both the reference list and in Reference Previews.
• Sub-referencing is used with lots of different citation details – predominantly page numbers, but also details such as chapters, paragraphs, quotes or video / audio timestamps.

What has happened since September?

• We ensured that re-used sub-references actually appear as re-used in the reader view and in VisualEditor.
• We've made some cosmetic changes to the reference list: Initially, multi-line sub-references (e.g. quotations) were not displayed ideally, and two-digit sub-reference numbers were not indented correctly.
• In VisualEditor, we have provided a feature to choose whether changes to re-used sub-references should affect all uses of the same sub-reference or only the one currently edited.

What's next?

• We will deploy sub-referencing to additional pilot wikis next week: Polish Wikipedia, Swedish Wikipdia and seven smaller wikis (phab:T414094). All of these projects have been notified in advance.
• We are working on technical adjustments to make sub-referencing usable in all wikis that use variants of the {{Reflist}} template.
• We are continuing to address community feedback: Among other things, we are currently exploring various ideas for visually improving reference lists with lots sub-references (e.g. de:Liste der Straßen in Bad Honnef#Einzelnachweise und Anmerkungen).
• In addition to sub-referencing, we are looking at other reference-related improvements: We are considering general improvements to Reference Previews or solving issues with automatically created reference names in VisualEditor – there will be announcements and community consultations on this in the near future.

More information about sub-referencing on our project page, more about our learnings and next steps in our report. All the best from WMDE Technical Wishes!

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