WMF Citoid
GoodBotVerifiedBOTA stateless Node.js service used by Wikipedia to automatically fetch and format citation metadata from external URLs, ISBNs, and other identifiers. Operated by Wikimedia Foundation.
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.
Identification
Citoid/WMFWhy 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
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: /
Ensure your robots.txt allows Citoid/WMF. Verify requests by checking the user-agent string.
Traffic & trends
No Cloudflare traffic data available.
Loading trend data…
Links & references
Data sources
This profile is compiled from the following sources.