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Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Citations/Bring back doi bot

< Community Wishlist Survey 2019 | Citations

Bring back doi bot

  • Problem: Lack of citations
  • Who would benefit: Editors who cite, you know, things.
  • Proposed solution: A doi bot that fills in refs if a doi is provided. There used to be one.
  • More comments: Maybe it could tie into Wikidata this time? Wikidata has millions of scholarly articles entered now.
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Abductive (talk) 16:54, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • There is no (widely used) bot that goes around filling in citations from doi or Wikidata info without being told to. You are presumably talking about some tool(s) that the editor has to initiate. Abductive (talk) 06:45, 6 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • From the bot's activation page, editors can activate it on specific pages or categories. The bot seems to sign the edits with the activator's name. Smith609 handles the bot, with assistance from Kaldari and AManWithNoPlan. They might have useful input.
I'd also like such a tool to do PMC URLs, arXiv URLs, URLs to pdfs with dois in them, and suchlike (Citation bot does at least some of this). Maybe even Wikidata identifiers. From the editing toolbar, Cite>Template>cite journal>[paste doi and click on magnifying glass below] works on en-wiki. Waiting for the scraping and lookup is annoying, tho. While it's good to proofread the autofill, it's usually very acceptable. Sometimes I'd rather have a bot and come back later and improve the bot-expanded refs. HLHJ (talk) 21:26, 17 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It sounds like what you really want is the return of {{cite doi}} that is then automatically expanded. You want to be able to add the citations and then not think about it. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 22:40, 17 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
That would be nice, AManWithNoPlan, if there is no reason not. I remember formerly using something of the sort and being delighted that a bot would just turn up and do the tedious work. Though I should use the "Expand citations" link in the sidebar, now I'm aware of it. HLHJ (talk) 22:57, 17 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
FYI, at least for enwiki, w:en:Template talk:Cite doi/Archive 1#RfC: Should Template:cite doi cease creating a separate subpage for each DOI?. Anomie (talk) 22:04, 18 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Though the voting is over, I would like to offer a suggestion.
The problem with something like a doi template is that in the wikitext one sees only the doi, making it extremely obscure as to what source is being cited. Also, articles sometimes differ in how they use a source's full citation, which leads to various problems.
What I would suggest is a feature that displays the requested full citation in preview mode in template form, with options for cs1 or cs2 formatting, full names or initials, etc. The editor can then copy that into the article text, modifying as preferred. That makes the details visible right where they are used, without having to jump between the edit window and the preview window, and avoids various hassles inherent in trying to maintain a centralized citation. ~ J. Johnson (talk) 00:28, 1 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Here's another suggestion that would be relatively easy to implement. It should not be difficult to edit Template:Cite journal to add a maintenance category when a citation is "profoundly incomplete", i.e. only contains a DOI/PMID. Citation bot could then watch this category and expand these incomplete citations. For the technically minded, I would propose a cron job that runs Category.php regularly (hourly, say) on this maintenance category. Smith609 (talk) 06:09, 15 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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