User:Diegodlh/VisualCitoidTranslatorEditor

Note: This idea became a proposal to develop Web2Cit, a tool to help non-technical users create and edit Citoid web translators. Discussion will continue there.

A visual editor for Zotero/Citoid translators?

This sub-page is to discuss about an idea raised by User:Strainu on the Shared Citations proposal discussion page. You can read the conversation leading to the idea in that discussion page. The summary is as follows:

User:Scann and I think it might be worth it developing one such tool [a visual Citoid translator editor] and promoting it among the Wikipedia and Zotero communities.

To sum up, Citoid uses Zotero's translators to fetch citation metadata for a URL provided. Websites which expose metadata appropriately are understood by generic translators. This is often not the case and site-specific translators are needed. However, most of them seem to be for English sources (see here, or here). Although contributions to the Zotero's translators repository are open, they require some technical skills.

The idea, then, would be to develop a web browser extension, a visual scrapper editor, that would enable non-technical users create and edit web translators, define test cases, and post them to Zotero's translator repo (and Wikimedia's fork). This would benefit both Wikimedia and Zotero communities, by widening the coverage and diversity of websites supported by Zotero translators and Citoid.

We would like to apply for these software/research grants, due on March 16th, 2021. Before writing the actual proposal, we would appreciate your comments and feedback in the discussion page. Thanks!