Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Citations/Bring back autopopulation of citation template from a PMID

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Bring back autopopulation of citation template from a PMID

  • Problem: When you want to cite an article indexed in PubMed and you have to waste time manually typing/pasting the bibliographic field values into the template parameters (in w:Template:Citation or w:Template:Cite journal) because you can't just paste the PMID and let a bot take care of autopopulating them. This puts MediaWiki behind best-in-class tools such as Mendeley and Zotero. There used to be a bot that would come around and fill in a substitution after your edit if you called it with a certain template call. That bot went away.
  • Who would benefit: Anyone who frequently cites from PMIDs, meaning anyone who edits in topics related to medicine, biology, physiology, nursing, and other important fields.
  • Proposed solution: Bring back (a reincarnation of) the bot that did this task.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:

Discussion[edit]

Autofill is also present in the ref tool bar[1]

It works for PMID, DOI, and url. There is one that works for ISBN for books. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:50, 13 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Are any of these tools available to smaller projects? If not (at least I can't access them at :slwiki), effort should be made to implement them globally and not make people rely on external hacks such as the Wikipedia citation tool for Google Books. True, it would mostly benefit experienced editors at the start, but it would greatly facilitate newbies' learning to add proper citations as well. — Yerpo Eh? 06:22, 17 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Citoid can be implemented EVERYWHERE. It is quite easy and you don't need permissions from Meta or this kind of things. -Theklan (talk) 18:29, 1 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

VisualEditor (and the new VE-based wikitext editor that's currently a beta feature) actually uses Zotero internally to generate citation templates from URLs and common identifiers (PMID, ISBN etc) - see help. To use it in a wiki, you need cite templates which have the same basic parameter types as the enwiki one, and you need to go through some simple configuration steps.

The Zotero part is separate from the rest of VisualEditor and could probably be easily backported into the other editors as well. --Tgr (WMF) (talk) 06:39, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

that would be quite helpful. DGG (talk) 02:04, 20 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Cite button in source editing mode is already available. You should go to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatures, activate "New wikitext mode". I did not know that and I get to know this feature today. Is this what @Quercus solaris: proposed? --Snek01 (talk) 19:29, 23 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, thanks so much for the tip, @Snek01:. I just tried it and it is awesome! I am glad I interacted at this page. I am not very informed on all the latest developments, but just talking to you folks here has improved my knowledge. Quercus solaris (talk) 22:57, 23 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting[edit]