T362379 outlines an issue that is preventing people from being able to generate citations for sources from several major U.S. news websites.

This task involves the work of revising the error message people seein these cases so they are not left wondering what is preventing them from doing what they're attempting to do.

Note: we are still identifying solutions that could restore the functionality T362379 is leaving people without.

Open questions

• 1. What are the range ways Citoid can fail?
  1. JavaScript loaded pages: metadata cannot be retrieved because JS is used to load the metadata and Zotero (which Citoid uses underneath) cannot interpret JS.
  2. Wrong media type (.pdf, .mov): Zotero cannot parse the content and identify the metadata.
  3. GDPR Pages: There is a human-oriented interface to accept cookies which Zotero cannot navigate.
  4. Paywalls with no metadata: Citoid is not able to access the metadata someone is requesting because the page is hosted behind a paywall
  5. IP Blocked: the publisher/entity hosting the content for which someone is seeking metadata has blocked the IP address from which Citoid is making a request
• 2. What – if any – information does the Citoid API currently offer about why a request is failing?

Requirements

Failure state	Current copy	Desired copy	Status
Publisher is blocking Citoid API request	We couldn't make a citation for you. You can create one manually by using the "Manual" tab above.:	TBD
Unsupported media type (.pdf, .mov)
TBD see "Open questions" above...

• I think we need to strike a balance between a message that A) causes people to become clear about the error to the extent that they do not invest additional effort trying something that will not resolve the issue and B) does not harm the publishers themselves