Wikipedia:WikiProject Citation cleanup

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Quuux (talk | contribs) at 02:53, 13 August 2019 (→‎Participants: Added me.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

"WP:CCLEAN" redirects here. For WikiProject Copyright Cleanup, see WP:COPYCLEAN. For the Women's Classical Committee WikiProject, see WP:WMCC.

Welcome to WikiProject Citation cleanup. Some Wikipedians have formed this collaboration resource and group dedicated to improving the quality and consistency of citations and footnotes in Wikipedia. This page and its subpages contain their suggestions and various resources; it is hoped that this project will help to focus the efforts of other Wikipedians interested in the topic. If you would like to help, please join the project, inquire on the talk page and see the to-do list below.

Goals

  • Standardising the use of citations by making all citations within the same article consistent with each other
  • Ensuring that no citations are broken at any time
  • Preserving citations by archiving them with WebCite

Scope

Open tasks

Guidelines

  • If you see a link that shows up as [1], try to convert it to show up with text (e.g. Google).
  • If you see a reference to a news article, it is helpful to link to an online-version of this article (typing the title of the article in the search engine is often sufficient).

Tagging articles

If you don't have time to fix citations/references at the moment, you can still help by tagging the article so that others can find and fix them.

See also

Help:Citations quick reference

Examples

Participants

Please feel free to add yourself here, and to indicate any areas of particular interest.

  1. bdesham (talk · contribs) 18:26, 23 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Wtmitchell (talk · contribs) 04:31, 6 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Rifleman_82 (talk · contribs)
  4. Wildhartlivie (talk · contribs) 06:47, 28 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Softtest123 (talk · contribs) 13:56, 30 September 2007 (UTC) I mostly do link rot clean up or cleanup after a bot does link rot clean up (i.e. Missing authors, titles, and dates).[reply]
  6. Biochemza (talk · contribs) 20:38, 1 November 2007 (UTC). Fixing citation style consistency.[reply]
  7. Jw21 (talk · contribs) 01:37, 2 December 2007 (UTC) (I have been adding and checking citations before this WikiProject came into light, and I'd be happy to be affiliated with it.)[reply]
  8. Superm401 (talk · contribs) 12:55, 31 December 2007 (UTC) As with Jw21, I've been doing this often, and I'm glad to join up.[reply]
  9. Sparkygravity (talk · contribs) I'm interested in working on citation style consistency, and increasing reliable sources 17:44, 31 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  10. Altairisfar (talk · contribs) 02:20, 12 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  11. Brenont (talk · contribs) 03:30, 7 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  12. EraserGirl (talk · contribs) 03:46, 6 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  13. Skittleys (talk · contribs) 04:52, 12 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  14. Leonard^Bloom (talk · contribs) I hit "Random Article" and if whatever comes up needs work, I do it. 00:27, 29 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  15. Blehfu (talk · contribs) 04:16, 17 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  16. N2e (talk · contribs)04:26, 17 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  17. Legoktm (talk · contribs) 02:28, 12 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  18. Jw_193 (talk · contribs) 12:34, 14 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  19. UpstateNYer (talk · contribs) 21:32, 3 December 2008 (UTC) - I also go for random articles and format into {{cite}}. I'll also hit big-ticket pages and fix their references as well.[reply]
  20. OlEnglish (talk · contribs) Always checking and adding citations. 23:19, 9 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  21. Atmoz (talk · contribs) 16:56, 11 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  22. Emc2 (talk · contribs) 22:02, 19 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  23. Speednat (talk · contribs) 03:24, 21 February 2009 (UTC) I have been doing it already, mainly in birds.[reply]
  24. Jeffq (talk · contribs) 18:44, 19 March 2009 (UTC). Most of my non-trivial WP edits of late involve cleaning up, expanding, and formatting citations, including turning bare external links to proper references, usually whenever I read an article for other purposes.[reply]
  25. Flipper24 (talk · contribs) 11:37, 29 April 2009 (UTC)There are a number of Australian Schools articles that could use some citations.[reply]
  26. Unionhawk (talk · contribs) 04:11, 25 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  27. Mistress of Awesome (talk · contribs) 19:15, 30 May 2009 (UTC), unhealthily obsessed with checking footnotes and references.[reply]
  28. Matthew Desjardins (talk · contribs)
  29. Lantrix (talk · contribs) 02:54, 26 September 2009 (UTC), have been checking and correcting citations for quite a while.[reply]
  30. Zoeydahling (talk · contribs) 03:59, 24 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  31. bender235 (talk · contribs) 01:32, 28 December 2009 (UTC), I've fixed citation styles in Wikipedia for years.[reply]
  32. DutchTreat (talk · contribs) 13:20, 30 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  33. PoeticVerse (talk · contribs) 13:54, 17 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  34. CharlesGillingham (talk · contribs) 16:29, 24 March 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  35. RDBrown (talk · contribs) 14:37, 8 June 2010 (UTC) PMID etc. → cite journal[reply]
  36. Reaper_Eternal (talk · contribs) 02:23, 2 November 2010 (UTC) - I commonly open "Random article", fix any citations, and then walk down the wikilinks looking for more citations to fix.[reply]
  37. Francophile124 (talk · contribs) 09:51, 2 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  38. ShelleyAdams (talk · contribs) 13:42, 21 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  39. TheJJJunk (talk · contribs) 14:46, 24 March 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  40. ramaksoud2000 (talk · contribs) 02:26, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  41. Wtwilson3 (talk · contribs) I don't have a lot of time to fix references, but have been tagging a lot and decided to join up. And it's good to be #41 on the list, I used to have a cat named 41. — Bill W. (Talk) (Contrib)  –  24 April 2024, 05:31 (UTC) 19:24, 6 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  42. Benzband (talk · contribs)
  43. Benjamil (talk · contribs) Tagging, finding sources (I love to google). 22:31, 13 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  44. Faizanalivarya (talk · contribs) I look at everything, Whatever article need me I would be there as protector of that article, love Wikipedia, love project Peace. -- 18:53, 25 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  45. kawaii♥bot (talk) 09:35, 2 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  46. Ikerus (talk · contribs) 15:13, 18 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  47. Renzoy16 (talk · contribs) - I have been fixing citations for months using Twinkle. 20:02, 12 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  48. Stillwaterising (talk · contribs) - journal, medical, and scientific citations. - 06:59, 28 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  49. FiendYT (talk · contribs) - I have recently joined Wikipedia, and want to make a difference in the way articles are presented.
  50. Funandtrvl (talk · contribs) 23:18, 10 February 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  51. Johnmperry (talk · contribs) 00:07, 25 February 2013 (UTC) - I tend to look in history-related articles, mostly Philippine but others too[reply]
  52. Ecallow (talk · contribs) (I am interested in working on computer related wikis) 16:30, 13 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  53. l1271435 (talk · contribs) (I am interested in working on science related wikis) - 16:00, 14 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  54. Kjtobo (talk · contribs) I have been working through Category:Articles needing link rot cleanup - 16:45, 27 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  55. Mikemoral (talk · contribs) 21:24, 27 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  56. Miszatomic (talk · contribs) 20:50 29 July 2013 (UTC)
  57. MrBill3 (talk · contribs) (Science, Medicine, Skepticism) 12:23, 10 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  58. Scottyoak2 (talk · contribs) 16:45, 4 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  59. Frze (talk · contribs) 10:30, 10 October 2013
  60. Ruby Murray (talk · contribs) 09:22, 23 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  61. Prof. Squirrel (talk · contribs) 00:12, 1 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  62. Meteor sandwich yum (talk · contribs) 20:20, 23 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  63. Acb314 (talk · contribs) 11:42, 27 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  64. Azaghal of Belegost (talk · contribs) (I am interested in unifying citation style with {{cite}}, particularly on physics articles) 20:32, 15 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  65. Diptanshu.D (talk · contribs) I have been cleaning up references and using citation templates for WP:MED for quite some time. Did not know that a separate WikiProject existed for this 17:46, 18 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  66. Tgok (talk · contribs) I've been doing this informally for a while. Might as well make it official. 21:32, 26 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  67. Safety_Cap (talk · contribs) 09:28, 27 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  68. J Beake (talk · contribs) 19:16, 29 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  69. Sesquiannual (talk · contribs) 18:02, 16 February 2014 (UTC) Help with broken reference names[reply]
  70. NorthAmerica1000 09:11, 31 March 2014 (UTC) Fixing bare urls.[reply]
  71. Carriearchdale (talk · contribs)07:40, 23 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  72. Randomdice (talk · contribs)03:53, 21 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  73. Lloydsilver (talk) 22:57, 5 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  74. Mahensingha (talk · contribs)12:50, 26 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  75. George.Edward.C (talk · contribs) 16:51, 12 November 2014 (UTC) - We need to clear those backlogs![reply]
  76. AlbinoFerret (talk · contribs) 16:06, 15 November 2014 (UTC) There is no scope to my interests in fixing citations, I have been doing it on my own and was happy to find this Wikiproject.[reply]
  77. StewdioMACK (talk · contribs) 12:16, 29 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  78. BoonDock (talk · contribs) 10:53, 18 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  79. Bosstopher (talk · contribs) 13:00, 7 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  80. Nemesis2473 (talk · contribs)
  81. Zveznet (talk · contribs)
  82. Jablestech (talk · contribs)
  83. Googol30 (talk · contribs) 23:12, 31 March 2015 (UTC) - Properly formatting existing cites and occasionally adding new ones[reply]
  84. AfroThundr3007730 (talk · contribs) 06:54, 14 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  85. Olivettilly (talk) 00:24, 26 June 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  86. Ouanor (talk) 13:10, 4 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  87. Hampton11235 (talk) 15:23, 4 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  88. Vivek.bekhabar (talk · contribs) (Already correcting the wrong citations I see on article. Didn't know that their is a project. Its good to be here.) 07:10, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  89. Geobeedude (talk · contribs) (I am interested in working on fixing missing "|title=" fields in citations.) 03:24, 5 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  90. Clifford_Anderson (talk · contribs) (I am interested in assisting librarians, college students, and faculty members with finding references for articles) 00:44, 19 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  91. Warga1 (talk · contribs) (Interested in the concept of improving Wikipedia's authority by doing citation cleanup work. Excelsior!) 16:44, 21 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  92. LenTheWhiteCat (talk · contribs) (working on name error backlog) 22:14, 28 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  93. Jennica (talk · contribs) (cleaning up bare references) 11:28, 23 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  94. JayCodec (talk · contribs) (Cleaning up bare references, primarily on Musical Articles.) 20:19, 27 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  95. Sirkablaam (talk · contribs) 06:00, 5 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  96. PaleoNeonate (talk · contribs) 18:32, 27 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  97. James_Shelton32 (talk · contribs) (Cleaned up some articles on historical trains in the south. Added references, based on notes in Soil mesofauna) 14:28, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
  98. MrLinkinPark333 (talk · contribs) (been doing a lot of page numbers) 02:57, 21 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  99. BulkData (talk · contribs) 13:52, 25 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  100. EMachine03 (talk · contribs) I am interested in fixing citation errors. 15:45, 5 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  101. Ohmyerica (talk · contribs) (I love combating link rot!) 02:29, 27 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  102. RaptorChief (talk · contribs) 05:48, 1 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  103. haakonsson (talk · contribs) 19:25, 3 May 2018 (UTC) been doing it for years some one just linked to the page.[reply]
  104. TheTechnician27 (talk · contribs) 23:13, 14 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  105. AmericanAir88 (talk · contribs) 21:51, 5 September 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  106. Philharmonic Phil (talk · contribs) 16:47, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  107. Anas1712 (talk · contribs) 21:14, 25 November 2018 (UTC) ( i correct bare references in templates since 6 months)[reply]
  108. jflopezfernandez (talk · contribs) I love cleaning 23:59, 29 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  109. Prime Lemur (talk · contribs) Sometimes people misplace citations during copy-editing, others add great material, but sometimes leave spartan citations. Fixing it contributes to the enduring robustness of WP. Or I think so, anyway *wink*. 10:01, 14 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  110. Smuckola (talk · contribs) Seek and destroy all lack of citations and presence of non-template-formatted citations. Citations are the foundation of the encyclopedia. Please build automated tools to format and unify them all, such as Citoid, WP:REFILL, and wikidata.13:47, 24 January 2019 (UTC)
  111. Paleorthid (talk · contribs) I love verifying citations. See talk. -- 17:33, 24 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  112. Mikhail Ishchenko (talk · contribs)10:05, 31 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  113. A garbage person (talk · contribs)—Love fixing weird citations. New, big fan of Harvard references.—22:23, 10 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  114. Mccull415 (talk · contribs)18:54, 16 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  115. Masumrezarock100 (talk · contribs) I combat against link rot. 09:01, 22 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  116. Jpotterlibr (talk · contribs) 2:11, 23 April 2019
  117. Kodning (talk · contribs) 05:12, 28 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  118. MonkeyStolen234 (talk · contribs) I have been fighting through several pages to fix citations to the point of going to bed and dreaming of code every night for an entire week. I still love it, though. 17:55, 6 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  119. Diriector_Doc (talk · contribs) I have been fixing link-only citation already. Thought I might aswell join the club! 21:28, 9 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  120. Nemo_bis (talk · contribs) 12:17, 6 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  121. Ionmars10 (talk · contribs) 19:32, 9 August 2019 (UTC) - will probably focus on cleaning up bare URLs[reply]
  122. Quuux (talk · contribs) 02:53, 13 August 2019 (UTC) -- technical fixes (bare URLs, dead links, book details, etc.)[reply]

Please note that it is "User|" not "User:" and five tildes to add the date, not four.

Userbox

Note: If you are a participant, then you may wish to add {{User WikiProject Citation cleanup}} to your userpage.

This user participates in
WikiProject Citation cleanup.

Collaboration and review

Peer review
Assessment
I will assist if this team decides to take action. Note that the article's creator may react unfavorably. ---DOOMSDAYER520 (Talk|Contribs) 12:27, 8 April 2019 (UTC)[reply]
I've rewritten the 2002-06 section and listed the references for them (from 600 words to 250). I'm not comfortable editing the actual page as I'd likely break the references as I kept just nine (but only their URL). Any recommendation for a next step? ogenstein (talk) 15:27, 14 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • Good grief. This is far and away the worst case of WP:REFBOMB I've ever seen. I'm not even kidding when I say it might be worth it to just completely undo all of Pr12402's edits to the article. For crying out loud, the article on the American Civil War has fewer references. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 07:36, 6 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Templates

Citation templates

See also: Category:Citation templates
See also: Wikipedia:Citation templates

Article tagging templates

See also: Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup/Verifiability and sources

Categories

Click on "►" below to display subcategories:
Wikipedia articles with sourcing issues

Subpages

Resources

Tools

See also: Wikipedia:Citation tools
Editor tools
Editing aids
Citation tools
Things to review
Customisation
  • mw:Citoid – use in the visual editor to quickly "Convert" a bare URL into a citation template.
  • refill - Edits bare references - adds title/dates etc. to bare references.
  • Google book tool Converts bare url into {{cite book}} format.
  • RefScript
  • Universal reference formatter for journal article citations.
  • WebCite — tool to archive webpages to allow stable citation links.
  • Diberri template builder — given an ISBN, a PubMed ID, etc., output a citation which can be pasted into a Wikipedia article.
  • Reference generator — generates wikicode for journals, webpages, and other commonly cited sources.
  • Citation bot — for finding and fixing citation errors, and adding missing data.
  • User:CitationTool — finds a different set of errors. Not currently working.
  • Wikicite — a free program that helps editors to properly reference their Wikipedia contributions using citation templates. It is written in Visual Basic .NET, making it suitable only for users with the .NET Framework installed on Windows, or, for other platforms, the Mono alternative framework.
    • Wikicite+ - free program based on source code from the above Wikicite project - features extra validation, bug fixes, additional cite templates (such as cite episode) as well as tools for stub sorting and more.
  • OttoBib.com — a free tool to generate an alphabetized bibliography for books, using an input list of International Standard Book Number (ISBN) numbers, with output in MLA, APA, Chicago/Turabian, BibTeX, or Wikipedia format (also generates a permalink).
  • Cite.php — a MediaWiki extension that enables the use of <ref>.
  • Zotero allows you to find articles in Mozilla Firefox and easily paste them into Wikipedia as citation templates using Ctrl-Alt-C
  • Smith609's Google Scholar interface lets you search for articles in Google Scholar and automatically produce an appropriate cite template.
  • User:Richiez tools to handle citations for a whole article at a time. Converts occurrences of {{pmid XXXX}} or {{isbn XXXX}} to properly formatted footnote or Harvard style references. Written in Ruby and requires a working installation with basic libraries.
  • WikiProject Check Wikipedia produces a series of daily reports with checks on various wiki syntax elements. The reports on broken template syntax frequently list {{citation}} templates.
  • Automatic Referencing Assistant — The Automatic Referencing Assistant (ARA) is a script which aids users in correcting referencing errors. It notifies the user when the article being edited is missing the {{Reflist}} template, has invalid or broken <ref></ref> tags, and many other small functions. Clicking a fix link will automatically add the necessary template or information to the correct location in the article.
  • WikiBlame - To find first entry of incorrect formating with broken reference names.

Related projects

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