Hmm, there's actually a cite button in the 2010 wikitext editor, as described in
Wikipedia:RefToolbar (h/t
Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library/Citoid). Moreover, starting with a DOI, this can autofill the other fields - contrary to the current version of
Help:Citation tools#Templates, which states "Allows you to format a reference during editing when you already have all the data".
Wikipedia:RefToolbar#Related scripts mentions "
toollabs:reftoolbar/lookup.php Provides the autofill capability used to auto-complete forms based on ISBN, DOI, and PMID values." But this is too hard for newbies to navigate - I'll try out RefToolbar some more, and if it works as promised, I'll edit the Citation Tools help page to mention autofill. It's taken me two years to figure this out, it would be nice if our help doco was more user-friendly...
Modifying [[Special:Diff/1110712185|1110712185]] by [[Special:Contributions/Preimage|Preimage]] ([[User talk:Preimage|talk]]): message
Reverted good faith edits by [[Special:Contributions/Preimage|Preimage]] ([[User talk:Preimage|talk]]): message
message - reverted error from [[Special:Diff/1110735118|05:50, 17 September 2022]] - edited previous wording [[Special:Diff/1110724250|04:36, 17 September 2022]] for clarity
Page history tools
I've noticed page histories tend to get cluttered with minor edits. Has anyone made a keyframe viewer for edit histories? This would identify stable versions of the page that remained unchanged (apart from small edits) for an extended period of time.
Manually tagging stable page versions might also work. Is this supported by
MediaWiki?
Another approach would be to develop a Git-style blame tool for Wikipedia. The standard edit history "blame" tool links
Wikiblame and
Blame - XTools are certainly useful, allowing text strings to be traced back to their corresponding "keyframe" edits, but don't support Git-style blame, where the aim is to understand the provenance of each part of the page.
Given the name of an en.wikipedia.org article, this returns its source code colored by editor, with each piece of text linking back to the edit responsible for it. This is closer to what we'd like, but doesn't handle vandalism very well. For example, 42% of
Nitrous oxide is attributed back to vandalism reversions by
User:ClueBot_NG, whereas
https://xtools.wmflabs.org/authorship/en.wikipedia.org/Nitrous%20oxide (powered by Wikiwho) skips over vandalism and anti-vandalism edits, instead identifying the most prolific author as
User:Jorge_Stolfi at 6.7%.
Recommends Who Wrote That?, a browser extension providing a Wikiwho-powered overlay for Wikipedia articles (
https://github.com/wikimedia/WhoWroteThat,
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WWT). Unfortunately, as of Oct 2022, both versions (Chrome and Firefox) error out for me on every page, even on short pages with small edit histories like
Perstraction. The WWT Kanban board
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/who-wrote-that has a high-priority bug report
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T318746 that's been open for the past week, which notes "the extension is currently unusable for many/all people", albeit (possibly) only on "articles which haven't yet been indexed by wikiwho". Hopefully this will be fixed soon...
And in fact, as of May 2023, WWT is a fantastic resource, and seems to work properly on the vast majority of pages (it stops working 20% of the way through
negative binomial distribution, but that's a very long article). It would be nice if it worked on Wikipedia meta-pages (
MOS:MATH,
Template:Math). Extending it to wikis for other languages was one of the
top-voted proposals in the
2023 Community Wishlist Survey, and is
currently being worked on, but wiki meta-pages aren't covered by the current work.