Wikipedia talk:WikiProject COVID-19/Reference sources

Building a reference library of citations shareable across articles

This is directed at any interested user, and particularly to John Cummings, as the one who conceived of this resource page. I wanted to propose something regarding the re-use of citations across articles that may be of interest to project members here. After years of working on mini-projects of my own to create or improve a bunch of related articles united by a common central theme (e.g. the Vichy regime, say), I constantly ran into the issue of citations that were common to several articles in the group, and having to go hunt down which article had that darn citation I had created previously, so I could copy it into another article, or several others. I finally got tired of this, and devised a template-based method that extends the concept of reference sharability from a single article, to cross-article sharability, so that citations can be shared across a set of related articles without having to duplicate anything. This is still in its infancy, but is now available for the domains "Vichy", and "French criminal law". To expand the usability, I'm looking now for some additional groups of articles related by a central theme (I'm calling these "article domains" for now) to incorporate into this schema. It occurs to me that COVID-19 (or perhaps some subset of it, as coverage seems vast) might be such a domain. In addition, you and other volunteers have already built out this page, which would make incorporation into the cross-article citation capability pretty easy.

If you're curious about this sharable citation concept, have a look at Template:Reflib, in particular the § Example section, which will give you a quick idea about how it works.

Pro's and cons:

• con: currently designed primarily for use with articles that use short footnotes. If there's a desire to use it for inline references, that's a feature that should be coming soon, but isn't there yet.
• con: to the extent that articles are already cited and working, there's no particular motivation to change anything (if it ain't broke, don't fix it).
• pro: if some editors are building out some new corner of the Covid project with a bunch of articles that would tend to share citations, this should make their work easier (especially if they are using short footnotes).
• pro: division of labor: using Reflib ensures that citations are the same everywhere, and allows editors who are strong in writing citations to concentrate on that, while others who prefer to add content can do that, secure in the knowledge that standardized, full citations are available in a central location and can be quickly and easily acquired.
• pro: if you do wish to convert an existing article, it's pretty easy. See for example this diff, replacing six references at one article with one reflib call: the page renders identically before and after (and the wikicode is shorter).

That's pretty much it. If this looks interesting to you, please lmk and we can see about how to apply it to this project. If it is too vast, we could choose a corner of it, especially if there's one about to be created or expanded. Otherwise, if it's a no-go here, maybe you could point me to some other area under development where you think this might be helpful. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 22:22, 7 March 2023 (UTC)