Hello,
If you sometimes edit citation-heavy pages on Meta-Wiki (for example when you
document your projects in the Research: namespace), you might be interested in
knowing that you can now automatically format your citations with Citoid.
Citoid is a tool based on Zotero and integrated with the visual editor on
Wikimedia wikis. It allows you to automatically retrieve metadata about a
citation using its DOI or URI, and automatically format and insert that
information using the standard citation templates from Wikipedia.
Citoid has been in use on several Wikipedia wikis for a while, but it wasn't
set up to work on Meta. Given that Meta hosts a lot of research documentation,
I decided to configure it as well (mostly for my own convenience, but it
benefits everyone :)
You can refer to Wikipedia's user guide to see screenshots of Citoid:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/User_guide#Using_Citoid
(To learn more about Citoid itself and how it works behind the scenes, see
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Citoid )
Citoid works with the visual editor, which you can enable in your user
preferences if you haven't already. In your beta options:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeat…
click on "Visual editing" and then save your preferences.
If you have an account on Meta and have enabled visual editing, you can test
Citoid in your personal sandbox:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyPage/sandbox
In the visual editor, click the "Cite" button in the toolbar. Try to add, for
example:
*
http://abs.sagepub.com/content/57/5/664
* 10.2139/ssrn.2021326
*
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262016575
and watch as they become complete citations, fully formatted with the
appropriate templates.
I have also taken this opportunity to update the main citation templates on
Meta (cite journal, cite book, etc.) with their most recent version from the
English Wikipedia, using the latest Lua modules. I haven't imported all of
Wikipedia's citation templates, only the most common. Feel free to reach out
to me off-list and/or on-wiki if you want me to import another one.
As always, feel free to drop by in the #wikimedia-research channel on Freenode
IRC if you notice a problem. (And you're welcome to stay once you get there!
We're a welcoming bunch.)
(As a side note, if there is someone familiar with Semantic MediaWiki around,
I'd love to see if we can couple it with Citoid, in order to match their
fields. This would make it much easier to add new entries to WikiPapers, simply
by entering their DOI/URI.)
--
Guillaume Paumier
Wikimedia Foundation