Wikipedia:Cite4Wiki

Cite4Wiki
	Cite4Wiki in action
Developer(s)	SMcCandlish (active); Unit 5 (inactive); User:Jehochman (inactive); Diego Cadogan (inactive),; Yojimbo Doodah (inactive),; Ratel (inactive)
Written in	JavaScript, XUL, RDF
Operating system	Microsoft Windows (confirmed); Mac OS X (unconfirmed); nx (unconfirmed)
Available in	English
Type	Wikipedia editing tool
License	GNU LGPL
Website	https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cite4wiki/

Cite4Wiki is a freeware and open source Firefox browser add-on. It is a contextual menu ("right-click") citation-generating tool for Wikipedia. The add-on is also compatible with Flock, and should work with stable versions of other Gecko based browsers that support Mozilla add-ons. (One known exception is SeaMonkey 2.0.2/Vista as of this writing.)

The user can right-click to get a bare-bones {{Cite web}} source citation for the page currently loaded in the browser, such as a news report or a journal article. The information will be wrapped in a <ref> inline footnote citation. The code is then put on the clipboard for pasting into a Wikipedia article being edited.

The default output is in this format (see below for US-style dates):

<ref>{{Cite web
|title=Page Title |url=page's URL |work=site.name |accessdate=today's date in D[D] Month YYYY form
}}</ref>

You can even use it on multiple pages! Each one will get its own little popup window with citation details and you can just leave them there until needed, and re-use them multiple times.

The add-on is clever enough to strip "www." from domain names before using them for the |work= parameter.

There is also a second context menu entry for generating a "Month D[D], YYYY" American-style date, for use in articles written in American English, per WP:ENGVAR.

Rationale

Far too many (especially inexperienced) editors simply paste in a URL and call it a source citation, leaving it to other editors to properly format the citation for even very basic information such as title, or to even determine whether the link pertains to the article at all rather than being a test edit, or spam or even an attack site (a serious potential problem for biographies of living people). This add-on alleviates some of the geeky pressure on inexperienced or technically disinclined editors, who need not remember complicated citation code to insert a basic citation with this add-on. It also makes cleanup of bare-URL citations easier on other editors, who can load the URL in question and copy-paste a proper, if minimal, citation over it in a matter of a seconds.

Download, installation and compatibility

The add-on is available from Add-ons for Firefox at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cite4wiki/.

Click the install button, allow the add-on to install, and restart the browser to activate it. Its operation can be tested on any and all actual Web pages (browser-internal pages such as "Restore Session" cannot do anything with the add-on).

The add-on is known for certain to work with Mozilla Firefox 3.5.5 through 7.0.1 and 8b, well as Flock 2.5.6+, all under Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP2 and Windows 7 x64, and Firefox 3–8 under Mac OS X 10.5 through 10.7. It is known to unfortunately not be compatible with Mozilla 2.0.2 (Vista, probably others), for unclear reasons. It is expected to work more broadly, but please leave feedback on the talk page or at the Add-ons for Firefox page about your experiences with other operating systems, Firefox versions and non-Firefox Mozilla browsers.

Usage

Edit an article.
In another browser tab, open a webpage you need to cite in the article.
Right-click on that page.
Select the Cite4Wiki context menu item (it has a helpful Wikipedia "W" logo next to it).
You'll get a dialog box showing the {{Cite web}} code; examine it, then press "Copy to cliboard", then close the dialog.
Paste the citation into the article, and edit it as needed.
Preview and save the article.

Contextual menu items, with a Wikipedia logo to make them easier to find. Note the US date format option, and mouseover tooltext (cursor is not visible due to Windows screen-capture limitations)
Popup window, with formatted Wikipedia citation data for the page currently being read. Just behind it is another with data pulled up from previous usage (note it's US date format, since that option was picked that time). Note also no "www." in the |work= parameter.

User input often needed

The add-only only grabs obvious information. Details that require human reading and judgment, such as author name, publication date, real-world publication company (|publisher=) and its location, etc., would need be entered manually when known, with specific parameters for such information. Ver. 1.4, in testing now, will auto-fill some of this information for a number of major news sites. If you frequently cite a website and would like it included leave a request with the cite URL on the talk page.

Users of the add-on should review the details before saving a Cite4Wiki-generated citation into a real article. The add-on is entirely dependent upon what it is told by the site it is building a citation for. It is very common for site authors to forget to update the <title> of a page, if they have been copy-pasting code from one page to another. In other cases, this HTML field may simply repeat the work (site) name, with the page actually providing a real title only in a <h1> heading that will need to be manually located, read and repeated in the template code generated by the add-on. Another common problem is the use of pipe ("|") characters as "breadcrumb" navigation separators in <title*>s; these will break the template, and must be escaped with |, e.g. |title=2010 Election results {{!}} Europe {{!}} France {{!}} Municipal. This "|" problem is fixed in ver. 1.4, now in testing.

The site name reported in |work= may be more readable with cleanup (e.g. "FooBar.com" instead of "www.foobar.com"), or the site as a publication may prefer and advertise a different title (e.g. "AZBilliards.com - The A to Z of Billiards and Pool", not just "azbilliards.com", or even completely different, such as "BBC News" vs. "news.bbc.co.uk"). Some sites also munge the page title and site name (for example, this page at Wikipedia itself has a <title> of "Wikipedia:Cite4Wiki - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" in which only the first part would be the |title= information). Ver. 1.4, in testing, now stripps "www." from the front of URLs.

If the page is going to be cited more than once in the same article, be sure to name the reference: <ref name="something unique here">.

Use outside of en.wikipedia

The add-on will also work "out of the box" on other MediaWiki sites that have a copy of Wikipedia's Template:Cite web, as long as it is at that name, and uses the same basic parameters. Cite4Wiki's JavaScript source code can be easily modified, in the file cite4wiki.js to handle other set-ups, such as non-English Wikipedias with different template and parameter names.

History

The first add-on of this sort, WPCite, was designed in September 2008 by Jehochman (talk · contribs) and coded by his associate Diego "Manuar" Cadogan (who has not edited Wikipedia), in Java (or rather mostly in Javascript, XUL and RDF, wrapped in Java and packaged in .jar files). It was released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, and provided very basic citation information in a new browser window. In August 2009, Unit 5 (talk · contribs) adapted it into a Java-free implementation, Cite for Wiki, using a pop-up window. At some point in the interim, it had also been modified by "Ratel" (details unknown). It was modified again by "Yojimbo Doodah" (details unknown); this was after the work of Unit 5, who went dormant on en.wikipiedia in December 2009. In January 2010 it was updated again by SMcCandlish (talk · contribs), whose subsequent versions fixed some bugs/misfeatures, added new features, and consistently used the name Cite4Wiki (which was already used in some of the Cite for Wiki materials and appeared to be the name to which the project was intended to migrate).

The tool still needs further development. Volunteers should contact SMcCandlish, after registering for a free Mozilla add-ons developer account, to be added to the project.

The current stable version is 1.3, and was released on January 25, 2010. The code repository is at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/101770 starting November 3, 2011.

Forthcoming

Version 1.4 is in beta testing, and includes many refinements.

The |last= and |first= parameters are part of the output now (empty but for a warning tag to fill them in; most citations will actually need these, there's no reason to make Cite4Wiki users manually type them out, and we don't want half-citations being put into articles (thus the warning tag).
Auto-detection of some particular sites (The Times, Washington Post, etc.) as a demo of future capabilities, with customized output for these sites, including use of {{Cite news}} instead of {{Cite web}}, linked |work, |publisher, |location and |issn parameters, and so on. This is a really cool feature, but will eventually require a scalable solution, maybe a database, but at least a flat file of arrays. The project could use some help on this part.
Auto-insertion of year from last-modified date as |year= value for {{Cite web}} sources; while this will often be more recent than the actual publication date, this is better than no date at all, as innumerable pages do not mention when they were first published. It's a "lesser evil" default.
Many more potentially problematic characters and strings besides "|" have been escaped, to prevent weird output.

Known issues

To-do list of stuff to fix:

The add-ons validation process at Add-ons for Firefox's "Developer Hub" throws a yellow warning (i.e., not a red error message) about a potential JavaScript issue, namly use of wrappedJSObject; code should be replaced if possible.
Needs more localization, so it will be more easily portable to other Wikipedias, and so it will stop giving another warning when uploaded to addons.mozilla.org.
Inexplicable vestigial code ripped from AdBlockPlus needs to be removed from global.properties; some of this has been changed to refer to Cite4Wiki, but the presence of any of it at all is questionable.
No installer script does pre-install cleanup of previous versions' files (such a script was included with the original WPCite, but was abandoned in Cite for Wiki for unknown reasons). This doesn't seem to be strictly necessary, but it can't hurt and could become necessary in later versions.
Should auto-detect the (declared-in-HTTP-headers) language and add that as a parameter, if not English.
Should auto-detect the (declared) file format as a MIME type and add that as a parameter, if not HTML.
An option to format output with no linebreaks.
Should, if possible, grab the company name, for the |publisher= parameter, from authentication data, the same way that Firefox itself provides this information just to the left of the URL entry field when at an https address and the site has a valid security cert.
~~Should auto-detect the character "|" (pipe) and escape it as {{!}} to keep from breaking the {{Cite web}} template.~~ Already in beta testing for ver. 1.4.
Completely fails in SeaMonkey 2.0.2 (at least under Windows Vista x64 SP2), and has not been tested with any other version. Add-on installs, but no right-click context menu items are available, ergo no popup window of wiki code. Not tested in any other version, on any other platform.