Wikibooks seems to hold a lot of relevant information.

Type could be either of these:

• @online
• @electronic
• @www

Relevant fields include:

• organization
• location
• url
• urldate
• version
• date, year
• month
• translator, origlanguage
• origdate, origlocation, origpublisher
• origtitle, reprinttitle, indextitle

Let me state some points, before going into detail. BibTeX was invented in the 1980s, where Internet was just starting up and WWW wasn't even invented. Strictly speaking, BibTeX is relies, that its input is 7 Bit wide. That means, it can't work with any kind of input outside the ASCII set, ie. Umlauts as äöüß, and so on. There is an 8-bit-BibTeX and modern TeX-Systems silently use this BibTeX, but you must not rely on that assumption.

BibLaTeX was recently "invented", to overcome the limitations of BibTeX. It is capable of 8-bit input and offers a broad range of newly designed literature types like Webpages, and so on. The BibLaTeX types offer also a wider range of allowed bibliographical details (AKA fields), to be stored in the entries. As a successor of BibTeX, BibLaTeX superseeds it. It can do anything, BibTeX could do but it can do much more.

Nowadays, you should use BibLaTeX and there is no reason not to do so, other than having to update your TeX-System, which ought to be no big deal.

Having said that, I will from now on concentrate on the newer BibLaTeX.

As far as I know, there are no massive differences in those two types "@Online" and "@WWW". When it comes to format those database entries into the bibliography list. One could consider these two types synonym? I think, one of these two types will be a wonderful choice.

To decide, which fields should be inserted to this types, let's have a look, what Wikipedia offers on the block labeled "Bibliographic details for "Unicode" Citing the "Unicode" page. (I was wondering about the BibTeX export offered in the german Wikipedia for its (german) Unicode page.)

First there is the field "Page Name". This is similar to the BibTeX and BibLaTeX field "title". Next, as you can see in the BibTeX and suggested BibLaTeX export examples above, the term "--- Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia" is added to each title field. I am sure, most users will agree, that this dull repetition is not part of the title itself.

To me, it makes more sense, to put this in the fields "publisher" or even better "organization".

In the Bibliographic details block, the term "Wikipedia, the free ..." is listed in the field publisher. So, shouldn't it also be in this field, when exported to BibTeX and BibLaTeX? Incidently, the german Wikipedia translated that field with "Herausgeber". By using the BibLaTeX field "editor" in a german document, its content will be labeled with "Hrsg", which is the abbreviation for "Herausgeber". I think, that fits a 100 %.

In the Bibliographc details block, there are no single authors listed, as most of them work collaborative team. Hence, I suggest, to not use the BibTeX field "author" but instead the field "editor". It should be filled with "Wikipedia" (note the short form, as the long form "Wikipedia, the free ..." is already listed elsewhere!).

The next field in the Bibliographic Block is the field "Date of last revision". There is the similar BibLaTeX field "version", which would fit so well for this purpose.

The Bibliographic Details offers the actual date and time, when the "Cite ..." page was visited by the user. This should be stored in the BibLaTeX field "urldate". The date should be sufficient, it should be presented in ISO format, which is e.g. 2019-12-09.

BibTeX offers the even more important fields "date", as well as the combination of "year" and "month". These should reflect the release date, hence the date of the last editing of that title. As Wikipedia is highly dynamic, the "date" field is the only one, which should used in this case.

Next, Wikipedia offers a permalink in its Bibliographic details box. Einar.io proposed, that the link to the actual page should be presented as well. I vote against that, as Wikipedia might sometimes be to dynamic. When someone cites the Wikipedia, she can only give a reference to the exact version, he saw at the moment, he visited the page. Any later version isn't visible to him. Therefore, the BibLaTeX field "url" should contain, what it actually contains today: the permalink. (If you want to give a link to the actual page, you could insert it into the "note" field?) As discussed above, the "urldate" field is the correct field, to store the actual visiting date. It will be formatted nicely by BibLaTeX. The output will be automatically translated into the documents default language, so there is no need for Wikipedia to give a static "[Online; accessed 8-December-2019]"entry in the notes field.

Speaking of the "[Online; accessed 8-December-2019]" entry in the "notes" field. Having banned the visiting time already, I suggest to move the "Online" into the BibLaTeX field "keywords", which could be than used to sort and filter the bibliographic database by keywords.

I already suggestd in the german Wikipedia, to offer this export (slightly translated):

@Online{wikipedia:unicode,
  editor =  {Wikipedia},
  publisher = {Wikipedia{,} The Free Encyclopedia},
  title = {Unicode},
  date = {2019-12-05},
  version = {2019-12-05, 16:44 UTC},
  url = {https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Unicode&oldid=194661212},
  urldate = {2019-12-07},
  langid = {german},
  keywords = {Online)
}

I would appreciate a lot, if this would the default for citing Wikipedia pages.

Thank you in Advance.

I do agree, especially I'd want the urldate, no ugly note etc.

Hi again,

i'd love to bring this topic back to your attention, as it is nearly half a year without any noticeable action.

The wikipedia BibTeX-export is still fault, at least for german articles. In plain BibTeX the title exported will be downcased by BibTeX. One of the articels in the news of today, is aexported as follows:

@misc{ wiki:xxx,
  author = "Wikipedia",
  title = "Internationaler Tag gegen Homo-, Bi-, Inter- und Transphobie --- Wikipedia{,} Die freie Enzyklopädie",
  year = "2019",
  url = "https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Internationaler_Tag_gegen_Homo-,_Bi-,_Inter-_und_Transphobie&oldid=192212181",
  note = "[Online; Stand 17. Mai 2020]"
}

If you rund this with an small LaTeX-File and cite it via BibTeX using the plain bibliography style like this:

\documentclass[11pt,twoside,final]{scrartcl}

\usepackage[main=ngerman]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\bibliographystyle{plain}

\begin{document}
\cite{wiki:ithbit}

\bibliography{test}

\end{document}

You get

Literatur
[1] Wikipedia. Internationaler tag gegen homo-, bi-, inter- und transphobie — wikipedia, die freie enzyklopädie, 2019. [Online; Stand 17. Mai 2020].

With all words in the title except the first being turned in lowercase, which is not correct in german language.

The solution to this would be to enclose the uppercase letters in the title in curly braces, or to enclose the complete title in a doubled pair of curly braces:

@misc{ wiki:ithbit,
  title =	 "{I}nternationaler {T}ag gegen {H}omo-, {B}i-, {I}nter- und
                  {T}ransphobie --- {W}ikipedia{,} {D}ie freie {E}nzyklopädie",
 ...
}

or

@misc{ wiki:ithbit,
  title =	 "{Internationaler Tag gegen Homo-, Bi-, Inter- und
                  Transphobie --- Wikipedia{,} Die freie Enzyklopädie",

If you use BibLaTeX and biber instead of good old BibTeX, you get the desired result:

Literatur
[1] Wikipedia. Internationaler Tag gegen Homo-, Bi-, Inter- und Transphobie — Wi- kipedia, Die freie Enzyklopädie. [Online; Stand 17. Mai 2020]. 2019. url: https: //de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Internationaler_Tag_gegen_Homo- ,_Bi-,_Inter-_und_Transphobie&oldid=192212181.

I there for beg you: please change the export. Please: change it, to enhance the complete functionality of the up-to-date BibLaTeX. Please!

Anybody who wants to see this fixed please feel very welcome to git clone mediawiki/extensions/CiteThisPage and provide a patch. Thank in advance!

I will have a look.

Good morning,

I cloned the named git but was not able to find anything helpful, as these classes relay on other classes, which are not present in the CiteThisPage module. Can anybody give some more precise hints?