What is WMF Citoid?
Direct Answer: WMF Citoid is a Wikimedia Foundation service that generates citations from URLs, DOIs, and ISBNs.
Citoid is a Wikimedia service in VisualEditor that generates citations from URLs, DOIs, and ISBNs, relying on the Zotero Translation Server for accurate metadata, processed on demand from website visitors. It uses a specific user-agent string to identify itself.
User-Agent Identification
The following user-agent strings identify WMF Citoid in your live traffic data:
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:noc@wikimedia.org)
robots.txt Rules for WMF Citoid
Respects robots.txt: No
Robots.txt has limited effect on user-initiated bots
WMF Citoid is triggered by user actions within Wikimedia Foundation's products. While Wikimedia Foundation states it respects robots.txt, the bot operates differently from autonomous crawlers — it fetches specific URLs on demand rather than systematically spidering your site. Server-log monitoring is the only reliable way to verify what actually happens.
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Crawl Behavior
Frequency:On-Demand
Request Pattern:Requests Are Triggered By User Actions In VisualEditor
Official Documentation Quotes
"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."
Crawl Activity Index
Relative crawl activity for WMF Citoid over the past 28 days. Higher values indicate increased crawling intensity compared to the period baseline.
View recent activity data (last 7 days)
| Date | Activity Index |
|---|---|
| Mar 26, 2026 | 88.0 |
| Mar 27, 2026 | 82.7 |
| Mar 28, 2026 | 83.1 |
| Mar 29, 2026 | 81.8 |
| Mar 30, 2026 | 87.3 |
| Mar 31, 2026 | 90.2 |
| Apr 1, 2026 | 88.8 |
Source: Cloudflare Radar
Why track WMF Citoid traffic?
Identify and classify unknown crawler activity. WMF Citoid may appear in your live traffic data with varying frequency. Tracking its behavior helps you decide whether to allow, throttle, or block it based on actual data.
Protect your crawl budget. Every bot request consumes server resources. Understanding what WMF Citoid crawls helps you prioritize the crawlers that matter.
Log Verification
To verify WMF Citoid traffic in your live traffic data:
- Search access logs for the user-agent strings listed above
- Check if the IP addresses match documented ranges (if provided by Wikimedia Foundation)
- Verify the crawl pattern matches documented behavior
- Use reverse DNS lookup for additional verification if available
Note: Observed behavior in production environments may differ from official documentation. Live traffic monitoring provides the only reliable verification of actual bot behavior.
Undocumented Information
The following information is not officially documented for WMF Citoid:
- crawl frequency details
- IP verification method
Official Documentation
View Official WMF Citoid Documentation →
Information sourced from official documentation. Content generated with AI assistance.