Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Unwarranted variation in citation output from tools

Suppose that someone uses a tool to generate a citation. None of the available tools for Wikipedians purport to follow a traditional citation style. Perhaps this is because Wikipedia citations tend to contain hyperlinks, the doi, and the PMID, which are valuable for an Internet-native publication but have less meaning for a traditional publication.

Because of the need to vary from traditional, people who made tools had them create citations as best they can. When they made tools, there was no standard target or expected output stylistically. For this reason, every tool has variation in the citation that it generates.

This is a small problem. It should be addressed by the Wikipedia community coming to consensus on a single tool citation as a best practice, and then notifying people who develop tools that this one citation example has consensus and community approval. The alternative is that existing tools and all subsequent tool development will have variation for no good reason. This variation causes problems, has no benefit, and is completely unintentional. The tools below obviously are derived from each other and intended to give consistent output to the reader. There is no stylistic choice or conscious decision for citation variation in presenting these, as they are all non-traditional and were designed by the coders and not intended to be traditional.

Variation in output for readers

 * WP:RefToolbar, which is the only tool embedded into Wikipedia natively


 * Template:cite PMID


 * Citation template generator - (link lost to this - it was something popular)


 * Wikipedia template filling, also called Diberri's tool


 * DOI Wikipedia reference generator

For all of them except the last one I gave the PMID, and in the last one I shared a DOI. They should all have identical output but do not. These are not different because of WP:CITEVAR or anyone's conscious choice to make them different. The developers intended for all of these to give identical output, and I hope that someday someone synchronizes them. None of these are a standard citation format which exists outside of Wikipedia. For reference, here is how the paper gives its own citation
 * Widmer M, Gülmezoglu AM, Mignini L, Roganti A. Duration of treatment for asymptomatic bacteriuria during pregnancy. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2011, Issue 12. Art. No.: CD000491. DOI: 10.1002/14651858.CD000491.pub2.

Like it or not, there are a variety of citation styles that are currently in use in Wikipedia and WP:CITEVAR states the current citation style should be maintained unless there is consensus to change. Hence it is natural that different tools produce different output to support these different citation styles. Only Diberri's tool produces Vancouver style authors. The citations produced by the other tools can also produce this style if a vanc parameter is added to the citation templates. Also two of the examples you gave above were not generated from the current version of these tools. WP:RefToolbar no longer uses the deprecated coauthor parameter and Wikipedia template filling now generates vcite2 journal instead of cite journal templates. Boghog (talk) 04:16, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Variation in output for editors
Of the popular tools, the cite PMID and cite doi templates do something strange for edits. They list fields vertically with line breaks rather than in one line. Most Wikipedia editors do not like that. However, this only comes up if someone substitutes those templates into a Wikipedia article, which rarely happens as citation templates are almost always transcluded.
 * The cite pmid and cite doi templates have been deprecated and should no longer be used. I have run a script over many WP:MED articles to substitute these templates. The script however converts vertical to horizontal alignment. Boghog (talk) 04:26, 8 April 2015 (UTC)