Jump to content

Improving URL citations on Wikimedia

From mediawiki.org

Incomplete and missing citations of web resources are a relatively endemic problem on Wikipedia. There are two major problems to be addressed:

  • There are many existing cite web citations which are currently incomplete.
  • The relative difficulty and tedium of including web citations provides a barrier to editors properly citing works.

History

[edit]

The project is a combination of projects proposed in the following area:

Tools

[edit]

There are several tools to get around these issues for citations in general:

On WikiMedia

[edit]

Third Party

[edit]
  • Zotero (browser extension)
  • Reference me (smartphone app that scans barcodes for ISBN)
  • Cite4Wiki (browser extension)

For more, see Help:Citation_tools and Wikipedia:EIW#Citetool.

Projects Ideas

[edit]

Retroactively fixing web citations

[edit]

Cite Web Bot

[edit]

A bot that would add titles to cite web CS1 style citations with the C1 title missing error.

Making URL-based/web citation easier

[edit]

As originally proposed on the raw projects page, a a full URL-to-citation engine could be developed to support web citations in the way the citations with a DOI are currently supported. Such a project may include:

Bot-filled cite URL template

[edit]

A bot filled template for web citations, similar to what already exists for DOIs and PMIDs.

RefToolbar 2.0 cite web autofilling

[edit]

Add autofilling to RefToolbar 2.0 for citing websites, such as what is currently provided for DOIs and PMIDs.

Adding functionality to visual editor

[edit]

The Visual Editor team is currently working on adding references to the transclusion dialog.

An extension could be built to return a full citation to both the RefToolbar and the VisualEditor given a URL, similar to the CiteByDoi extension.

Road Map

[edit]

This is currently what is being planned/implemented: