New editor experiences: Editing citations

Enabling and empowering editors to edit and insert citations to content

Last updated: 2022-12-16 by APaskulin (WMF)
Status: v1 published September 2021

Narrative

Jorge is a medical student from Mexico. He wants to add information about a medical condition that relates to the class he just finished. He has three books to reference. He inserts the details of the books into the interface and is presented with a list of pieces of information where the books are referenced within content and images. He uses that information to find other places where citations are needed and adds them.

Enabled by these architecture patterns

Canonical data model: Treating citations as a piece of knowledge rather than “just” metadata to other pieces allows us to utilize them in the search for information, and in the addition of strong verifiable and transparent information.
Event-based interactions: In an event-based interaction, an edit to a page triggers an event. Different subsystems can respond to this event and manipulate the data appropriately. Each edit can be processed to extract the citations as standalone objects, ready to be categorized and contextualized. This means that at the time of fetching, we can give the user a robust experience based on the relationships between the content and the citations themselves.