Help:Citation tools

"Wikipedia:Ref tools" redirects here. For referencing toolbar that is part of the default Wikipedia editor, see Wikipedia:RefToolbar.

The following tools can help you assemble a citation from limited information, with limited effort. These are tools with a variety of interfaces that provide a complete formatted reference based on a few initial details.

Leveraging existing Wikipedia content

When one wishes to such an item—it would most likely be a book—which already has a thorough Wikipedia page, it is tempting to suspect that such a powerful and convenient tool must already be near to hand. Unfortunately, "cite this page" in the "tool" bar appears to generate citations for the current Wikipedia page only as a Wikipedia page, and not transparently to the underlying object.

Possibly, most or all of the URL tools listed below will also have this limitation when supplied with a Wikipedia URL to a page describing the specific resource one wishes to cite.

Possibly, at some future date, the "Wikidata item" tool will have the smarts to include an item containing preformatted Wikipedia citation template syntax to the underlying object for articles already containing suitable metadata.

Another way this could work is where such a Wikipedia page is already linked from a populated citation template elsewhere in Wikipedia article space, and that could quickly cribbed if it were possible (and obvious) how to follow the chain backwards. (Guess what? It is possible, though not obvious. If you click on an ISBN number in a book article sidebar, it takes you to the "Book sources" auto-generated page, and down near the bottom there's a "Find on Wikipedia" section with a helpful link to do just that. But it doesn't take you directly to the citation syntax. You still have to spelunk manually for that. Using text search to find the ISBN string in the page source will probably work most of the time, or even all of the time, depending on whether alternate ISBN syntaxes are permitted or not.)

Tools

See also: Wikipedia:Citing sources § Programming tools

Not working

Templates

Citation tools

Reference markup and citation templates may be inserted manually or by use of tools:

  • RefToolbar is part of the editing tool bar
  • User:Zhaofeng Li/reFill
  • ProveIt provides a graphical interface for editing, adding, and citing references. It may be enabled per the documentation
  • Citation expander automatically adds missing data to citations using citation templates, and makes corrections to their formatting
  • SnipManager adds a ribbon interface to add citations
  • wikEd

User scripts

Beta and obsolete

Beta

Obsolete:

Deprecated

The following bot-filled templates are deprecated.

Documentation

These templates can be used in documentation:

Typing aids

Navboxes

Documentation

Replication