The Web2Cit user script integrates Web2Cit into Wikipedia's visual editor. Web2Cit is a tool to collaboratively define procedures to automatically extract citation metadata from web sources.

Open your common.js file (or meta:Special:MyPage/global.js, to install across Wikimedia projects), add this at the end and save your changes:

// Web2Cit
mw.loader.load( '//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Diegodlh/Web2Cit/script.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript' ); // Backlink: [[:en:User:Diegodlh/Web2Cit/script.js]]

You may need to bypass your browser's cache for the changes to take effect.

Alternatively, follow the instructions in Wikipedia:User_scripts#How_do_you_install_user_scripts?.

The user script will add a "Web2Cit" checkbox to the dialog that opens when you click on the Visual Editor's "Cite" button.

If the checkbox is enabled, automatic citation generation will be handled by the Web2Cit translation server, which will return two citation results:

1. The citation returned by Citoid, at the top; and
2. The citation returned by Web2Cit, at the bottom.

A "Powered by Web2Cit" legend will appear on the bottom-right corner of the Web2Cit citation. Click on "Web2Cit" to see more details and edit the results.

Note that only queries that look like URLs (i.e., starting with http://, https:// or following the pattern www.something.somethingelse...) will be handled this way. Other queries will be handled directly by Citoid as usual.

If one or more Web2Cit-generated citations are inserted in an article, a #Web2Cit hashtag will be included in the edit summary draft before publishing. Edits tagged with this hashtag may be tracked using Hashtags tool here.

We also track a few actions, such as citation generation, insertion, and Web2Cit config edit attempts. These can be monitored on Grafana here.

Full details on these tracking implementations can be read at phab:T321568.

Please open a task in Phabricator, or post a message on this page's Talk page.

By default, Web2Cit user script uses the production instance of Web2Cit server at https://web2cit.toolforge.org/. If you want to use an alternative instance (e.g., the test instance at https://w2c-beta.toolforge.org/), add the following setting to your common.js file:

window.web2citServer = "https://w2c-beta.toolforge.org/"

Briefly, the user script applies three monkey patches:

It monitors all $.ajax requests and modifies those matching the following criteria (all other requests are left untouched):

• The target path begins with /api/rest_v1/data/citation/mediawiki/; i.e., a Citoid request
• The search parameter of the Citoid request is a URL (starts with http://, https:// or follows the pattern www.something.somethingelse....

These requests are routed to the Web2Cit translation server instead: https://web2cit.toolforge.org/translate?citoid=true&format=mediawiki&url=....

By using the citoid parameter, the Web2Cit translation server returns both a raw Citoid citation and a Web2Cit citation. This avoids having to make two separate Citoid requests: one for the Citoid citation, and another one for any Citoid selection steps in the Web2Cit translation procedures.

This patch adds "Web2Cit" to the credits legend, including a link to the translation result details.

This adds the "Web2Cit" checkbox to the "Cite" dialog, to enable and disable Web2Cit translation (i.e., to patch or unpatch $.ajax and CitoidInspector's patchBuildTemplateResults).

This setting is persisted by being saved to the browser's local storage web2cit.disabled item.

The code is hosted on Wikimedia GitLab at https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/diegodlh/w2c-gadget. It is manually copied to User:Diegodlh/Web2Cit/script.js, from where it is served as a user script.^{[Note 1]}

To load your local version of the user script while working on it, you can serve it from a local web server as explained in Wikipedia:User scripts/Guide#Loading it from a localhost web server.

For debugging, you can use your browser's development tools. Because the script modifies the visual editor behavior, you may find it useful reloading the page with ?debug=true to get the non-compacted version of it.