Talk:Community Wishlist/W240

Related or same approaches?

Is this about Template:Cite Q and either way how does this proposal relate to that? I think that's also the subject of this talk. Also I wonder if it may be useful to prevent issues of "post-expand include size" in articles that cite many refs(?) Morevoer, I think for this to be viable there would first need to be bulk imports to Wikidata for most scholarly papers and while there are many items for studies on there I found most of the most notable (e.g. top 1000 per month by altmetrics) are not in Wikidata even years after publication. Related post here. Lastly, I think it may be difficult to implement with lots of caveats (such as maybe more difficult to detect and prevent vandalism) with no clear or no large usefulness where most of the practical things are implemented to some degree using citation cleanup methods like CitationBot & Citoid & reFill that auto-generate or auto-improve references. More clarity on all of these subjects would be great, I'm certainly interested in where this goes. Prototyperspective (talk) 16:43, 17 November 2024 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective It is in right direction, however I think there are several challenges.

1. Wikidata already aspires to have an item for every single scholarly article, but the number of item creations for non-scholarly journals is insurmountably higher than Wikidata can support.

2. Adding a source automatically should map/link it to a SharedCitation. Right now I can add a scholarly article using default citations, but it won't make any links to an existing wikidata item.

3. I think the other challenge not solved by en:Template:Cite Q is that it is not global, but a local wiki template. Therefore it does not allow for cross-wiki analysis, the way Commons images do.

Some challenges Shushugah (talk) 05:43, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for explaining:

1. Then how do you mean to address/solve/workaround this here? The wish has very little explanation and its contents as well as the title are relatively undescriptive. It doesn't outline how these things could be achieved. I guess with but for all citations you mean all citations used on Wikipedia? The lack of items for most scholarly papers and books in Wikidata seems like a big problem here.
2. What if the Wikidata item for it doesn't exist?
3. If it doesn't use that template, how else would this work? And if it uses templates like it probably needs to, wouldn't that increase page load much, have references be far more often vandalized or disappearing due to essentially nobody watching the respective editable-by-everyone items, and the page maybe hit that post-expand size limit? (Regarding the latter, I don't know if it's only about the count of templates or also about how long-loading them are or similar.)

Prototyperspective (talk) 14:47, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective there is a detailed project at WikiCite/Shared Citations which expands further. I don't want to be prescriptive of what the technical solutions must be. I think users should add sources as they normally would, and it would try to either map to existing sources, or create a new wikidata-like item if none exist. Perhaps editing the Wikidata item itself would be restricted, especially if it's used in multiple shared citations and would be at higher risk of vandalism. That is similar to how images cannot be easily replaced/written-over/moved without appropriate permissions. I would imagine the interface for adding sources should be similar, but imagine if I added a poorly structured magazine article, and it exists in SharedCitations already, the interface could suggest from recognizing the url, the author of the magazine, a wikilink to the publication and other defaults that would be decided per wiki, along with individual user customization. When translating from one wiki to another, being able to reuse citations with ease would be a key benefit. Shushugah (talk) 15:45, 20 November 2025 (UTC)

Re "This would allow us to globally track citation usage"

For studies that are properly cited – that is hyperlinked to the DOI or studypage – this can already be done using altmetrics. Example.
For other sources, the title can be searched on individual wikis by searching for "title" – don't know if there is a way to search across the language versions and if there is a way, the hyperlink to do so could be added to the Wikidata items that are instances of scholarly articles or literary works etc.
Scholia also shows Wikipedia citations of sources.
Prototyperspective (talk) 13:44, 13 December 2025 (UTC)

AltMetric is really good. As you mention, it only tracks sources with DOIs though (all but just academia), and search queries can be complicated to make due to edge cases. Aaron Liu (talk) 20:50, 20 December 2025 (UTC)

For search, I recommend this. An example of where search queries are complicated would help. One idea I'm having now is a gadget that adds a button next to every citation that uses either {{cite journal}} or has a DOI (or even simply all citations) to search the study in the linked platform from where one can go to the altmetrics and e.g. find all the news articles and Wikipedia articles that link directly to the study.

It doesn't work for books and news articles but Wikidata has items for only a very small fraction of books and more or less none for news articles and sources like that. Maybe one could try to have a bot import citations from the references section into Wikidata items so that despite it being a small fraction, it would have nearly all things cited in Wikipedia articles. Nevertheless, the benefits and especially how this could be achieved and how problems like vandal edits to Wikidata items for citations could be mitigated all are quite unclear at this point imo. Metadata about sources for example is added by bots and tools like CitationBot and reFill which could be improved for a more readily available clearly feasible way to improve things. I think the proposal & project sound nice on paper and in theory but may not be the best approach – at least at this point (in specific before Anna's Archive sources metadata is imported and a few other things) – and has open problems. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:52, 21 December 2025 (UTC)

problems like vandal edits to Wikidata items for citations

Same as any other vandalism: people patrol it or see it and revert it. Do note that watching an article already watches its corresponding Wikidata item, and I expect it possible to do the same with citations. We don't see our article citations vandalized all the time (or at least, not without RC patrollers or other people who see weird citations undoing them) either. (I'll note that I've seen exact same conversations about vandalism with Wikidata before.) Plus, high-use citations could be protected just like high-use templates.

[Metadata added by bots is a better way]

I don't see what that has to do with the proposal. Aaron Liu (talk) 20:56, 12 January 2026 (UTC)