Citoid

What is Citoid?

About

Citoid is Wikimedia's citation generation service that fetches metadata from URLs, DOIs, and ISBNs to automatically create formatted citations in Wikipedia and other wikis, using Zotero's translation server for accurate bibliographic data. You can see how often Citoid visits your website by setting up Dark Visitors agent analytics.

Expected Behavior

Fetchers visit websites on-demand. They're normally dispatched by apps to present metadata about a link (e.g. the title and thumbnail image) to a user.

Type

Fetcher
Fetches web content on behalf of an app

Detail

Operated By Wikimedia
Last Updated 5 hours ago

Insights

Top Website Robots.txts

0%
0% of top websites are blocking Citoid
Learn How →

Country of Origin

United States
Citoid normally visits from the United States

Global Traffic

See All Global Bot & LLM Insights →

The percentage of all internet traffic coming from Fetchers

Get These Insights for Your Website
Use the WordPress plugin, Node.js package, or API to get started in seconds.
Set Up Agent Analytics

Robots.txt

Should I Block Citoid?

Probably not. If you block a fetcher, it won't be able to fetch the metadata it needs to display a link preview. Fewer people will click on the link to your website without this.

How Do I Block Citoid?

⚠️ Manual Robots.txt Edits Are Not Scalable
New agents are created every day. Instead, serve a continuously updating robots.txt that blocks new agents automatically.
Set Up Automatic Robots.txt

You can block Citoid or limit its access by setting user agent token rules in your website's robots.txt. Set up Dark Visitors agent analytics to check whether it's actually following them.

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 Citoid/WMF (mailto:noc@wikimedia.org) 
# robots.txt
# This should block Citoid

User-agent: Citoid
Disallow: /

References