On English Wikipedia the {{Cite journal}} template has a jstor parameter. Can Citoid be changed to extract the relevant stable link for the Jstor URL instead of copying the provided URL into the URL field?
Topic on Talk:Citoid/Archive 2
If given a JSTOR link, it gives the stable JSTOR url.
For most other links, it doesn't typically know the JSTOR identifier, so it can't use that to then get the JSTOR link. Most links to journal articles, if they include extra identifiers will include the DOI, but not typically JSTOR.
If I wasn't clear, I'm discussing how it treats Jstor input only: eg input like https://www.jstor.org/stable/45019299.
Ah, I misinterpreted you - you want the jstor url to go into the jstor field instead of into the url field?
That's a little tricky. We could definitely return a JSTOR parameter in the api; the problem is that TemplateData and Citoid extension only does really basic mapping, so then the jstor link would end up in the url as well and so it'd be linked in both. In the API we return a url no matter what because it's a required parameter (api guarantees return of a url in the url field) and for other language wikis that don't have separate parameters, they need it. We've had this issue as well with people not liking we return both the doi and the resolved doi link in the url field, though personally it doesn't bother me.
That kind of per-wiki customisation might have to be per-wiki user script / common.js kind of solution rather than something that goes in the back-end or the extension, which is designed to be fairly agnostic about the citation templates being used.
Yea, it would pretty much be just changing where the JSTOR parameter ends up. On English Wikipedia there's been an issue basically where there are three interrelated issues. ¶ First, the citation bot adds Jstor parameters given the stable Jstor URL but this causes unnecessary duplication... which some people want retained just in case someone meant the URL to be there (even though nobody means much of anything when using these citation generators). ¶ Second, the Internet Archive bot then can be run to "archive" the live Jstor URLs (but not the parameters) because the URL is there... even though, because Jstor is paywalled, the "archive" is just a landing page. Naturally some people don't want these useless archive links remove either. ¶ Third, Jstor because it's paywalled isn't always the best free full-text source and putting a URL there would on first glance seem misleading.
Anyway, I understand the technical issues involved, though I think the real solution in this instance is the root cause, which is the unthinking addition of Jstor URLs to templates that end up triggering all of the downstream clutter. A user script would have insufficient adoption to go much of anywhere in nipping the issue.
Just noting here that it's been my practice to remove url parameters when they point to jstor, and put the stable jstor identifier in the jstor parameter instead, to avoid the unnecessary archive and access-date cruft that follow-on scripts produce. I understand if it's not possible not to return a url parameter though.
en-wp's own in-house tools could be a vector for correction here, although the maintainers have been too busy to maintain them for a long time. Honestly given how popular automated referencing has become, we could use about four times as much staffing at every point in the stack.
Yea, when I was reading that Village Pump discussion about people claiming that an editor might have placed the Jstor URL there on purpose, my first thought was "lmao nobody formats citations manually anymore; there's no purpose involved".
I missed that discussion, but there's no reason to duplicate a link (to jstor content) in the cruft-inducing url field when it can be safely tucked into the parameter specifically included to hold it.
These days if I'm citing a journal article, I'll usually swap into Visual Editor to generate the citation with Citoid, but I swap back into source editing to touch it up afterwards.
I do find it worrisome how proliferate automated referencing has become when weighed against the accuracy of its output. I spend probably eighty per cent of my time on wiki cleaning up after thoughtless automatic references, but even with a team of fifteen or twenty the references would be flowing in at a rate we couldn't handle them, given the huge backlog currently present.
I agree, which is why I was thinking to get to (at least) one of the sources of those automatic reference generators. Is it possible, Mvolz, to add some kind of post-processing to trigger with Jstor? Or is that actually technically infeasible?