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Directory/Categories/Other/WMF Zotero Translation Server
WM

WMF Zotero Translation Server

GoodBotVerifiedBOT

A specialized Node.js service operated by the Wikimedia Foundation that extracts bibliographic metadata from web pages to support the Citoid citation tool. Operated by Wikimedia Foundation.

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

What is WMF Zotero Translation Server?

The WMF Zotero Translation Server is a backend service maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation that functions as a core dependency for the Citoid service. It is designed to interpret and extract structured bibliographic data from URLs, DOIs, and ISBNs, allowing Wikipedia editors to quickly generate accurate citations. By running as a specialized translation layer, it bridges the gap between raw web content and the standardized citation formats required by MediaWiki.

Helpful — This bot is a critical component of the Wikimedia infrastructure, enabling users to automatically generate citations for Wikipedia articles by parsing metadata from external websites.

Identification

Bot name
WMF Zotero Translation Server
Operator
Wikimedia Foundation
Category
Other
Kind
BOT
Verification
Verified bot
Cloudflare slug
wikimedia-zotero
User-agent patterns
ZoteroTranslationServer/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 ZoteroTranslationServer/WMF (mailto:[email protected])
Main use cases
Bibliographic metadata extractionCitation generation supportWeb page parsing for Citoid

Why it crawls your site

This bot crawls specific web pages when a user requests a citation for a URL on a Wikimedia project. It fetches the page content to identify and extract metadata (such as author, publication date, and title) using Zotero's translation library. The operator can be verified via the contact email provided in the User-Agent string ([email protected]) and the official Wikimedia Wikitech documentation.

Block or allow WMF Zotero Translation Server

Block it

Add a Disallow rule for ZoteroTranslationServer/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 Zotero Translation Server from crawling your entire site
User-agent: ZoteroTranslationServer/WMF
Disallow: /

# Allow WMF Zotero Translation Server full access
User-agent: ZoteroTranslationServer/WMF
Allow: /
Allow & verify

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

Traffic & trends

Cloudflare Radar traffic

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Related bots

Other crawlers operated by Wikimedia Foundation.

WM
WMF Citoid
Other
›

Links & references

Wikimedia Foundation documentation
wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Zotero
↗
Cloudflare Radar: WMF Zotero Translation Server
radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/bots/wikimedia-zotero
↗

Data sources

This profile is compiled from the following sources.

CloudflareRadar
Last updated July 26, 2026