Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Advanced Citation Techniques

With what you’ve learned so far, you now know how to document information in Wikipedia in just about any situation—you can create links, footnotes, and multiple footnotes, and use citation templates. The three techniques described in the rest of this chapter are completely optional. But if you spend a lot of time creating and editing citations, you may find a need for automated citation-creating tools, viewing footnotes for just a section of an article, and adding page numbers to footnotes.

Automated Citation Tools

When you want to cite a source, you usually have to cut and paste various elements—one by one—from the Web page where you found the source into the edit box where you’re assembling the citation. But sometimes, computerized tools can vastly simplify your work: You can simply cut and paste the whole citation, not its individual parts. Here’s an assortment of tools to check out:

• If you start a Google Scholar search with the Wikipedia {{citation}} Assistant at http://toolserver.org/~verisimilus/Scholar/, you can just click the {{Wikify}} link that’s part of each search result. That link generates a citation for you.

• For books, try OttoBib at http://www.ottobib.com/, enter an ISBN, click the Wikipedia button, and then click Get Citations.

• If you have access to and use specialized databases, and know the DrugBank ID, HGNC ID, PubMed ID, or PubChem ID of a document, you can simply enter that ID into the Wikipedia template-filling page at http://diberri.dyndns.org/wikipedia/templates/ ...