Community Wishlist/Wishes/Improve reuse of citations between VE and source

Improve reuse of citations between VE and source Open

Currently, citations in VE get assigned a number as a name. This poses problems when you use the source editor:

If you copy-paste to a different article, the name is likely to duplicate, leading to errors. Even worse, some of these errors will go unnoticed
If you read the article in source mode, you will not know which source is used
Worse than verbose errors are silent errors. For example copying <ref name=":1"/> from one article to another article will silently fail if <ref name=":1"/> exists which is more likely to occur with numeric increments.
A better system would be to automatically use the lastname_year or publisher_year if available, with sensible fallback options if unavailable. This would reduce conflict between people who tend to use VE with those using the source editor.
Sub-referencing proposal WMDE Technical Wishes/Sub-referencing would repeat the same confusion/limitations, if re-naming references is not resolved. Whatever solutions are implemented for regular references should also potentially be incorporated for sub-references. The development of sub-references is not a blocker here.
This was 6th most popular wish list from last year

Unassigned.

System change

Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons

editors