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,