Integration with Wikipedia reference system

I'm not completely familiar with how Zotero works, so I apologize if I'm asking stupid questions.

Wikipedia is the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. One of the consequences of the "anyone can edit" part is that we really like it when people provide citations for the facts they enter into articles.

Unfortunately, the citation system currently in use is pretty clunky, and requires you to enter information in by hand every time you cite something. This leads to a lot of problems. The information people fill in for each reference is arbitrary, they enter things incorrectly, the citation styles are haphazard and completely different from one reference to the next, and so on. A lot of the time, people just don't bother to enter references because it's so technical and difficult. We have a bunch of "citation templates" to help solve some of this; they allow you to enter the information in a x=y format, and the software generates links and formats it in the desired citation style for you:

Entering this in the source code of the page:
{{cite book 
| last = Cordell
| first = Bruce R.
| coauthors = Jeff Grubb, David Yu
| title = [[Manual of the Planes]]
| publisher = [[Wizards of the Coast]]
| date = 2001
| pages = pp. 198-203
| month = September
| id = ISBN 0-7869-1850-8 }}
Creates this when the page is viewed:

Cordell, Bruce R., Jeff Grubb, David Yu (2001). Manual of the Planes. Wizards of the Coast, pp. 198-203. ISBN 0-7869-1850-8.

But that's still annoying to use; it's slow to copy and paste each field into each field, the template names, available fields and field names are hard to remember, and so on.

In the future, a new citation system should solve all these problems, but that's probably far in the future. It would be great if Zotero could help with the citation process in the meantime.

Ideally, I'd like Zotero to know all of the books I own, and when I want to cite one, I just click on it in Zotero, say "export to Wikipedia" or something like that, and it would generate a citation template for me from the bibliographic information it already knows and copy it to the clipboard for pasting into an article. The citation would have as much information as possible, including meta-data, ISBN numbers, DOIs, and so on, so that the reference in Wikipedia could be robust and a reader could find the actual resource easily through URLs or OpenURL or whatever. Is this possible?
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  • Although we currently have released only a limited number of supported citation styles, Zotero's citation architecture is capable of exporting virtually any format. It's basically just a matter of matching Zotero item types and fields to your desired output format. I would encourage you to consult our citation style documentation to learn more. We're still very much in the process of ramping up our export styles, and it sounds like Wikipedia support would be an excellent addition to Zotero's capabilities.
  • edited November 27, 2006
    Excellent. Is this something that I could just load into Zotero and start using and sharing with others immediately?
  • Yes, once you create a new CSL export format, it can be added to Zotero's online style repository and made accessible to all Zotero users.
  • I'd also chime in and say that there's potential for a more sophisticated utility to be built here, which would essentially allow drag-and-drop addition of references from within Zotero to Wilipedia pages (being edited from within the browser itself)...I've been thinking of something similar for Wordpress, albeit with a different syntax...
  • I'm planning to implement a feature suggested in another thread that would allow you to control-c an item in Zotero to copy a formatted reference for it to the clipboard. Even without a separate utility, this idea could potentially be expanded both to support drag-and-drop and to be a bit smarter and let the citation format be determined by the domain of the active window, with user-definable mappings.
  • Yeah, this really isn't something I should do all by myself. I just want to see it done. I'll certainly help, at least, if needed. See:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Citing_sources#Zotero_Firefox_extension_for_citations
  • If I created the CSL export format, would that be helpful in developing the Ctrl+C or drag'n'drop features, or would it be duplicated effort and a waste of my time?

    Where should discussion about development of the export format be centralized? Here or Wikipedia?
  • The CSL export format would be separate from the ctrl-c/drag-and-drop functionality. If the CSL was implemented before those features, you'd at least be able to export to the Wikipedia format via the standard Create Bibliography feature.

    Along with our limited developer documentation, you should also take a look at the CSL project page, which is separate from Zotero. You're welcome to discuss the development wherever you think you'll find the best support, but with CSL-specific questions you'll likely have the best luck directing questions to the CSL mailing list.

    We pull CSL files from their SVN repository for use in Zotero, so once the new CSL template is done and validated you'll want to commit it there. That way it can also be used in the future by other projects that use CSL.

    Note also that COinS, which you mention on that Wikipedia page, is used for embedding metadata in a page—e.g. (eventually) to automatically pull citations from Wikipedia to Zotero—and won't help much going the other way.
  • edited November 30, 2006
    So this would be a citation style, right? Not an export format?

    If I were to write to styles at zotero.org, would I just reach you?




    Do I understand COinS correctly?

    If fully implemented on Wikipedia, there could be one span in the HTML of each article that you are reading, which would enable automatic retrieval of citation meta-data for that article? So you could cite that Wikipedia article in another work?

    We also have the list of references for each article, though. Would it also be appropriate to add a COinS span for each citation in the References section of an article? Is it meant only to provide information for the page you are looking at? Or is it meant to provide machine-readable citation information for any resource either referenced or viewed?
  • yes, there could be one span of html in each article you are reading.

    Yes, it would be appropriate to add a COinS span for each citation in the References section of an article. COinS is meant to provide machine-readable citation information for any resource either referenced or viewed.
  • Yes, it would be appropriate to add a COinS span for each citation in the References section of an article. COinS is meant to provide machine-readable citation information for any resource either referenced or viewed.
    Looks like this part can be done pretty quickly. I modified our standard citation templates to add COinS tags:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Omegatron/COinS_testing
  • Great work implementing COinS on that references page. One problem that I foresee is the disambiguation between references and the Wikipedia article itself. You'll want to add another COinS entry the article itself and then tag each reference as "reference" so that users have the ability to save the article as an item as well as its references.
  • If possible, you'll also want to strip the square brackets from the COinS entries for phrases with intra-wiki links.
  • One problem that I foresee is the disambiguation between references and the Wikipedia article itself. You'll want to add another COinS entry the article itself
    I plan to request that eventually.

    I could add one to the "Cite this article" page immediately, but putting one in the article itself would either require a template to be added to every single article (possible, but a dumb idea), or a software change (best idea, but feature requests go ignored for a long time).

    But I'm not even sure about putting one on the "Cite this article" page, since there's no format for online encyclopedia articles.

    http://cavlec.yarinareth.net/archives/2006/10/13/i-hate-library-standards/

    I don't know what the best-fit format would be. Here's an example with Journal article format.
    and then tag each reference as "reference" so that users have the ability to save the article as an item as well as its references.
    What do you mean by "tagging them as references"?
    If possible, you'll also want to strip the square brackets from the COinS entries for phrases with intra-wiki links.
    I know. We don't have any string manipulation capabilities in user space, so I've requested a new feature in the software to strip HTML and wiki markup:

    http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8161

    Would it be acceptable to go live with the reference COinS even though they still have square brackets in them?
  • edited February 19, 2007
    Yes, once you create a new CSL export format, it can be added to Zotero's online style repository and made accessible to all Zotero users.
    Where exactly is this repository?
  • See Creating Citation Styles for more info on getting a CSL into Zotero (your own install or the public distribution).

    Basically, CSLs with general appeal should be submitted to the XBib project. We pull new CSLs from there and put them into Zotero (and onto our server for existing Zotero installs to grab).
  • I keep staring at this and this and this and I can't figure out where to start.

    Can someone who is already familiar with the output styles help us? User:Circeus and I would really like to make Zotero output Wikipedia citations, so we can use COinS to input citations to Zotero and then output them to articles. I have a feeling this would go over very well.

    I know all about the Wikipedia side, but I don't know where to start with the XML/Biblio/Zotero/whatever side. We're basically just taking a bunch of fields and plugging them from one format into another. Our citation templates are just collections of data with delimiters between them.

    Zotero's Last name field goes in | last =
    Zotero's Date field goes in | date =

    and so on... Shouldn't be too hard.
  • We have a ticket to provide export to a Wikipedia citation (which could then be pasted into the edit text area on Wikipedia), and currently have a staff member working on CSLs--I'll remind him about this since we would really like to add Wikipedia support soon.
  • 1.0 Beta 4 adds a Wikipedia Citation Templates export format. This can be used in conjunction with the new Quick Copy feature for very quick copying-and-pasting of references into Wikipedia.
  • 1.0 Beta 4 adds a Wikipedia Citation Templates export format. This can be used in conjunction with the new Quick Copy feature for very quick copying-and-pasting of references into Wikipedia.
    Great great great double great awesome!

    Copying and pasting would be good. Dragging a citation into the textarea would be good, too, as was mentioned above.
  • I've created a ticket for being able to set the Quick Copy format on a per-site basis.
  • The default file extension for export should be .txt, no?
  • edited March 29, 2007
    Also some of the fields are missing. Is there a way I can help with this?

    Can Circeus and I get trac logins or should we just start a thread to report things in?
  • Did this eventually get done? Thanks!
  • >>> Did this eventually get done? Thanks!

    For me dragging citations into en.wikipedia.org works just fine (note that you can set a wikipedia site specific overrun if you prefer to have a different citation template active as default) - also grabbing citations from Wikipedia (provided they are formatted as COinS there, of course).

    Does it not work for you?
  • I am not so technically inclined as many of you here and am getting lost in the many comments on the Zotero forums about Wikipedia. I am getting the impression that people have worked on a Wikipedia style for Zotero, just what I am looking for, but it looks like no such style is currently supported. So is there such a Zotero style or not? I'm getting confused! Help!

    I cannot export references from Zotero into Wikipedia and have them end up as a Wikipedia citation style. It simply shows up as the selected export style in my Zotero preferences. Are there any plans to make Wikipedia citations a style for Zotero? Or has that already been made? If so, why is it not showing up anywhere in the list of available styles?
  • lufiend: It's an export format ("Wikipedia Citation Templates"), not a style. Check the list in the Export pane of the Zotero prefs, and, if you like, set up a site-specific entry for wikipedia.org.
  • Wow, that was a quick and helpful comment. I have to say that that is not at all clear in the documentation of Zotero.

    Now I'll wait for someone to make it easier to switch between different export formats, because the Wikipedia format certainly is not my no. 1 used format.

    Nevertheless, thanks Dan for helping me out here.
  • http://www.zotero.org/support/kb/zotero_and_wikipedia
  • Now I'll wait for someone to make it easier to switch between different export formats, because the Wikipedia format certainly is not my no. 1 used format.
    It doesn't need to be the default. See Site-Specific Settings on that page.
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