Wikipedia Source Debug Tool

A validation tool for Wikipedia sources.

The Wikipedia Source Debug Tool provides information about the Wikipedia citation data for a specific source. Information is gathered via Zotero translators and integrated into Wikipedia via Citoid. Sources are a key part of Wikipedia's integrity and reliability, so it's valuable to get this right.

This was a project from WikiConference North America 2019. Thanks to Andrew Lih for the idea!

Setup

This is a single page app built with svelte.

Get started

Install the dependencies:

cd source-debug
npm install

Then start Rollup:

npm run dev

How does it work?

The tool is built on the APIs that power Citoid:

It fetches citation data from the getCitation query in Wikimedia's REST API. This service uses Zotero translators to parse the source and identify the right template on Wikipedia.

Then, the tool fetches the template's information from the templatedata query in the Wikipedia API.

TODOs & ideas

• Provide a simple score for a source's coverage (what does an A+ source look like?)
• Include all supported languages
• Put fields in more logical order (title first?)
• Show metadata available from Citoid that isn't included in the template
• Generate a citation, for illustration purposes? (there's no convenient API for this, unfortunately)