User:CitationTool

The Citation Tool is a semi-bot for finding citation errors and fixing them.

About
This page contains discussion of the Citation Tool semi-bot. Watch for announcements of development progress. A related project is the experimental /Hybrid referencing footnote style.

Version 1.0 is now live! It appears to be both functional and useful; for example, I identified errors in the  markup for Race and intelligenceΔ and Jean LaplancheΔ (two articles I happen to have worked on that use ).

To learn more about the use of Python for tasks such as this, see Text Processing in Python.

Bugs
Please list known problems here, if in pithy summary. For longer discussion of bugs (or misfeatures), use the talk page.


 * 1) Sometimes, but not according to any pattern that seems obvious, updating a page with the "Update using this WikiText" button inaccurately reports an edit conflict.  In such cases, you may still copy-and-paste the proposed text into the Wikipedia edit window.

Mixed-style example
I believe that a mixture of annotational footnotes and citational references is often desirable for articles. A toy example of this style is at: Wikipedia talk:Footnotes/Mixed citations and footnotes. An example "in the wild" of something similar is at Jello Biafra. Please consider whether such a mixed-style would be useful for articles you actively edit. Over time, this tool will aid more in creating this style.

Caveats
This tool is intended to aid editors in automated page editing. The decision to use a particular reference style within an article is a matter for the consensus of article editors. Do not modify citation/footnote styles in an article simply because a tool exists that makes the process easier; only do so because editors agree that a particular style is desirable.

Pages known to use m:Cite.php
These might be worth keeping an eye on for errors that creep in with editing.