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WMF Citoid

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Citoid is a Wikimedia service in VisualEditor that generates citations from URLs, DOIs, and ISBNs, relying on the Zotero Translation Server (see wikimedia-zotero) for accurate metadata, processed on demand from website visitors. Operated by Wikimedia Foundation.

GoodBot
Assessment
Page Preview
Category
BOT
Kind
1
Data sources
AI-generated summary, drawn from Cloudflare, operator docs, and community data

What is WMF Citoid?

WMF Citoid is a specialized service operated by the Wikimedia Foundation that powers the 'Automatic' citation feature found in the Wikipedia VisualEditor and other MediaWiki interfaces. It functions as a middleware that receives a URL or identifier from a user, queries a local Zotero server to parse the page's metadata, and returns a structured JSON object. This allows Wikipedia editors to generate properly formatted references without manually entering bibliographic details.

Helpful — This bot facilitates the creation of accurate, verifiable citations on Wikipedia by automating the retrieval of bibliographic data.

Identification

Bot name
WMF Citoid
Operator
Wikimedia Foundation
Category
Page Preview
Kind
BOT
Verification
Verified bot
Cloudflare slug
wikimedia-citoid
User-agent patterns
Citoid/WMF
User-agent string
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/110.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Citoid/WMF (mailto:[email protected])
Main use cases
Automated citation generationMetadata extraction for Wikipedia referencesBibliographic data normalization
Rated Sep 23, 2026 from public evidence

How we rated this bot

Verified by Cloudflare, which confirms who runs it, with no widespread reports of abuse.

Names itself honestly
Yes
Verified by Cloudflare
Yes
Says it follows robots.txt and opt-outs
Not stated
Ignores site rules
None found
Disguises itself or evades blocks
None found
Overloads sites
None found
How widely people complain
No complaint about this bot in the evidence
Reddit discussion
There is no Reddit discussion of this bot in the evidence

What we read

Why it crawls your site

Citoid crawls specific web pages only when a Wikipedia editor triggers a request to generate a citation for that URL. It does not perform broad, unsolicited indexing of the web; instead, it acts as a targeted tool to extract title, author, publication date, and other metadata to ensure citations are accurate and consistent. The bot identifies itself via a User-Agent string containing a contact email ([email protected]) to allow site administrators to reach out if the service causes unexpected load.

Block or allow WMF Citoid

Block it

Add a Disallow rule for Citoid/WMF in your robots.txt file. You can also block at the server level using your web server configuration or CDN firewall rules to filter requests matching the user-agent string.

# Block WMF Citoid from crawling your entire site
User-agent: Citoid/WMF
Disallow: /

# Allow WMF Citoid full access
User-agent: Citoid/WMF
Allow: /
Allow & verify

Ensure your robots.txt allows Citoid/WMF. Verify requests by checking the user-agent string.

Traffic & trends

Cloudflare Radar traffic

No Cloudflare traffic data available.

Google Trends interest

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Related bots

Other crawlers operated by Wikimedia Foundation.

WM
WMF Zotero Translation Server
Page Preview
›

Links & references

Wikimedia Foundation documentation
wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Citoid
↗
Cloudflare Radar: WMF Citoid
radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/bots/wikimedia-citoid
↗

Data sources

This profile is compiled from the following sources.

CloudflareRadar
Last updated October 26, 2026

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