Improving URL citations on Wikimedia

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: