Union:News/Workaround for Citations

Hey, all. I've done a lot of work on the wiki over the past couple of days. Frankly, it's been a miracle that I've managed to get the visual editor working, along with a lot of other things. However, one thing that I haven't been able to fix is the citations system. There's a bug in the visual editor that prevents you from using citations effectively. At first it will look like it works fine, but once you switch to the source editor or save the post, the citation information doesn't work, and it results in pages having ref tags with empty content and lots of red errors. No good.

I've spent hours trying to figure out the source of the problem and I am at a loss of what to do about it. There isn't a lot of information online about other people having similar problems. However, the ref tags do still work in the source editor. This makes them a ridiculous pain to use because you have to type them by hand and switch back and forth between the comfortable visual editor and the source editor. That is, unless you are a skilled wiki warrior like PorkchopGMX. While you were using the visual editor, he studied the blade (wiki markdown).

Anyway, to the point — I've spun up a pretty basic Google Sheet that makes it very easy for you to generate ref tags using plain English.

I recommend filling in column A with an alias you want to give the citation. This will help you use the reference more than once in the same article, like if you have to cite the same source multiple times. You'll just copy and paste the content in column D as many times as you want throughout the article. Meanwhile, the content column B is where the meat is. That's where you'll put the actual content of the citation, like where it's from and any links you want to include. I don't care if it's properly formatted or not, just paste a URL in there if you want.

Here's the link to the sheet. You're welcome!

- m88youngling index.php?title=Category:Wiki news