Advise newbie on workflow to insert pdf of wikipedia page with its citation

wrcstewart
I have generated a pdf from a wikipedia article and dragged it into a suitable collection in my library. I have turned off auto retrieve metadata for pdf and auto rename as they are not giving sensible results at all. From the wikipedia citation page I copied an APA citation and used the + citation option in the sidebar to paste that in. I also tried creating a bib file from the bib text entry in the wikipedia citation page and importing that in. Zotero complained about the format. I'm not sure what I would have done to attach the bib entry to the pdf anyway!

My question: please advise best workflow to put a wikipedia pdf in Zoter together with its wikipedia citation.

Thank-you
  • damnation
    How did you generate that .pdf? Just a print of the website?

    Can you not save the page you want via the Zotero add-on in your browser and then add the .pdf to that new entry?
  • adamsmith
    i.e. the first option here: https://www.zotero.org/support/adding_items_to_zotero (there's no real need for the PDF: Zotero saves a copy of the Wikipedia page automatically)
  • wrcstewart
    Thanks- for help - I generate pdf file using the download as pdf button in the sidebar of the wikipedia page. If Use the Safari Zotero page grabber it places something called a snapshot into Zotero. I really want to build a collection of pdf s as these are more standard and can be picked up by other editors etc. So the suggestions above of using the browser don't seems to work - unless I download the pdf and then reopen it in the browser ...
  • wrcstewart
    And I just tried to reopen the pdf in Safari - guess what - the Zotero grabber is greyed out ..
  • adamsmith
    HTML (which is what snapshots are) is certainly not less standard than PDFs, so I'd just reconsider that -- it's also a more faithful representation of the webpage (which, after all, is in HTML).

    If you really want to do this with a PDF, the most convenient way is to import the item from the Wikipedia page as described, then download the PDF and attach it to the item. The much more cumbersome alternative is to add the PDF to Zotero, right-click --> create parten item and then manually fill out the citation information.

    Importing local PDFs via the browser add-on doesn't work, so that's expected behavior.
  • wrcstewart
    Thanks again - I will experiment further - using your guidance above.
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