Visual Editor > Cite Automatic is creating cite journal for URLs
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	Kerry_Raymond
	Sep 9 2022, 6:02 AM

Description

Steps to replicate the issue (include links if applicable):

I am editing [[:en:Southport, Queensland]] using Visual Editor and I want to add this URL as a citation

http://digitalbank.goldcoast.qld.gov.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/vital:27316 (an online photo archive)

Cite > Automatic > paste in my URL > Generate

What happens?:

creates a {{cite journal}} instead of {{cite web}}

The Visual Editor user has no way to modify the resultant citation as the citation type is not able to be changed in VE (previously reported problem).

What should have happened instead?:

When given a URL as input, I would have expected {{cite web}} to be the default citation type unless there was a positive match to the URLs for known journals. I cannot see anything in the source of the page that suggests it is a journal.

Obviously I am accustomed to Cite > Automatic URL not producing a perfect result for that URL given the vagaries of the information at that webpage, but I haven't seen it confuse a webpage for a journal article before.

Software version (skip for WMF-hosted wikis like Wikipedia):

Other information (browser name/version, screenshots, etc.):

Related Objects

Mentioned Here: T132308: Internationalise citoid dates
T309706: Support partial ISO dates in Web2Cit date transformation

Event Timeline

Kerry_Raymond created this task.Sep 9 2022, 6:02 AM

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald TranscriptSep 9 2022, 6:02 AM

Maintenance_bot added a project: VisualEditor.Sep 9 2022, 6:29 AM

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Esanders added a subscriber: Mvolz.

I can confirm this is recognized as journalArticle by Zotero "COinS" translator.

The Coins translator uses Zotero's parseContextObject which interprets the rft_val_fmt=info%3aofi%2ffmt%3akev%3amtx%3ajournal (rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:book) in the title attribute of the page's span.Z3988 element as journalArticle. It should have been rtf_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dc to be interpreted as webpage (which would have resulted in Citoid returning a Cite web template instead).

I've fixed it (partially) on Web2Cit. Remember you can insert Web2Cit-generated citations either installing the Web2Cit user script, or prepending https://web2cit.toolforge.org/ to the URL you are trying to cite via Citoid. Note that:

It's returning webpage as requested, but I wonder whether it should return artwork instead (given that the item refers to a photograph). This would become a Citation template in the English Wikipedia.
It's returning nothing for author (which I think is the expected behavior, given that the source says "Creator: Unidentified"). Citoid returns "7.1, Vital Repository".
The date is specified as "1900-1909". However, Web2Cit has been designed to only support returning dates in one of yyyy, yyyy-mm, or yyyy-mm-dd formats. Worked around as 1900 (actually, 1900-01-01 because of T309706). I wonder whether Web2Cit should be changed to support additional date formats (T132308 is probably relevant here).
Returning "publishedIn" (publicationTitle) and language as well. Citoid isn't returning anything for these.

I've tried it with a couple other webpages from the same website, and it seems to be working OK.

In the long term, I guess that the library's webmasters should be contacted to have the COinS meta tags corrected.

Realistically, we can't do anything about bad metadata on websites upstream, other than the workaround @diegodlh has mentioned, so closing this!

Visual Editor > Cite Automatic is creating cite journal for URLsClosed, DeclinedPublicBUG REPORTActions

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Visual Editor > Cite Automatic is creating cite journal for URLs
Closed, DeclinedPublicBUG REPORT
Actions