A tool which pops up asking for a URL, author and date would be a rich source of bad references. We should rather be looking at ways to get references to books and journal articles. Web references should be the exception rather than the rule, because the vast majority of websites are not WP:RS.
How about a wizard-like tool which asks "did you read this in a book, in a newspaper, a journal article or on the web?" and if the answer is "on the web" asks the user how they know it's true. Compare for example Commons's image uploader. Users who care about references should be taught how to extract good refs from Google Books and Google Scholar - both quite easy to use. If you paste the ISBN of a book into Citation Expander, it fills in the whole citation for you, and the same for pubmed IDs. Now we just need a tool which will do this for major newspapers on the web. -- David Richfield e^(πi)+1=0 _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
