Re: Getting Citations in Wikipedia page to convert over to HTML, Docx, LaTeX.

[Joseph Reagle <joseph.2011-T1oY19WcHSwdnm+yROfE0A@public.gmane.org>]

Hello John, as someone who authors a lot of citation-heavy content in markdown and Wikitext, I know it'd be nice if there was an easy way to convert between the two. 

However, on Wikipedia, citations are templates (appearing between '{{' and '}}'). Any specific template is not actually part of Wikitex, it is instead a dynamic and arbitrarily customizable extension. Pandoc, obviously, doesn't support that. I suppose someone could write a filter to do some of the work, but they'd need to decide which template to support: {{cite}}, {{citation}}, {{sfn}}, ... . And then when it comes to the bibliography, there's <references/>, {{reflist}}, ... And then deal with all of the paramaters, converting their semantics, and bugs.

Wikitext, and especially templates, is a god-awful mess; it's often not even well-formed. I tried running a citation bot on your article and it found many errors, which would make conversion difficult. (Feel feel to revert that edit.)

  https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:JohnM7190/John%27s_Noise_Figure_Page&action=history

If you do actually want to do a proper semantic conversion of your citations, I think the thing to do would be:

1. Convert your article into List-defined style, so that each citation is a short reference (<REF NAME=FOO/>) to a longer one (<REF NAME=FOO>{{citation ...}}</REF>) at the bottom of your page.

	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:List-defined_references

This is how latex and pandoc-markdown structures things.

2. You'll then need to turn your references (in the prose) and citations (at the bottom) into the appropriate pandoc/YAML -- you could use bibtex for the latter. Some regexs might get you part of the way, but given the sloppiness in the citations, it would be a very manual process. For some of them, perhaps you could use a DOI or ISSN to get bibtex formatted citations from an API, which you could use with pandoc.

There are tools that can output Wikipedia citations given a well-formed and defined input (bibtex or YAML), but I'm not aware of anything that goes the other way.

Good luck!


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