This thread on en.wp is the story of a 70k+ editcount editor hitting "convert" over and over in VisualEditor and causing the loss of information from existing citations. Plenty of diffs in the thread. I don't know whether this problem comes from Citoid's output or from VisualEditor not checking existing template parameters to ensure it's not deleting anything, so crossposting to both talkpages. Folly Mox (talk) 11:25, 14 May 2024 (UTC)
Topic on Talk:Citoid
Update since the thread linked above has been archived. I haven't duplicated the problem yet, but I'll try to put together some test cases and see what is happening exactly so I can file a phab ticket.
This flaw is heartbreaking. An article I created was impacted by this: a user used the "Convert" button in visual editor, and they thought they were "improving" the article ... and the edit convinced them it was better (citation in footnote looked cleaner). The user did not realize that the Citoid script was deleting some information from the citation!!!! (usually author name, publication date, publisher name, ... but also other data).
My article lost data from about five citations (about 1/3 of those that Convert script was applied to). But the user that used Convert script has done over 50,000 edits with that tool (I think that # is correct, I have not confirmed it). Does that mean that perhaps 10,000 citations have had data deleted?
This needs to be addressed ASAP !! [Signed user Noleander, cannot get signature to work here]