Background:
Somewhere in the year 2019 a website development company titled "Kitsoft" have developed new redesigned and modernized websites for most of the government institutions of Ukraine. They are not actually different websites, it is just one template copied over and over. All levels of government in Ukraine now use websites developed by the Kitsoft: from mayors office of a small village to the Cabinet of Ministers.
Summary of the problem:
The problem is that the tool for automatic generating of references, present in the visual editor, adds "Kitsoft" as an author, i.e. it adds a parameter "|last=Kitsoft" to the {{Cite web}} template, when the actual author is not "Kitsoft", but the government institution, to which the website belongs.
Originally reported by user @Fed4ev of the ukwiki. ( his talk page )
Example of the problem:
https://uk.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3524809&oldid=27875869
On this page, which was created by a new user in the visual editor, we can see such a reference:
<ref>{{Cite web|title=Бразилія - Політичні відносини|url=https://brazil.mfa.gov.ua/posolstvo/3135-diplomacy|website=brazil.mfa.gov.ua|accessdate=2020-05-05|language=ua|last=Kitsoft}}</ref>There we see "|last=Kitsoft", when the actual author is the Embassy of Ukraine to Brazil. Here we can guess that the author of this Wikipedia article used the tool for automatic generating of references in the visual editor, and did not check the result or did not know how to change it.
Another example: https://uk.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4148545&oldid=31188834
Steps to reproduce:
- Go to any page in Ukrainian Wikipedia, for example, to Wikipedia:Sandbox and start editing it in the visual editor:
- Click on the button "Cite" and choose "Automatic" option:
- Insert a link to any page from any of Kitsoft-developed websites, for example this page from the website of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, and press "Generate":
- Get an autogenerated reference with "Kitsoft" given as an author:
Solution options:
I see two possible solutions of this issue:
- (Preferred) Figure out what exactly on those websites misleads the tool into thinking that "Kitsoft" is an author, and request the company to fix it. It may take a long time for them to react, if they do at all, but it would be silly not to try this.
- (Fallback) Make a patch to the MediaWiki engine itself, for it to treat this case separately.
All the references mentioning this company, that were already added to the Ukrainian Wikipedia, I will remove using my bot. What I request here is that the tool for automatic generating of references stopped adding "Kitsoft" as an author.