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Useful links
edit- Wikipedia:Citing sources#Citation generation tools:
- Wikipedia DOI and Google Books Citation Maker
- If you have a URL but no DOI, https://citer.toolforge.org can sometimes be useful
- To get DOIs, try https://doi.crossref.org/simpleTextQuery (h/t https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/93339/obtaining-the-doi-in-google-scholar/114259#114259)
- Hmm, there's actually a cite button in the 2010 wikitext editor, as described in Wikipedia:RefToolbar (h/t Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Citoid). Moreover, starting with a DOI, this can autofill the other fields - contrary to the current version of Help:Citation tools#Templates, which states "Allows you to format a reference during editing when you already have all the data". Wikipedia:RefToolbar#Related scripts mentions "toollabs:reftoolbar/lookup.php Provides the autofill capability used to auto-complete forms based on ISBN, DOI, and PMID values." But this is too hard for newbies to navigate - I'll try out RefToolbar some more, and if it works as promised, I'll edit the Citation Tools help page to mention autofill. It's taken me two years to figure this out, it would be nice if our help doco was more user-friendly...
- Autofill details: Wikipedia:RefToolbar/2.0#Autofilling: "Currently DOI, PMID, ISBN, and URL are supported."
- Referencing specific pages: Help:References_and_page_numbers#Inline_page_numbers
- Wikipedia:Link_rot
- Wikipedia:When_sources_are_wrong
- Wikipedia:Writing better articles
- Wikipedia:Twinkle, e.g. power tools for restore/rollback
- Formatting wiki text
- Formatting edit summaries. Unfortunately the diff template doesn't work here. Example templates:
- Modifying [[Special:Diff/1110712185|1110712185]] by [[Special:Contributions/Preimage|Preimage]] ([[User talk:Preimage|talk]]): message
- Reverted good faith edits by [[Special:Contributions/Preimage|Preimage]] ([[User talk:Preimage|talk]]): message
- message - reverted error from [[Special:Diff/1110735118|05:50, 17 September 2022]] - edited previous wording [[Special:Diff/1110724250|04:36, 17 September 2022]] for clarity
- Searching for section/anchor links:
- Help:What links here#Limitations notes ""What links here" cannot list the backlinks of a specific section/anchor only."
- https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2016/Categories/Editing#Enhanced_.22What_links_here.22_for_sections never got up (by the looks of it)
- Instead, you can do this (at some cost) via regex search: e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=linksto%3Acopper+insource%3A%2F%5C%5B%5C%5Bcopper%5C%23methods%28%5C%5D%5C%5D%7C%5C%7C%29%2Fi&title=Special:Search&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns0=1&ns1=1
Page history tools
editI've noticed page histories tend to get cluttered with minor edits. Has anyone made a keyframe viewer for edit histories? This would identify stable versions of the page that remained unchanged (apart from small edits) for an extended period of time.
- Manually tagging stable page versions might also work. Is this supported by MediaWiki?
- Another approach would be to develop a Git-style blame tool for Wikipedia. The standard edit history "blame" tool links Wikiblame and Blame - XTools are certainly useful, allowing text strings to be traced back to their corresponding "keyframe" edits, but don't support Git-style blame, where the aim is to understand the provenance of each part of the page.
Searching https://www.google.com/search?q=github+wikipedia+blame found a few more useful references:
- https://github.com/Gaelan/Whodunnit (https://whodunnit.toolforge.org)
- Given the name of an en.wikipedia.org article, this returns its source code colored by editor, with each piece of text linking back to the edit responsible for it. This is closer to what we'd like, but doesn't handle vandalism very well. For example, 42% of Nitrous oxide is attributed back to vandalism reversions by User:ClueBot_NG, whereas https://xtools.wmflabs.org/authorship/en.wikipedia.org/Nitrous%20oxide (powered by Wikiwho) skips over vandalism and anti-vandalism edits, instead identifying the most prolific author as User:Jorge_Stolfi at 6.7%.
- https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/15938/line-by-line-display-of-author-responsible-for-contribution-on-mediawiki-page
- Links to some custom scripts (e.g. https://gitlab.com/andreascian/mediawiki2git) but no easy-to-use web tools.
- https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/367/how-can-i-find-out-who-wrote-a-certain-section-of-an-article-in-wikipedia/165593#165593
- Recommends Who Wrote That?, a browser extension providing a Wikiwho-powered overlay for Wikipedia articles (https://github.com/wikimedia/WhoWroteThat, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WWT). Unfortunately, as of Oct 2022, both versions (Chrome and Firefox) error out for me on every page, even on short pages with small edit histories like Perstraction. The WWT Kanban board https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/who-wrote-that has a high-priority bug report https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T318746 that's been open for the past week, which notes "the extension is currently unusable for many/all people", albeit (possibly) only on "articles which haven't yet been indexed by wikiwho". Hopefully this will be fixed soon...
- The WWT GitHub page also links to https://wikiwho.wmflabs.org/gesis_home, which describes some alternative implementations (e.g. "the WhoColor userscript for the Tamper-/Greasemonkey browser extensions") and article editing analysis tools (e.g. https://github.com/gesiscss/IWAAN).
More generally, to find out what's going on with Wikimedia community-driven tech initiatives, see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Tech.
And in fact, as of May 2023, WWT is a fantastic resource, and seems to work properly on the vast majority of pages (it stops working 20% of the way through negative binomial distribution, but that's a very long article). It would be nice if it worked on Wikipedia meta-pages (MOS:MATH, Template:Math). Extending it to wikis for other languages was one of the top-voted proposals in the 2023 Community Wishlist Survey, and is currently being worked on, but wiki meta-pages aren't covered by the current work.