I created a bookmarklet for automatic creation of citations. With a single click you can generate a reference or an external link from an online newspaper article.
The bookmarklet needs extra code added for every website in order to "learn" that particular website, and the code must be updated every time (very rarely) a website changes the way it's storing those key elements (title, author, date) in their HTML pages.
That implies a little work but it's so much worth it!
I am using it very much (on Romanian Wikipedia), and it's saving me lots and lots of time.
If more people find it useful, then we can grow together the script to make it capable to handle the most well known websites. Those who would like to try it can find the script here: User:Ark25/RefScript.
Such a bookmarklet is the best solution for creating citations because:
- you don't depend on an external server, which might work or not
- you don't depend on a browser addon, which might work or not
- it works in Firefox and Google Chrome, and maybe it can be made to work in Internet Explorer (I don't have much time to test that though)
- it's super-fast
This is how the script works:
Say you have a link like this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23814524
After visiting the link, you click the bookmarklet.
The script can generate a reference using the {{cite web}} template:
<ref name="BBC_2013-09-19c">{{cite web |url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23814524 |title=Sea otter return boosts ailing seagrass in California |newspaper=BBC |date= 26 August 2013 |last=Suzi Gage |accessdate=2013-09-19}}</ref>
or it can generate a plain reference like this:
<ref name="BBC_2013-09-19r">[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23814524 Sea otter return boosts ailing seagrass in California], 26 August 2013, Suzi Gage, ''BBC'', retrieved at 2013-09-19</ref>
Or it can generate an external link, looking like this:
* [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23814524 Sea otter return boosts ailing seagrass in California], 26 August 2013, Suzi Gage, ''BBC''
The output will be like this:
[1]
[2]
References:
External link:
In order to change the output of the script, you just have to change the last variable, from "sc" to "sr" or to "s".
For the moment, the script can only handle a few sites (BBC, Daily Mail, Huffington Post, Ars Technica, TG Daily), but the good part is that everyone can teach the script how to handle a new website.
If for example you are using a lot The New York Times for citations, you can teach the script how to find the key elements (title, author, date) into that newspaper's online articles and then you can save a lot of time by creating citations with a single click. I am not using often English newspapers for the citations I create, but I developed the script to handle about 30-40 most important Romanian newspapers and that's helping me a lot.
If you can't manage to add code to the script, then ask me to add code for the newspaper you need, and I will try to do it, depending on how much free time I have.
— Ark25 (talk) 02:06, 17 September 2013 (UTC)
Done ---— Gadget850 (Ed) talk 14:16, 21 February 2012 (UTC)
