WMFCitoid is a bot in the link preview bots category, operated by Wikimedia Foundation.
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.
Link preview bots fetch a page when someone shares its URL in a chat app or social network, to build the preview card. Blocking them breaks your link previews, so keep them allowed but leave them out of analytics and ad requests.
WMFCitoid identifies itself with this 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:[email protected])Anyone can copy a user agent string. Transfon Security also checks where each request comes from, so a request that claims to be a known crawler but comes from the wrong network is treated as a fake, not as the real crawler.
We have not confirmed whether WMFCitoid follows robots.txt. Add a rule, then check your logs to see that it stopped. robots.txt is a plain text file at the root of your domain, such as https://example.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: Citoid Disallow: /
User-agent: Citoid Disallow: /private/ Disallow: /search
User-agent: Citoid Allow: /blog/ Disallow: /
User-agent: Citoid Allow: / User-agent: * Disallow: /
User-agent: Citoid group, WMFCitoid ignores your User-agent: * rules, so repeat any that should still apply.Citoid from WMFCitoid's user agent; check Wikimedia Foundation's own documentation if it publishes a different robots.txt name.Treat robots.txt as a statement of your policy, and enforce it where requests arrive.
WMFCitoid fetches pages when your links are shared or syndicated. Keep it allowed so previews and feeds work, but leave it out of page views and ad requests.
Transfon Security for publishersWhen ads or posts are shared, WMFCitoid fetches the landing page. Those hits are not clicks, so keep them out of campaign reports.
Transfon Security for advertisersProduct links shared in chats and feeds are fetched by WMFCitoid. Keep it allowed so previews show the right image and price.
Transfon Security for e-commerceAllow WMFCitoid on public pages so shared links preview well, and keep it off the app.
Transfon Security for SaaS and APIsrobots.txt is a request, not an enforcement. Transfon Security shows WMFCitoid by name in the Top Bots report, so you can see how often it visits and which pages it reads. Block or allow it with a User Agent rule, or slow it down with a rate limit decision rule.
Transfon Security
WMFCitoid is a bot in the link preview bots category, operated by Wikimedia Foundation. 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.
We have not confirmed whether WMFCitoid follows robots.txt. Add a robots.txt rule, then check your logs to see that it stopped, and block it by user agent if it did not.
Add "User-agent: Citoid" followed by "Disallow: /" to the robots.txt file at the root of your site. To enforce it, block requests whose user agent contains "Citoid/WMF" at your WAF. In Transfon Security that is one User Agent block rule.
No. robots.txt is voluntary, so WMFCitoid may not follow it, and anyone can send WMFCitoid's user agent, so a fake WMFCitoid ignores your rule. Enforce the rule where requests arrive, at your WAF, and check the source network.
Link preview bots fetch a page when someone shares its URL in a chat app or social network, to build the preview card. Blocking them breaks your link previews, so keep them allowed but leave them out of analytics and ad requests.
Transfon Security identifies every bot in this directory in your traffic reports, flags fake search crawlers, and lets you allow, block or rate limit each bot.
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