wikicfp.com logo
wikicfp.com

search-cfp-deadlines

Installation

Adds this website's skill for your agents

 

Summary

Search WikiCFP by topic or keyword to return matching calls-for-papers with their submission deadlines, event dates, locations, and canonical WikiCFP URLs; optionally drill into an event for its full deadline breakdown and external site.

FIG. 01
FIG. 02
FIG. 03
SKILL.md
179 lines

Search WikiCFP for CFP Deadlines and URLs

Purpose

Given a research topic or keyword, this skill returns the matching Calls-for-Papers (CFPs) listed on WikiCFP — each with its event acronym, full name, canonical WikiCFP event URL, event dates ("When"), location ("Where"), and submission deadline. It can also drill into a single event to return the full deadline breakdown (abstract registration, submission, notification, camera-ready) plus the external conference website. This is a read-only lookup. The optimal path is a plain HTTP GET against WikiCFP's server-rendered listing pages — no browser, no JavaScript, and no login are required.

When to Use

  • "What are the upcoming CFP deadlines for machine learning / NLP / robotics / <topic>?"
  • "Find conferences about <topic> and their paper submission deadlines."
  • "Give me the WikiCFP page and deadline for <conference acronym>."
  • "List calls-for-papers closing soon in <field>, with links."
  • Building a deadline tracker / digest that needs the event URL + submission date for many conferences.

Workflow

WikiCFP has no JSON/REST API, but every listing page is fully server-rendered HTML that a proxied HTTP GET retrieves in one shot. Prefer fetch+parse over driving a browser — it is faster, cheaper, and returns the exact same data (verified: a browser run and a raw fetch produced byte-identical results).

1. Choose the right listing endpoint

  • Topic / category listing (recommended default) — results ordered by deadline (soonest first):

    http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/call?conference=<topic>&page=<N>

    <topic> may contain spaces or %20 (e.g. machine%20learning). Pagination via &page=1..last.

  • Keyword search — matches both categories and CFPs, and lets you scope by year:

    http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/servlet/tool.search?q=<query>&year=<t|n|f|a>

    year: t = current year (2026), n = next year (2027), f = current-year-and-later (2026+), a = all years. This page renders a "Matched Categories" block (links back into call?conference=) followed by a "Matched Call For Papers" results table.

2. Fetch the HTML (residential proxy)

browse cloud fetch "http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/call?conference=machine%20learning" --proxies

Returns { "statusCode": 200, "content": "<html>…" }. The server is Apache/Tomcat and occasionally returns a transient 500 (especially the bare homepage) — just retry once.

3. Parse the results table

The results live in a <table> where each CFP spans two <tr> rows (rows alternate bgcolor="#f6f6f6" / #e6e6e6):

  • Row 1: <a href="/cfp/servlet/event.showcfp?eventid=NNNNN&copyownerid=MMM">ACRONYM</a> (event link + acronym) and, in a colspan="3" cell, the full event name. A trailing <img src="/cfp/images/new.gif"> marks newly-posted CFPs — strip it.
  • Row 2: three cells — When (date range, or N/A for journals/rolling CFPs), Where (location, or N/A), Deadline (submission date).

Build the canonical event URL by keeping only eventid: http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/servlet/event.showcfp?eventid=NNNNN (drop copyownerid). All hrefs are site-relative — prefix with http://www.wikicfp.com.

Total count and page count come from the footer: Total of 6412 CFPs in 321 pages, with first | previous | Page N | next | last links carrying the &page= param.

4. (Optional) Drill into one event for full deadlines

browse cloud fetch "http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/servlet/event.showcfp?eventid=190474" --proxies

The detail page exposes machine-readable RDFa microdata — each deadline is <span property="v:startDate" content="2026-02-08T00:00:00">Feb 8, 2026</span> under labelled rows (Abstract Registration Due, Submission Deadline, Notification Due, Final Version Due). Prefer the ISO content attribute over the display text. The external conference site is in a Link: row (<a href="https://kdd2026.kdd.org/" target="_newtab">).

Browser fallback

Only needed if fetch is blocked (not observed on this site). Drives identically:

browse open "http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/call?conference=machine%20learning" --remote
browse wait timeout 1500 --remote
browse snapshot --remote      # accessibility tree; the same two-row-per-CFP table
browse get markdown body --remote

Stop at the listing/detail screen — never click "Add to My List", Register, or Login.

Site-Specific Gotchas

  • No official API. Fetch+parse of the HTML listing is the shortcut; do not waste time hunting for a JSON endpoint — there isn't one. RDFa on the detail page (property="v:startDate") is the closest thing to structured data.
  • Homepage probe is unreliable, content endpoints are fine. The pre-run probe of https://wikicfp.com/ timed out; that's the slow Tomcat homepage, not anti-bot. The /cfp/call, /cfp/servlet/tool.search, and /cfp/servlet/event.showcfp endpoints all return clean 200s. No anti-bot, no captcha, no Akamai/Cloudflare observed across fetches and two browser iterations.
  • Use www.wikicfp.com. Both wikicfp.com and www.wikicfp.com serve, but detail-page share/RDFa URLs are emitted with the www host — normalize to it for consistency.
  • Two rows per CFP. Parsing row-by-row without pairing them will split each conference's name from its dates. Pair on the alternating bgcolor or the rowspan="2" on the acronym/checkbox cells.
  • N/A When/Where is normal. Journals and rolling/standing CFPs (e.g. IJSPTM, IJCNC) show N/A for When and Where but still carry a Deadline. Don't treat this as an error.
  • call?conference= is deadline-ordered; tool.search is relevance-ordered. For "closing soon" use call?conference=. For scoping to a specific year use tool.search with the year param (t/n/f/a).
  • Deadlines get extended. The listing always shows the current deadline; a value in the past (e.g. today's date) usually means the CFP is closing today or was recently extended.
  • Transient 500s. Apache-Coyote occasionally 500s under load — retry once before declaring failure.
  • Legacy HTML. Pages are HTML 4.01 / XHTML with deeply nested <table>s and almost no semantic classes on data cells — parse by table structure, not CSS selectors. Strip the new.gif image and stray whitespace/&nbsp; from acronym cells.
  • Robots meta. Topic pages are INDEX,NOFOLLOW; the tool.search page is NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW. This is read-only public data; respect rate limits and keep request volume modest when paginating (321 pages for a broad topic).

Expected Output

Search / listing result:

{
  "success": true,
  "query": "machine learning",
  "endpoint": "http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/call?conference=machine%20learning",
  "total_results": 6412,
  "total_pages": 321,
  "page": 1,
  "results": [
    {
      "acronym": "CSMLA 2026",
      "name": "IEEE 2026 International Conference on Computer Science, Machine Learning and Intelligent Agents-EI/Scopus",
      "url": "http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/servlet/event.showcfp?eventid=189830",
      "when": "Aug 7, 2026 - Aug 9, 2026",
      "where": "Qujing, China",
      "deadline": "Jul 24, 2026"
    },
    {
      "acronym": "IJSPTM 2026",
      "name": "International Journal of Security, Privacy and Trust Management",
      "url": "http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/servlet/event.showcfp?eventid=195010",
      "when": "N/A",
      "where": "N/A",
      "deadline": "Jul 25, 2026"
    }
  ],
  "error_reasoning": null
}

Single-event detail (from event.showcfp?eventid=):

{
  "success": true,
  "acronym": "KDD 2026",
  "name": "32nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining",
  "url": "http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/servlet/event.showcfp?eventid=190474",
  "external_link": "https://kdd2026.kdd.org/",
  "when": "Aug 9, 2026 - Aug 13, 2026",
  "where": "Jeju, Korea",
  "deadlines": {
    "abstract_registration_due": "2026-02-01",
    "submission_deadline": "2026-02-08",
    "notification_due": "2026-05-16",
    "final_version_due": null
  },
  "categories": ["data mining", "machine learning", "knowledge discovery"],
  "error_reasoning": null
}

No matches:

{
  "success": true,
  "query": "asdfqwerty",
  "total_results": 0,
  "results": [],
  "error_reasoning": null
}

Failure (e.g. repeated 5xx / network block):

{
  "success": false,
  "query": "machine learning",
  "results": [],
  "error_reasoning": "WikiCFP returned HTTP 500 on 3 consecutive fetches of /cfp/call?conference=machine%20learning"
}