Topic on Talk:Citoid

Daniel Mietchen (talkcontribs)

I'd like to be able to use Citoid's "cite from ID" functionality to fill in statements on Wikidata items about references with Citoid-covered IDs. Is something like this on the horizon somewhere, possibly through a gadget?

Jdforrester (WMF) (talkcontribs)

It's certainly something that could be built. I'm not sure it's a great area to focus on, until we have actual structured citations on WIkidata; right now you're meant to just add a reference with type=URI and the link – there's not really anywhere for the content that Citoid fetches to go…

Mvolz (talkcontribs)

Actually, that's not exactly true; it's convention to just add the URI because that's the easiest way to do it. But there is support for structured citations, see claim "original language of work" in wikidata:Q43361. There you can see that the reference is "in" a wikidata item, a book, which has its own metadata, and then there are other properties you can annotate the citation with, like page number and quote, etc.

That said, it is easily more complicated than what is currently being done with citoid/VE or citoid/wikitext because of course, it requires you to both a) search wikidata and b) create new items on wikidata which is already more complicated than VE/wikitext which essentially amounts to just inserting text. And it also is a more complicated language, because each reference has to be annotated with potentially specific fields depending on the kind of citation; we have to know which fields go in the wikidata item the reference is "in" (such as volume) and which fields get annotated directly onto the reference (such as page number), and we have to do that with each citoid type (which are just zotero types- see incomplete map between zotero and wikidata types here: wikidata:Wikidata:WikiProject_Source_MetaData/Source_types).

Although I agree with James that it's probably not *immediately* in the pipeline since there is more low-hanging fruit before we get there.

Jdforrester (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Oh, sure, you can do that in Wikidata, but only if the item you're referencing already exists; there doesn't appear to be community appetite just yet for auto-creating items just to serve as reference points.

He7d3r (talkcontribs)

Doesn't?

Jdforrester (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Happy to be proven wrong if you have a link. :-)

Mvolz (WMF) (talkcontribs)

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Sources#Adding_a_source_to_a_statement

"Add the source as an item if: i) it's not in Wikidata already and ii) it is not a webpage"

So if citoid retrieves information about a book, newspaper article, or journal article, both the journal article itself and the journal it's published in should be added as items in wikidata, as see: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Sources#Scientific.2C_newspaper_or_magazine_article

If the item is a webpage, then only the reference URL should be inserted, but an item for the particular website (publisher) itself should not be unless it is already in wikidata. Date and access date can be added: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Sources#Web_page

I can see an issue arising where if citoid miscategorises a blog as a newspaper, this could conceivably contribute to "junk" being in wikidata. Right now though it's very "cautious" in this regard; currently only results coming from zotero are classified as newspapers or journals, where a human has assessed this. We currently assign urls where no zotero translators exist that have the open graph type "article" to itemType "blogPost" even though plausibly these could be news or journal articles as well.

Jdforrester (WMF) (talkcontribs)
Mvolz (WMF) (talkcontribs)

I believe User: Daniel Mietchen's question was about using citoid to create references for claims in Wikidata, which is what I was responding to. Is that not the case?

Jdforrester (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Sorry, you're right, I lost track of the parallel conversations. :-)

He7d3r (talkcontribs)

Could you clarify what you mean by "reference points"?

So9q (talkcontribs)

Interesting discussion. I would like Citoid to support Wikidata and creating new items based on identifiers they don't exist already.

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