Zotero can be a powerful tool for Wikipedia users, be they casual visitors or regular contributors. By incorporating print-based references, Wikipedia users are able lend greater credibility to their articles and provide readers with a broader reference base, forging new relationships between online and offline resources. Wikipedia employs its own format for bibliographic citations, known as Wikipedia Citation Templates. Because the Wikipedia Citation Templates for books and articles embed COinS tags in each bibliographic entry (see, for example, the raw code of the Wikipedia article for "Amphibian"), Zotero can import references from articles that employ them. In addition, a Wikipedia Citation Templates export format in Zotero allows for the exporting of references to Wikipedia. This read/write relationship promises to allow better circulation of information through different scholarly communication networks.

Zotero's Quick Copy feature makes it trivial to export Zotero items to Wikipedia. The configuration panel for Quick Copy is found by clicking the gear icon in the Zotero toolbar, choosing Preferences, then selecting the Export tab. If Wikipedia Citation Templates is set as the default output format, you can copy properly formatted templates for selected items to the clipboard by using the keyboard shortcut set in the Shortcut Keys preference pane or by dragging and dropping items directly into a text area on Wikipedia.

While Wikipedia Citation Templates may be a valuable output format, for most users it will likely not make sense as the default. This is where site-specific settings come in. Zotero can adjust its citation format on the fly to match whatever site is being visited. Click the “+” button in the Quick Copy section of the Export preference pane, specify wikipedia.org as the domain, and select Wikipedia Citation Templates as the output format. From then on, when you are browsing Wikipedia in Firefox, Zotero will use generate Wikipedia Citation Templates automatically when you use the Quick Copy shortcut key or drag-and-drop.