Welcome to WikiProject Citation cleanup. Some Wikipedians have formed this collaboration resource and group dedicated to improving the quality and consistency of
citations and
footnotes in Wikipedia. This page and its subpages contain their suggestions and various resources; it is hoped that this project will help to focus the efforts of other Wikipedians interested in the topic. If you would like to help, please
join the project, inquire on the
talk page and see the
to-do list below.
Goals
Standardising the use of citations by making all citations within the same article consistent with each other
If you see a link that shows up as
[1], try to convert it to show up with text (e.g.
Google).
Please note that Wikipedia's
style guideline on
embedded links says, "A
full citation is also required in a References section at the end of the article." If able, please provide this.
If you see a reference to a news article, it is helpful to link to an online-version of this article (typing the title of the article in the search engine is often sufficient).
Tagging articles
If you don't have time to fix citations/references at the moment, you can still help by tagging the article so that others can find and fix them.
Softtest123 (
talk·contribs) 13:56, 30 September 2007 (UTC) I mostly do link rot clean up or cleanup after a bot does link rot clean up (i.e. Missing authors, titles, and dates).reply
Jw21 (
talk·contribs) 01:37, 2 December 2007 (UTC) (I have been adding and checking citations before this WikiProject came into light, and I'd be happy to be affiliated with it.)reply
Superm401 (
talk·contribs) 12:55, 31 December 2007 (UTC) As with Jw21, I've been doing this often, and I'm glad to join up.reply
Sparkygravity (
talk·contribs) I'm interested in working on citation style consistency, and increasing reliable sources 17:44, 31 December 2007 (UTC)reply
UpstateNYer (
talk·contribs) 21:32, 3 December 2008 (UTC) - I also go for random articles and format into {{
cite}}. I'll also hit big-ticket pages and fix their references as well.reply
Speednat (
talk·contribs) 03:24, 21 February 2009 (UTC) I have been doing it already, mainly in birds.reply
Jeffq (
talk·contribs) 18:44, 19 March 2009 (UTC). Most of my non-trivial WP edits of late involve cleaning up, expanding, and formatting citations, including turning bare external links to proper references, usually whenever I read an article for other purposes.reply
Flipper24 (
talk·contribs) 11:37, 29 April 2009 (UTC)There are a number of Australian Schools articles that could use some citations.reply
Reaper_Eternal (
talk·contribs) 02:23, 2 November 2010 (UTC) - I commonly open "Random article", fix any citations, and then walk down the wikilinks looking for more citations to fix.reply
Wtwilson3 (
talk·contribs) I don't have a lot of time to fix references, but have been tagging a lot and decided to join up. And it's good to be #41 on the list, I used to have a cat named 41. —
Bill W. (
Talk) (
Contrib) – 30 April 2024, 00:02 (UTC) 19:24, 6 January 2012 (UTC)reply
Benjamil (
talk·contribs) Tagging, finding sources (I love to google). 22:31, 13 May 2012 (UTC)reply
Faizanalivarya (
talk·contribs) I look at everything, Whatever article need me I would be there as protector of that article, love Wikipedia, love project Peace. -- 18:53, 25 May 2012 (UTC)reply
Azaghal of Belegost (
talk·contribs) (I am interested in unifying citation style with {{
cite}}, particularly on physics articles) 20:32, 15 January 2014 (UTC)reply
Diptanshu.D (
talk·contribs) I have been cleaning up references and using citation templates for
WP:MED for quite some time. Did not know that a separate WikiProject existed for this 17:46, 18 January 2014 (UTC)reply
Tgok (
talk·contribs) I've been doing this informally for a while. Might as well make it official. 21:32, 26 January 2014 (UTC)reply
AlbinoFerret (
talk·contribs) 16:06, 15 November 2014 (UTC) There is no scope to my interests in fixing citations, I have been doing it on my own and was happy to find this Wikiproject.reply
Vivek.bekhabar (
talk·contribs) (Already correcting the wrong citations I see on article. Didn't know that their is a project. Its good to be here.) 07:10, 10 July 2015 (UTC)reply
Geobeedude (
talk·contribs) (I am interested in working on fixing missing "|title=" fields in citations.) 03:24, 5 October 2015 (UTC)reply
Clifford_Anderson (
talk·contribs) (I am interested in assisting librarians, college students, and faculty members with finding references for articles) 00:44, 19 October 2015 (UTC)reply
Warga1 (
talk·contribs) (Interested in the concept of improving Wikipedia's authority by doing citation cleanup work. Excelsior!) 16:44, 21 October 2015 (UTC)reply
James_Shelton32 (
talk·contribs) (Cleaned up some articles on historical trains in the south. Added references, based on notes in
Soil mesofauna) 14:28, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
Prime Lemur (
talk·contribs) Sometimes people misplace citations during copy-editing, others add great material, but sometimes leave spartan citations. Fixing it contributes to the enduring robustness of WP. Or I think so, anyway *wink*. 10:01, 14 December 2018 (UTC)reply
Smuckola (
talk·contribs) Seek and destroy all lack of citations and presence of non-template-formatted citations. Citations are the foundation of the encyclopedia. Please build automated tools to format and unify them all, such as
Citoid,
WP:REFILL, and wikidata.13:47, 24 January 2019 (UTC)
MonkeyStolen234 (
talk·contribs) I have been fighting through several pages to fix citations to the point of going to bed and dreaming of code every night for an entire week. I still love it, though. 17:55, 6 May 2019 (UTC)reply
Diriector_Doc (
talk·contribs) I have been fixing link-only citation already. Thought I might aswell join the club! 21:28, 9 May 2019 (UTC)reply
Ionmars10 (
talk·contribs) 19:32, 9 August 2019 (UTC) - will probably focus on cleaning up bare URLsreply
Quuux (
talk·contribs) 02:53, 13 August 2019 (UTC) -- technical fixes (bare URLs, dead links, book details, etc.)reply
Capewearer (
talk·contribs) verifying citations, moving them to what they actually verifiy, fixing bare URLs and dead links, etc. 04:58, 24 February 2020 (UTC)reply
Chrisma0 (
talk·contribs) I feel like the "Quote" field for references is severely underused on Wikipedia! It's so useful. 15:01, 3 May 2020 (UTC)reply
Hello world 6 (
talk) 00:12, 17 July 2020 (UTC) I have recently started playing
Citation Hunt and feel that I should join this WikiProject to help.reply
Bill Neto (
talk·contribs) 4:41, 6 May 2021 (UTC) Completing as much as possible all existing references I come across.
Swaare (
talk·contribs) 14:37, 22 June 2021 (UTC). Mainly focused on bare URLs and plain text citations and converting them into CS1, on random articles I encounter while on research.reply
Kaltenmeyer (
talk·contribs) 21:31, 9 August 2021 (UTC) Fixing dead urls with current URLs or archived URLs, fixing Wikipedia errors in footnotes, multiple citations with the same ref name; ref names not attached to any reference; duplicate names of authors; fixing bare URLs; moving references to the correct location in the articlereply
TsunTsky (
talk·contribs) 03:12 24 September, 2021 (UTC) Interested in Fixing up citation that are cited in incorrect or not recommedned forms
Apollo468 (
talk·contribs) 02:10 2 October, 2021 (UTC) Mostly focused on adding references for any pages - particularly music.
Charlette9 (
talk·contribs) 20:17, 20 December 2021 (UTC) Fixing and completing existing references as much as I can.reply
SidP (
talk·contribs) 17:12, 5 January 2022 (UTC) Fixing, completing and adding requested (or needed) references; I wish I'd known this group existed before! I've been doing this for so long, and just learned I was not following CITEVAR well. When adding additional data to references, I was often taking the time to use the ref template and was recently corrected (due to a revert which stung).reply
Storchy (
talk·contribs) 14:24, 21 February 2022 (UTC) For now I'm mostly fixing bare urls, and replacing dead links.reply
Sideswipe9th (
talk·contribs) 20:52, 4 June 2022 (UTC) I'm working my way through the bare URL backlog, but if you need an opinion on gender, sexuality, video games, science fiction, fantasy, or Disney feel free to ask.reply
BhamBoi (
talk·contribs) (I had NO IDEA there was a wikiProject for this! I've been doing this independently for a while (check my contribs), so I'm glad to have found a group of like-minded editors.) 03:39, 12 December 2022 (UTC)reply
Demt1298 (
talk·contribs) Bare URLs is something I have been working on 03:16, 13 January 2023 (UTC)reply
Neko-chan (
talk·contribs) 20:58, 5 December 2023 (UTC) I've been working on scientific journal cites for a while now, especially ones with naked DOIs.reply
Hair Peace Salon an article about a Belarusian band has over 300 references and is currently being edited by one particular user who is not aware of
WP:REFBOMB. A relevant cleanup issue was raised at
WP:CLEAN by
Doomsdayer520 (
talk·contribs), I am duplicating it here to raise the awareness about this article. --
Bbarmadillo (
talk) 09:45, 7 April 2019 (UTC)reply
I will assist if this team decides to take action. Note that the article's creator may react unfavorably. ---DOOMSDAYER520 (
Talk|
Contribs) 12:27, 8 April 2019 (UTC)reply
I've rewritten the 2002-06 section and listed the references for them (from 600 words to 250). I'm not comfortable editing the actual page as I'd likely break the references as I kept just nine (but only their URL). Any recommendation for a next step?
ogenstein (
talk) 15:27, 14 May 2019 (UTC)reply
Good grief. This is far and away the worst case of
WP:REFBOMB I've ever seen. I'm not even kidding when I say it might be worth it to just completely undo all of Pr12402's edits to the article. For crying out loud, the article on the
American Civil War has fewer references. TheTechnician27(Talk page) 07:36, 6 June 2019 (UTC)reply
WebCite — tool to archive webpages to allow stable citation links.
Wikipedia template filling (was Diberri template builder) — given an ISBN, a PubMed PMID or PMCID, etc., output a citation which can be pasted into a Wikipedia article. Uses vauthors rather than first, last pairs.
Reference generator — generates wikicode for journals, webpages, and other commonly cited sources.
Citation bot — for finding and fixing citation errors, and adding missing data.
User:CitationTool — finds a different set of errors. Not currently working.
Wikicite — a free program that helps editors to properly reference their Wikipedia contributions using citation templates. It is written in Visual Basic .NET, making it suitable only for users with the .NET Framework installed on Windows, or, for other platforms, the Mono alternative framework.
OttoBib.com — a free tool to generate an alphabetized bibliography for books, using an input list of International Standard Book Number (ISBN) numbers, with output in MLA, APA, Chicago/Turabian, BibTeX, or Wikipedia format (also generates a permalink).
Cite.php — a MediaWiki extension that enables the use of <ref>.
Zotero allows you to find articles in Mozilla Firefox and easily paste them into Wikipedia as citation templates using Ctrl-Alt-C
Smith609's
Google Scholar interface lets you search for articles in Google Scholar and automatically produce an appropriate cite template.
User:Richiez tools to handle citations for a whole article at a time. Converts occurrences of {{pmid XXXX}} or {{isbn XXXX}} to properly formatted footnote or Harvard style references. Written in
Ruby and requires a working installation with basic libraries.
WikiProject Check Wikipedia produces a series of daily reports with checks on various wiki syntax elements. The reports on broken template syntax frequently list {{
citation}} templates.
Automatic Referencing Assistant — The Automatic Referencing Assistant (ARA) is a script which aids users in correcting referencing errors. It notifies the user when the article being edited is missing the {{
Reflist}} template, has invalid or broken <ref></ref> tags, and many other small functions. Clicking a fix link will automatically add the necessary template or information to the correct location in the article.
WikiBlame - To find first entry of incorrect formating with broken reference names.
Welcome to WikiProject Citation cleanup. Some Wikipedians have formed this collaboration resource and group dedicated to improving the quality and consistency of
citations and
footnotes in Wikipedia. This page and its subpages contain their suggestions and various resources; it is hoped that this project will help to focus the efforts of other Wikipedians interested in the topic. If you would like to help, please
join the project, inquire on the
talk page and see the
to-do list below.
Goals
Standardising the use of citations by making all citations within the same article consistent with each other
If you see a link that shows up as
[1], try to convert it to show up with text (e.g.
Google).
Please note that Wikipedia's
style guideline on
embedded links says, "A
full citation is also required in a References section at the end of the article." If able, please provide this.
If you see a reference to a news article, it is helpful to link to an online-version of this article (typing the title of the article in the search engine is often sufficient).
Tagging articles
If you don't have time to fix citations/references at the moment, you can still help by tagging the article so that others can find and fix them.
Softtest123 (
talk·contribs) 13:56, 30 September 2007 (UTC) I mostly do link rot clean up or cleanup after a bot does link rot clean up (i.e. Missing authors, titles, and dates).reply
Jw21 (
talk·contribs) 01:37, 2 December 2007 (UTC) (I have been adding and checking citations before this WikiProject came into light, and I'd be happy to be affiliated with it.)reply
Superm401 (
talk·contribs) 12:55, 31 December 2007 (UTC) As with Jw21, I've been doing this often, and I'm glad to join up.reply
Sparkygravity (
talk·contribs) I'm interested in working on citation style consistency, and increasing reliable sources 17:44, 31 December 2007 (UTC)reply
UpstateNYer (
talk·contribs) 21:32, 3 December 2008 (UTC) - I also go for random articles and format into {{
cite}}. I'll also hit big-ticket pages and fix their references as well.reply
Speednat (
talk·contribs) 03:24, 21 February 2009 (UTC) I have been doing it already, mainly in birds.reply
Jeffq (
talk·contribs) 18:44, 19 March 2009 (UTC). Most of my non-trivial WP edits of late involve cleaning up, expanding, and formatting citations, including turning bare external links to proper references, usually whenever I read an article for other purposes.reply
Flipper24 (
talk·contribs) 11:37, 29 April 2009 (UTC)There are a number of Australian Schools articles that could use some citations.reply
Reaper_Eternal (
talk·contribs) 02:23, 2 November 2010 (UTC) - I commonly open "Random article", fix any citations, and then walk down the wikilinks looking for more citations to fix.reply
Wtwilson3 (
talk·contribs) I don't have a lot of time to fix references, but have been tagging a lot and decided to join up. And it's good to be #41 on the list, I used to have a cat named 41. —
Bill W. (
Talk) (
Contrib) – 30 April 2024, 00:02 (UTC) 19:24, 6 January 2012 (UTC)reply
Benjamil (
talk·contribs) Tagging, finding sources (I love to google). 22:31, 13 May 2012 (UTC)reply
Faizanalivarya (
talk·contribs) I look at everything, Whatever article need me I would be there as protector of that article, love Wikipedia, love project Peace. -- 18:53, 25 May 2012 (UTC)reply
Azaghal of Belegost (
talk·contribs) (I am interested in unifying citation style with {{
cite}}, particularly on physics articles) 20:32, 15 January 2014 (UTC)reply
Diptanshu.D (
talk·contribs) I have been cleaning up references and using citation templates for
WP:MED for quite some time. Did not know that a separate WikiProject existed for this 17:46, 18 January 2014 (UTC)reply
Tgok (
talk·contribs) I've been doing this informally for a while. Might as well make it official. 21:32, 26 January 2014 (UTC)reply
AlbinoFerret (
talk·contribs) 16:06, 15 November 2014 (UTC) There is no scope to my interests in fixing citations, I have been doing it on my own and was happy to find this Wikiproject.reply
Vivek.bekhabar (
talk·contribs) (Already correcting the wrong citations I see on article. Didn't know that their is a project. Its good to be here.) 07:10, 10 July 2015 (UTC)reply
Geobeedude (
talk·contribs) (I am interested in working on fixing missing "|title=" fields in citations.) 03:24, 5 October 2015 (UTC)reply
Clifford_Anderson (
talk·contribs) (I am interested in assisting librarians, college students, and faculty members with finding references for articles) 00:44, 19 October 2015 (UTC)reply
Warga1 (
talk·contribs) (Interested in the concept of improving Wikipedia's authority by doing citation cleanup work. Excelsior!) 16:44, 21 October 2015 (UTC)reply
James_Shelton32 (
talk·contribs) (Cleaned up some articles on historical trains in the south. Added references, based on notes in
Soil mesofauna) 14:28, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
Prime Lemur (
talk·contribs) Sometimes people misplace citations during copy-editing, others add great material, but sometimes leave spartan citations. Fixing it contributes to the enduring robustness of WP. Or I think so, anyway *wink*. 10:01, 14 December 2018 (UTC)reply
Smuckola (
talk·contribs) Seek and destroy all lack of citations and presence of non-template-formatted citations. Citations are the foundation of the encyclopedia. Please build automated tools to format and unify them all, such as
Citoid,
WP:REFILL, and wikidata.13:47, 24 January 2019 (UTC)
MonkeyStolen234 (
talk·contribs) I have been fighting through several pages to fix citations to the point of going to bed and dreaming of code every night for an entire week. I still love it, though. 17:55, 6 May 2019 (UTC)reply
Diriector_Doc (
talk·contribs) I have been fixing link-only citation already. Thought I might aswell join the club! 21:28, 9 May 2019 (UTC)reply
Ionmars10 (
talk·contribs) 19:32, 9 August 2019 (UTC) - will probably focus on cleaning up bare URLsreply
Quuux (
talk·contribs) 02:53, 13 August 2019 (UTC) -- technical fixes (bare URLs, dead links, book details, etc.)reply
Capewearer (
talk·contribs) verifying citations, moving them to what they actually verifiy, fixing bare URLs and dead links, etc. 04:58, 24 February 2020 (UTC)reply
Chrisma0 (
talk·contribs) I feel like the "Quote" field for references is severely underused on Wikipedia! It's so useful. 15:01, 3 May 2020 (UTC)reply
Hello world 6 (
talk) 00:12, 17 July 2020 (UTC) I have recently started playing
Citation Hunt and feel that I should join this WikiProject to help.reply
Bill Neto (
talk·contribs) 4:41, 6 May 2021 (UTC) Completing as much as possible all existing references I come across.
Swaare (
talk·contribs) 14:37, 22 June 2021 (UTC). Mainly focused on bare URLs and plain text citations and converting them into CS1, on random articles I encounter while on research.reply
Kaltenmeyer (
talk·contribs) 21:31, 9 August 2021 (UTC) Fixing dead urls with current URLs or archived URLs, fixing Wikipedia errors in footnotes, multiple citations with the same ref name; ref names not attached to any reference; duplicate names of authors; fixing bare URLs; moving references to the correct location in the articlereply
TsunTsky (
talk·contribs) 03:12 24 September, 2021 (UTC) Interested in Fixing up citation that are cited in incorrect or not recommedned forms
Apollo468 (
talk·contribs) 02:10 2 October, 2021 (UTC) Mostly focused on adding references for any pages - particularly music.
Charlette9 (
talk·contribs) 20:17, 20 December 2021 (UTC) Fixing and completing existing references as much as I can.reply
SidP (
talk·contribs) 17:12, 5 January 2022 (UTC) Fixing, completing and adding requested (or needed) references; I wish I'd known this group existed before! I've been doing this for so long, and just learned I was not following CITEVAR well. When adding additional data to references, I was often taking the time to use the ref template and was recently corrected (due to a revert which stung).reply
Storchy (
talk·contribs) 14:24, 21 February 2022 (UTC) For now I'm mostly fixing bare urls, and replacing dead links.reply
Sideswipe9th (
talk·contribs) 20:52, 4 June 2022 (UTC) I'm working my way through the bare URL backlog, but if you need an opinion on gender, sexuality, video games, science fiction, fantasy, or Disney feel free to ask.reply
BhamBoi (
talk·contribs) (I had NO IDEA there was a wikiProject for this! I've been doing this independently for a while (check my contribs), so I'm glad to have found a group of like-minded editors.) 03:39, 12 December 2022 (UTC)reply
Demt1298 (
talk·contribs) Bare URLs is something I have been working on 03:16, 13 January 2023 (UTC)reply
Neko-chan (
talk·contribs) 20:58, 5 December 2023 (UTC) I've been working on scientific journal cites for a while now, especially ones with naked DOIs.reply
Hair Peace Salon an article about a Belarusian band has over 300 references and is currently being edited by one particular user who is not aware of
WP:REFBOMB. A relevant cleanup issue was raised at
WP:CLEAN by
Doomsdayer520 (
talk·contribs), I am duplicating it here to raise the awareness about this article. --
Bbarmadillo (
talk) 09:45, 7 April 2019 (UTC)reply
I will assist if this team decides to take action. Note that the article's creator may react unfavorably. ---DOOMSDAYER520 (
Talk|
Contribs) 12:27, 8 April 2019 (UTC)reply
I've rewritten the 2002-06 section and listed the references for them (from 600 words to 250). I'm not comfortable editing the actual page as I'd likely break the references as I kept just nine (but only their URL). Any recommendation for a next step?
ogenstein (
talk) 15:27, 14 May 2019 (UTC)reply
Good grief. This is far and away the worst case of
WP:REFBOMB I've ever seen. I'm not even kidding when I say it might be worth it to just completely undo all of Pr12402's edits to the article. For crying out loud, the article on the
American Civil War has fewer references. TheTechnician27(Talk page) 07:36, 6 June 2019 (UTC)reply
WebCite — tool to archive webpages to allow stable citation links.
Wikipedia template filling (was Diberri template builder) — given an ISBN, a PubMed PMID or PMCID, etc., output a citation which can be pasted into a Wikipedia article. Uses vauthors rather than first, last pairs.
Reference generator — generates wikicode for journals, webpages, and other commonly cited sources.
Citation bot — for finding and fixing citation errors, and adding missing data.
User:CitationTool — finds a different set of errors. Not currently working.
Wikicite — a free program that helps editors to properly reference their Wikipedia contributions using citation templates. It is written in Visual Basic .NET, making it suitable only for users with the .NET Framework installed on Windows, or, for other platforms, the Mono alternative framework.
OttoBib.com — a free tool to generate an alphabetized bibliography for books, using an input list of International Standard Book Number (ISBN) numbers, with output in MLA, APA, Chicago/Turabian, BibTeX, or Wikipedia format (also generates a permalink).
Cite.php — a MediaWiki extension that enables the use of <ref>.
Zotero allows you to find articles in Mozilla Firefox and easily paste them into Wikipedia as citation templates using Ctrl-Alt-C
Smith609's
Google Scholar interface lets you search for articles in Google Scholar and automatically produce an appropriate cite template.
User:Richiez tools to handle citations for a whole article at a time. Converts occurrences of {{pmid XXXX}} or {{isbn XXXX}} to properly formatted footnote or Harvard style references. Written in
Ruby and requires a working installation with basic libraries.
WikiProject Check Wikipedia produces a series of daily reports with checks on various wiki syntax elements. The reports on broken template syntax frequently list {{
citation}} templates.
Automatic Referencing Assistant — The Automatic Referencing Assistant (ARA) is a script which aids users in correcting referencing errors. It notifies the user when the article being edited is missing the {{
Reflist}} template, has invalid or broken <ref></ref> tags, and many other small functions. Clicking a fix link will automatically add the necessary template or information to the correct location in the article.
WikiBlame - To find first entry of incorrect formating with broken reference names.