Problem: I'm a fairly heavy editor, but I mainly do smaller copy edits (capitalization, metric units, ndashes) and fairly often I hoist content into a lead that fails to summarize. It's only a small percentage of my edits where I add new material with citation, so I haven't gone hardcore on citation tools. But what surprises me in the raw out-of-the-box edit window is that you can add a citation with a known URL, and when you press "submit" for your partially completed citation, it never says, "hey, someone else on this or another page entered a citation with the same title or URL, would you like to crib some of those fields?" Citation is supposed to be a default activity on Wikipedia, like breathing. So it strikes me that I shouldn't have to install something or activate a special/fancy/cozy/streamlined edit mode (fie to all of them) to get basic assistance in not duplicating prior work.
Proposed solution: URL and/or title of incomplete citation templates automatically checked for duplicate citations on same or other pages when doing a preview submission. (There could also be a dedicated button to preview citations only.)
Who would benefit: Anyone who wants to add cited material who isn't already an expert in the citation system.
More comments: I don't want to create another ticket for this, but it's very clearly a barrier to entry and self-evident paper cut how annoying it is to reuse an existing citation (from the same article) amending only the quotation field or page number fields on subsequent reuse. In my own editing, 90% of the time I notice resources that have been exploited by others, and that's how my bag of tricks expands over time; only in rare instances do I do a deliberate deep dive into the documentation pages. If an easy way to re-use a citation exists, amending only the page number, I sure haven't seen much evidence of other editors making use of this in the thousands of pages I visit in a typical year. Another aspect of citation that should be as painless as breathing. Also, when editing a section and some of the named citations won't resolve (because they are defined outside the section) would it be crazy to offer an button to *really* preview the edited section in the context of the whole page (as found when clicking "edit" on the current section heading? (The section edit URL would somehow need to capture the source page ID to make this work.)
