WikiCite 2016/Proposals/OABot: Associating repository versions with paywalled citations

Proposal

Background

Wikipedia links to hundreds of thousands of paywalled sources. Our community does not prohibit or even discourage citing paywalled sources, but at the same time there is absolutely no prohibition on surfacing OA versions right alongside those citations. Indeed, a good citation will have as much information as possible to let the reader find it in the way that is easiest for them.

Aim

Create a bot that can add links to available free versions alongside citations to paywalled resources (e.g. ScienceDirect -> PubMed Central; Nature -> University Repository; Physical Letters -> ArXiv)

Demo

You are very welcome to contribute to the code (for instance by pull requests on GitHub) and join the development team on wmflabs - make sure you request access to the Tools project before the event because it can take some time to be accepted.

Roadmap

Here are some points we need to discuss:

How should OA sources be identified in citations? See a relevant discussion here. Should we add a field for secondary versions?
What kind of links should the bot add? (Look at concrete examples, see what the bot currently does, and fix it incrementally.) You can do this by checking what the bot would do on various pages using the web interface.
What repositories should the bot cover or pull from?
- CORE - http://core.ac.uk/
- BASE - https://base-search-net/
- DOAI - http://doai.io
- CiteSeerX - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu
How to submit a Request for Bot Approval?

Skills needed

Familiarity with citations in Wikipedia (no tech skills needed, your input as a reader or editor will be much appreciated!)

Phabricator task

if you have a Phabricator task ID, you can link it here

Participants