Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia technical issues and templates

The following discussions are requested to have community-wide attention:

Should bots like Citation bot be allowed to remove redundant 'raw' PubMed URLs, and raw OCLC URLs when pmid/oclc identifiers are present.

Details

Following the last, extremely frustrating discussion about the behaviour of bots wrt to links, the consensus that 'emerged' from it was that Citation both was to leave urls alone, unless it was replacing them with a free alternative (e.g. |url=https://paywall.com → |doi=10.1234/654321 + |doi-access=free or |url=https://paywall.com → |url=https://freetoread.com).

However, there are two corner case I would like to establish consensus for the removal of a link.

Links to PubMed, e.g. |url=https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/123456, which can be given through the standard parameter |pmid=123456.
Links to OCLC, e.g. |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/123456, which can be given through the standard parameter |oclc=123456.

The reason is that those links will never contain free versions of articles, they will link to either the PubMed database, which only contain abstracts (free versions would be hosted at PubMed Central instead), or the OCLC database, which formerly held google book previews (then deemed useful), but no longer does.

This means that these urls make it look like a free version is accessible, when really none are, making readers click through links that lead them to nowhere useful. Note that this isn't a proposal to removal any URL covered by an identifier (e.g. |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/123456 → |jstor=123456) that may or may not be free, only these two, known to never host free versions.

Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 09:25, 17 February 2025 (UTC)

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