Citoid generates incomplete references - it doesn't fill the author name, publication date, and it doesn't remove the trash in the title (like the " - BBC News" suffix). The solution is to create an extremely simple web standard and to convince the publications to use it. Something like "<span class="publication date">January 25, 2000</span> and "<span class="author name">Joe Sixpack</span>. And then citoid will be able to fill all the necessary data for a well formatted reference. In time, slowly but steadily, the publications will implement this standard, because it will benefit them - the Wikipedians will cite the newspapers that implement the standard and will avoid those who don't. I created a bookmarklet script (en:User:Ark25/RefScript) that generates references in one click in one second (not in 10 seconds like citoid) and it fills all the data - but it's huge, bulky, and only knows some 30 newspapers websites. With a standard like this, my script (and citoid too) would be super-short and will work for any website that implements the standard. First, the blogs of the wikipedians can implement the standard (by the way, anyone knows wikipedians that have blogs), and I'm quite sure the people WMF board know people in the media and can convince some of them to implement the standard. I've launched this proposal some time ago at meta:Talk:Community_Liaisons/Process_ideas#Make life easier for the editors - generate references in one click. We can stop wasting gazillions of hours for painstakingly fill the data in the references, it all depends on the WMF board. Please WMF board, we want to write reliable articles by providing plenty of references but you need to get us out of the Stone Age! Thanks.
Topic on Talk:Citoid/Archive 2
w:Zotero is the standard that you want. I wish that you would add your list of sources to it.
Continued at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Generate_references_in_one_click
Zotero is not a standard. Zotero is a bulkish script, just like RefScript, that requires an enormous amount of energy to maintain. The more translators (pieces of code that teach it to handle a new website) you add, you make Zotero harder to maintain and to update. The "better" Zotero (and RefScript too) is, the more you have to update it every single day, to keep up with the changes the newspapers are doing in their formatting of the articles they are publishing. If you have 10.000 translators, then you have to update about 30 translators every day, because every day, some 0,3% of the websites Zotero knows are changing their formatting style. This is not a solution, this is a nightmare.
Let's keep the discussion on the other page