Hey all,
I'm delighted to announce here that you can now use ISBNs to add
automatically-generated citations to Wikipedia. This is thanks to a
partnership with OCLC, a global non-profit library cooperative, whose
WorldCat database of books is the largest in the world.
One of the editing features for which we've had the most praise is the tool
to generate citations. This tool, started back in 2014, allows you to type
in a URL, DOI, or PMCID and have it suggest a filled-in citation. Making it
quicker and easier for new and existing editors alike to do the right thing
is a key part of our work.
However, Wikimedians love our books, and the most-requested feature was to
add to this the most common identifier for books, ISBNs. I know that a few
wikis built their own custom gadgets to do this, but I felt that we should
provide a proper, reliable tool that works on mobile as well as desktop
platforms, for all users and in all languages.
Over the past while, we agreed a partnership with OCLC to provide this data
for editors to use, to make referencing stronger and clearer for our
readers around the world. Identifiers for books will help them find further
information on topics that catch their interest, using our long-standing
BookSources tool and OCLC's WorldCat database.
This is now live on all wikis which have Citoid set up. If your wiki
doesn't have it, we'd love to help your community out – ask on the talk page
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Citoid/Enabling_Citoid_on_your_wiki>.
You can read more in the blog post
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/05/11/wikimedia-oclc-partnership/>, and of
course I'd love for you to try it out on a wiki that's configured with it
near you.
My very big thanks to OCLC, in particularly Merrilee Proffitt, and to my
colleagues at the Wikimedia Foundation, particularly Marielle Volz, Marko
Obrovac, and Jake Orlowitz, for making this possible.
Yours,
--
James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester at
wikimedia.org
<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l> |
@jdforrester