WMF Citoid

Citoid handles the automatic citation lookup in Wikimedia's VisualEditor. An editor supplies a URL, DOI, ISBN, or another identifier, and the stateless service returns structured citation information. Requests to an external website occur on demand as part of that lookup, not as a continuous crawl of the web.

For URL lookups, Citoid retrieves source information with help from Wikimedia's local Zotero service. Wikimedia notes that the service is not a headless browser, so it cannot interpret metadata loaded only through JavaScript. If a source blocks the fetch or keeps its metadata in client-side code, citation fields can be incomplete or missing.

Successful extraction can save an editor from typing bibliographic fields such as the title and publication date. The editor still decides whether to use and save the reference, so a Citoid visit does not itself mean that a citation was published. The service has no documented search-index or model-training role.

Cloudflare's bot directory records an outbound identity ending in Citoid/WMF (mailto:[email protected]), and the stable token in this entry is Citoid. Robots behavior is unknown in the bot metadata, while Cloudflare's bot directory marks it as not following robots.txt. The entry has no signature directory or verified IP identity, so the header alone cannot authenticate Wikimedia.