User talk:Teratornis/Mechanical turk
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Comments welcome edit
I invite comments on the ideas in User:Teratornis/Mechanical turk. Be as honestly brutal as you like, especially if someone has already done this somewhere and I haven't figured that out yet. --Teratornis (talk) 22:09, 15 June 2008 (UTC)
Existing software edit
Have you come across AutoWikiBrowser, the semi-automated wiki browser?
This is an editing tool that automates some common mistakes, but requires manual input to confirm the corrections.
I'm sure the developers would be very open to suggestions of new features, and making citation formatting consistent would be fantastic. Also useful would be addressing pages which use the harvard style, but do not link the citations in the text to the footnotes.
I've no first hand experience of the AWB myself, but I suspect that it will at the very least provide a framework into which your ideas can be incorporated.
Wider functionality edit
Also, looking through the list of functions you suggest, you could maybe be even more ambitious still with the bot.
I mainly edit articles with a scientific bent, and find no end with plain-text references. It shouldn't be too difficult for a bot to interpret these – I've seen a tool at Citeulike that can extract information from most citation formats, and with Wikipedia's consistent fashion of generating bold/italic text, it should be relatively simple to identify the parts of the reference and change it to use {{cite journal}}. It would also be possible to find Harvard-style references (Example 2002) and check the references section for a corresponding reference, allowing the two to be equated through use of a ref tag or another citation template.
As I think about your proposed implementation I feel it's quite nice, and no software download or authorisation would be required (as per the AWB). Perhaps an entirely web-based approach would be the way forwards. Do you have any programming experience? It would be quite a large project for me to write myself, especially as I've been hoping to get involved with other things, but it could be quite fun, and would certainly benefit the Wiki!