Last modified: 2014-02-18 18:23:00 UTC
From David Gerard on the en.wp feedback page: if you go to add a reference and then choose not to continue and exit out of the template and save the page instead of going back, VisualEditor creates an empty closed reference tab </re>. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:David_Gerard&diff=562600190&oldid=545746964
Note that this doesn't happen until you hit "Create reference" inside the first dialogue box, so you have arguably told it to create a reference ... but this will confuse people, because modal dialogue boxes in applications usually cancel out your actions if you just keep hitting the X. Arguably, it shouldn't create a reference if it's got nothing to put into the reference.
(In reply to comment #1) > Note that this doesn't happen until you hit "Create reference" inside the > first dialogue box, so you have arguably told it to create a reference ... > but this will confuse people, because modal dialogue boxes in applications > usually cancel out your actions if you just keep hitting the X. Agreed. We'll get this fixed. > Arguably, it shouldn't create a reference if it's got nothing to put into > the reference. Are you telling users they're not allowed to do what they want?! ;-) I think that the number of users irritated by just silently munching references created as blank ("so I can come back to it later!") would be non-zero.
This is because we currently have the logic for a creating refernece (and potentially re-using an existing reference) and actually interacting with the content of a reference in a separate dialog. As soon as you go into the editor it inserts an empty reference and lets you edit that. This sounds like another reason to keep those two things in the same dialog (instead of making it look like one, actually have it be one). A dialog is perfectly capable of having multiple "pages" or "states". This would save a small amount of duplication and gain a fix for this bug and the bug of the animation between the two dialogs.
This was fixed in (I think) August; sorry for not noting it until now.
