I use Zotero and all the references in the article are in my Zotero library. I could easily put them all in a Zotero collection so that exporting the whole batch to Bibtex or Wikimedia, or other formats Zotero supports is easy. Bibtex or BibLaTex would be nice since these automatically create the short REF-Name. The whole list can also be exported as Wikimedia citations, but that does not create the <ref><\ref> container, so there is no automatically generated short REF-Name.

Is there a way to put the whole BibTex list at the end of my wikimedia source file and then reference those in the article text? Is that what you are suggesting?

It does seem like if the source was set up that way, converting it to a LaTex or docx format would go better.

I'm also thinking the HTML that I grab from my browser, looking at the wikipedia page, would also be cleaner and perhaps the HTML would convert to LaTex or docx better.

If you have never used Zotero, you might check it out. It is an absolutely fabulous tool. Great grabber and great database.

Thanks again.

On Friday, May 29, 2020 at 10:53:19 AM UTC-4, Joseph wrote:

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!