Web2Cit/Workshops

Web2Cit: collaborative automatic citations for web sources

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Did you give a Web2Cit workshop? You may add it here! Most recent workshops first.

Wikimania 2023 presentation

On August 16, 2023 a Web2Cit presentation took place at Wikimania 2023, in Singapore.

Session description and slides are available here.

Recording is available here (YouTube).

August 23 workshop

Recording of the workshop held at one of LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group call

On August 23, 2022 an English workshop was held at one of LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group calls.

Slides used during the presentation are available here.

Notes are available on a Google Docs document here.

July 2 workshop

On July 2, 2022, a Spanish hybrid workshop (online + in person) was co-organized with Wikimedia Colombia.

Event's flyer available on Twitter, here.

Notes available on Etherpad, here.

June 14 workshop

Recording of the workshop held at the Wikiherramientas cycle

On June 14, 2022 a Spanish workshop was held as part of Wikimedia Argentina's and Wikimedistas de Uruguay's Wikiherramientas cycle.

May 20 workshop

Slides used during the workshop at Wikimedia Hackathon 2022.

On May 20, 2022 an English workshop was held as part of Wikimedia Hackathon. Unfortunately, the workshop could not be recorded for privacy reasons.

The Phabricator task that had to be created for the session can be found here.

May 11 workshop

On May 11, 2022, 4 PM UTC, we will be holding a workshop that will explain step by step the Early adopters guide. This will allow you to explore Web2Cit, a tool designed to improve the capabilities of Wikipedia's automatic generator for references. This is a workshop for early adopters, so if you don't feel comfortable with some technical complex tasks, we recommend for you to wait Web2Cit visual editor.

If you can't attend but you are interested in knowing more, we will also be giving a workshop on the Wikimedia Hackathon on May 20, 2022.

Link to register:

Register here

Requirements

• You don't need programming experience, but some familiarity with JSON files and XPath expressions may be useful.
• Bring a source or reference that constantly fails for you on Wikipedia, so you can work on something you are interested in.
• English proficiency is not required to participate, but you need to be able to listen and follow a workshop in English.

Agenda

• Why Web2Cit? What's Citoid, Wikipedia's automatic generator for references, why it fails and what you can do about it.
• Brief general overview of what's Web2Cit.
• Walk through: what are the steps to change a link that is not working using Web2Cit.
• Hands-on workshop. Here we will generate translation templates from the sources that participants are interested in, or from the problematic URLs.

Resources

• We will we tracking progress during the workshop on a (Google) spreadsheet here.

Additional resources

• Check our introduction to how Web2Cit works and how to use it.
• The Early Adopters guide uses some Xpath. Andrew Lih has put together a spreadsheet with Xpath examples.
• Most of the information that will be shared in the workshop will be a summary of information that has already been shared. You can find that information on all these videos.

Workshop summary

Recording available on YouTube.

• Around 12 people participated.
• We first gave an introduction of how Web2Cit works and the Web2Cit ecosystem.
• We then explained how to use Web2Cit. We started with the audience following along, but then we had to switch to just demonstrating, because we were running out of time.
• Created at least:
  • 2 translation tests for 2 separate domains (main storage)
  • 2 translation templates for 2 separate domains (main and sandbox storage)
• Lessons learned:
  • The introduction of how Web2Cit works and the Web2Cit ecosystem may be useless for newcomers to Web2Cit, who may be working with just one template per domain. We may simply point them to our pre-recorded videos instead.
  • Having the audience follow along takes a lot of time. For upcoming workshops where time may be limited, we may consider having someone share their screen, and have the instructor guide them.
  • It may be useful to reinforce that people should bring a problematic web source, and that they should have a Wikimedia account (to save configurations to their sandbox). Nonetheless, having some non-working URLs prepared may be recommended.
  • Even though using a test-driven approach to writing templates (i.e., write the test first and then the template) would be ideal, we may consider skipping tests (or leaving them for the end, if time permits), particularly in short workshops.