[dash2]

"Fundamentally, the problem with this is that it's actively encouraging guesses to override the communication of ethically required citation information."

This is silly. 99% of the time, if you cite Autor et al. (2013), it'll be that Autor et al. (2013). The other 1%, it'll be another David Autor paper. The case when you guess something wrong, and really it's a different author, who then gets hurt, probably happens once a year. Meanwhile, Autor et al. (2013) immediately lets me understand what you're referencing, which [57] does not.

[KineticLensman]

One pragmatic advantage of the Autor et al (2013) reference style over the [57] style is that it is much easier to use when you don't have software to automatically number references, and renumber then as new refs are added. In my career I did occasionally have to resort to manual reference numbering and it was pure hell.

[Joker_vD]

It is also quite helpful to know from the first glance that e.g. [Wulf68b] is actually from, you know, 1968 so I probably can just ignore whatever ideas he had on what future directions the programming language design will take (heck, it pre-dates K&R C).

[_tk_]

Maybe I am wrong, but isn't the argument here, that because you trust in your guess, you don't look up the key in the bibliography and never become aware of your incorrect guess?

[hughesjj]

I mean, regardless of the Bibkey naming, it'll be the same content in the bibliography/citations section/appendix

Personally I hate autoincrementing numeric bibkeys for the same reason I hate them everywhere -- if you remove, reorder, or combine citations, it's a huge pita to work around.

I get if you're working in latex or something you can have the bibkeys programmatically generated, but still.

So long as the bibkey is unique and has an associated value, ill always prefer something semantically meaningful in the text.

I mean, when I see a citation, I'll read the citations regardless (if it's for work etc, casually at home I'll only read it if it seems interesting or if I'm dubious). The only way I could see it being an issue is if I've already seen the citations before and somehow I'm misremembering it or ignoring some context/nuance and I decide to be lazy and not refresh the cache, but at that point it's definitely a me problem and I don't think going to the citations and looking at the source title or excerpt there will be any better.

[nimih]

A 1% error rate honestly seems unacceptably high if you're in the habit of reading a large volume of papers, each of which has a large volume of citations. To quote TFA, "Science involves many different error-reduction practices that take time. It's part of the job." At the end of the day, it comes down to whether you think there's value in being correct, or if you're content merely seeming correct.

[dash2]

1% is my guess, and I'd call it a maximum. There is also a trade-off: when you use numbers, most people won't look up the reference at all. This means they simply don't know who deserves the credit. Or they may think a reference is more solid or accurate than it is.

[Ar-Curunir]

When I see numeric citations my error rate is much higher because I rarely go and check the bibliography because it’s such a pain in the ass.

Semantically meaningful citekeys give me useful information where I need it (in the text), as opposed to somewhere 20 pages away.