User blog comment:Kirkburn/The expanding world of the VisualEditor/@comment-4189499-20141002011135/@comment-4189499-20141003032000

Thanks for the reply Kirkburn.

I know it isn't that hard to insert a template, but you do have to actively stop what you are currently doing to insert it, which may be good for things like infoboxes but not for in-line templates like our referencing ones. By forcing people to stop their work flow and go out of their way, you are just going to land in one of two situations: a user will go out of their way to avoid using the templates, leading to less sources and therefore less information on pages, or people will just not use them and we'll return to the situation where people just cite episodes without putting them into the templates, which means we lose standardisation and probably our main source of page categorisation knowing the amount of attention most people give to categories. It is so much easier to just write " Martha Jones started travelling with the Doctor after the incident at the hospital, but didn't receive a TARDIS key until . " (which would then render as "Martha Jones started travelling with the Doctor after the incident at the hospital ("Smith and Jones"), but didn't receive a TARDIS key until "The Family of Blood".")  To stop writing midway through a sentence or paragraph to add in a template like this, which could be rendered so much easier in wikitext without pausing, just seems like a waste of time.

Even simple things like bolding or italicising text is so much easier when all you have to do is hit the apostrophe key a couple of times, and links are so much more practical when you can just place the name of the thing between double square brackets, especially with the use of link suggest. Wikitext is ridiculously practical, and the number of times I start going to use it in a non-wiki context is testament to it's practicality (to the confusion of my friends who don't understand why I'm emphasising a word with three apostrophes). Please can you move wikitext integration higher up your list of things to work on? It was one of the few good things about having the RTE as default editor in the past, and will make me just that much happier about users using a WYSIWYG editor (as I said, I'm a big fan of source myself).