Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-08-01/Tips and tricks

In the

, and some external tools. In particular, I'm going to try to do a brief summary of the main scripts/gadgets/tools related to citations.

Some of the text was taken from these tools' description pages, which I highly encourage you to read if any of them interest you.

How to install user scripts

A quick note on how to install user scripts, using my own

) as an example. The other scripts can be installed in exactly the same way, replacing User:Headbomb/unreliable.js with User:Example/source.js accordingly. Some scripts may have additional customization options, detailed on their documentation page.

As a general caveat, for

, and their code has been community vetted, thus they represent a lesser security risk.

Citation Expander

The Citation Expander is a gadget that lets you invoke Citation bot. I have already written an in-depth guide a year ago, so I'll summarize the main points and you can read that article if you want to know more. If you're new to tool-assisted editing, if you only install one tool today, this is very likely the one you want.

The key idea is that you can have citations like

• {{cite journal |jstor=20107388 }}
• {{cite journal |doi=10.1038/351624a0 }}
• {{cite book |isbn=978-0-9920012-2-3 }}

and have the bot automatically expand them to

• Keen, Suzanne (2006). "A Theory of Narrative Empathy". Narrative. 14 (3): 207–236.
  S2CID 52228354
  .
• Wigley, Dale B.; Davies, Gideon J.; Dodson, Eleanor J.; Maxwell, Anthony; Dodson, Guy (1991). "Crystal structure of an N-terminal fragment of the DNA gyrase B protein". Nature. 351 (6328): 624–629.
  S2CID 4373125
  .
• Robichaud, Marc; Basque, Maurice (September 2013). Histoire de l'Université de Moncton.
  ISBN 978-0-9920012-2-3
  .

This can save you a huge amount of time and headaches, not having to format things yourself, not having to manually enter authors, etc. All you need is an identifier (URLs will often work too), and let the bot take over. Then all you have to do is review what the bot did (e.g. it missed the publisher of the book, which you could add yourself with |publisher=Institut d'Études Acadiennes).

You can also unleash the bot on existing citations so it can perform some cleanup and find other relevant bibliographic information.

OAbot

OAbot is a tool designed to find and add links to open access publications and find suitable links to free versions of paywalled articles by searching several databases, author websites, and so on. In the case of open-access DOIs, it will append |doi-access=free to the citation to flag that the publication is indeed open access.

The bot will make edits on its own, but you can ask the bot to make edits on your behalf via ToolForge. Keep in mind that some database or website, like CiteSeerX or ResearchGate, might host papers in violation of copyright, even if most are not, so you ought to review that the uploader has the permission to upload the paper in the first place. If they aren't one of the authors of the paper, they likely do not have such permission.

Citation Style Markers

Note: You'll need to use the manual install method (method 2) with the following code to use its custom options.

importScript('User:BrandonXLF/CitationStyleMarker.js'); // Backlink: [[User:BrandonXLF/CitationStyleMarker.js]]
window.CSMarkerMode = 'both';

}} in an article.

If you have two different citation styles, it will append a small CS1, CS2, CSVAN, or CSLSA at the end of the citation.

• {{cite book |title=Albatrosses, Butlers, and Communists |publisher=Fake Publisher}}
• {{citation |title=Albatrosses, Butlers, and Communists |publisher=Fake Publisher}}
• Albatrosses, Butlers, and Communists. Fake Publisher. CS1
• Albatrosses, Butlers, and Communists, Fake Publisher CS2

I personally choose to enable those warnings only when there's a clash. I can then search for 'CS1' and 'CS2' to see which is the dominant style and which citations are compromising consistency. It's often only a matter of changing one or two citations from a {{citation}} to a {{cite book}} or vice versa. Sometimes it's a matter of appending |mode=cs1 or |mode=cs2 to premade citations (like {{McCorduck 2004|mode=cs1}}) or specialized templates (like {{cite arXiv|...|mode=cs2}}), which will change the template style from CS1 to CS2 or vice versa.

Note that plain text citations, like <ref>Smith, J. (2010) "Random Book". Random Publisher. pp. 32–38 {{ISBN|978-0-123-45678-9}}</ref> will be completely ignored by the script, so you still have to keep an eye out for those.

You can choose if you want the markers always present, present by default, off by default, or only present when there is a clash by changing OPTION in window.CSMarkerMode = 'OPTION'; above. See the documentation for details.

HarvErrors

article for an example).

HarvErrors checks these links for validity and displays an error message for incorrect links. In addition, it checks for citations that are likely set up to receive links, but do not have any pointing to them.

If you don't want to deal with warnings, and only with confirmed errors, use Svick's original HarvErrors instead.

Reference Tooltips

Reference Tooltips is a small gadget that simply shows you the citation upon hovering the reference link. You no longer need to click and go down to the reference section to see what the reference is. This is particularly helpful with articles that make use of {{rp}}.

Sadly, it will not work if the Navigation Popups gadget is enabled.

Unreliable/Predatory Source Detector

My own (i.e. Headbomb's) Unreliable/Predatory Source Detector, or UPSD for short, is a relatively famous script. The core idea is that the script looks for URLs and DOIs, and colour codes them according to reliability, summarized in the table below.

Severity	Appearance	Explanation
Blacklisted	example.com	The source is blacklisted on Wikipedia and can only be used with explicit permission.
Deprecated/predatory	example.com	There is community consensus to deprecate the source. The source is considered generally unreliable, and use of the source is generally prohibited.
Generally unreliable	example.com	The source has a poor reputation for fact-checking, fails to correct errors, is violates copyrights , or is otherwise of low-quality.
Marginally reliable	example.com	Sources which may or may not be appropriate for Wikipedia. For instance Forbes.com is generally reliable, but its contributors generally are not .

In general, the script is kept in sync with

.

The documentation contains several warnings and caveats, and I would highly recommend that you at the very least read the

before making use of this script so you understand its limitations.

The script can be customized to an extent, and can even support supplemental lists for specialized tasks, like

efforts.

CiteUnseen

which are displayed.

Like with any scripts dealing in citation analysis, it comes with heavy caveats, so you should read the documentation in detail to understand what it does.

Both CiteUnseen and UPSD will work together without issue, to provide fairly comprehensive analysis of both the reliability and nature of sources – and if one script misses a source, maybe the other will pick it up.

CiteHighlighter

discussions), and the source reliability pages of various WikiProjects. It recognizes around 1,800 sources.

Like with any scripts dealing in citation analysis, you should read the documentation in detail to understand what it does. In particular, it makes certain assumptions like The New York Times = reliable, without consideration to the type of article being published, or a reference with a

= reliable, despite the PubMed database including sources of various reliability.

CiteHighlighter works with either or both of UPSD and CiteUnseen, so feel free to mix and match as your heart desires.

Copyvios

. Like reFill below, it runs on ToolForge.

This tool is normally more useful to reviewers than to regular editors; if you don't know that copy-pasting/closely paraphrasing things from sources is bad, the intervention you need is education on the topic, not more tools.

in particular might want to install this, but anyone that is interested in copyright cleanup will be well served by this tool.

Checklinks

). If they are not, you can use it to search for archived versions of these links. It runs on Dispenser's personal site.

reFill/Reflinks/CiteGen

reFill is a tool that specializes in dealing with

for details).

It adds information (page title, work/website, author and publication date, if metadata is included) to bare URL references, and does additional fixes as well (e.g. combining duplicated references). The tool is an open-source replacement of Dispenser's Reflinks.

It is not perfect, and you will often need to cleanup its output, like |last=Welle |first=Deustche for Deutsche Welle links. But it gets you at least 90% of the way there!

Reference Organizer

). You can also use it to sort the references in various ways, and rename the references.

RefRenamer

"/>.

Sources

, to making sure that magazines aren't in the |publisher= field of citation templates, etc.

Closing remarks

Phew! That was a lot wasn't it? That's ok, you don't have to install all these scripts, or memorize all those details. Just pick the ones that seem useful to you.

That said, there are important caveats to using UPSD, CiteUnseen and CiteHighlighter. I know I've mentioned those before, but it bears repeating that these are not scripts to use mindlessly. They are, at least in part, based on the interpretation of discussions, many with limited participation. It's perfectly possible, and even likely, that some of these discussions did not reflect the entirety of the source, and that a closer look would change its classification from generally unreliable to marginally unreliable (or vice versa), or a source would be deemed unreliable in context X, but reliable in context Y.

Also remember that just because a source is considered generally unreliable, it doesn't mean that it cannot or shouldn't be used. Scripts cannot appreciate the

, and use your brain.

Feel free to post your experiences (new or old) with any of these scripts in the comment section! Also feel free suggest other scripts that you feel might benefit your fellow Wikipedian!

Note: This article was updated on 5 August 2023 to mentioned

for bringing this script to light in the comment section.

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Tips and Tricks is a general editing advice column written by experienced editors. If you have suggestions for a topic, or want to submit your own advice, follow these links and let us know (or comment below)!