Yesterday, I decided to give VisualEditor a try, making this edit on enwiki. It's not a complicated edit, but it's the sort of thing that should be bread-and-butter on Wikipedia—adding wikilinked text and a reference using a citation template. Before navigating to the page, I had all the details of the citation ready to go (URL, article title, journal title, volume, date, page number). The content was fine to add (it felt odd not typing [[ and ]] to link, but I think that's just unfamiliarity) but adding the reference wasn't all that pleasant. Here's the process I went through:
- Click 'Insert' -> 'Reference'
- Be confronted with a modal dialog box
- Click 'Insert' -> 'Template'
- Type 'cite journal'
- Click on 'cite journal'
- Click on 'add template'
- Fill out the two fields asked for straight away—but I've still got four more to go
- Four times over:
- Click on 'add parameter'
- Scroll through the list and hunt for the parameter I'm adding
- Fill out these four fields
- Click 'insert template'
- Click 'insert reference'
I found the process quite awkward, much more than using wikicode. There's a certain amount of inherent complexity here that I've already internalised with templates and wikicode (e.g., knowledge of parameter names), but there are still some things that are just taking too many clicks:
- If you're adding a reference, chances are it'll use a cite template. The UI should make this common path very easy. (Individual wikis will probably want to specify what a 'cite template' means for them as a configuration variable.)
- It should be possible to add multiple parameters at once, without having to click on 'add parameter' multiple times and scroll from the start of the list again. Templates should be able to hint what non-mandatory parameters are likely to be used very often (or, if they can do that already, they should do a better job of it on enwiki).