This page has archives. Sections older than 90000 days may be auto-archived by ClueBot III if there are more than 4.
Note that the bot's maintainer and assistants (Thing 1 and Thing 2), can go weeks without logging in to Wikipedia. The code is open source and interested parties are invited to assist with the operation and extension of the bot.
Before reporting a bug, please note: Addition of DUPLICATE_xxx= to citation templates by this bot is a feature. When there are two identical parameters in a citation template, the bot renames one to DUPLICATE_xxx=. The bot is pointing out the problem with the template. The solution is to choose one of the two parameters and remove the other one, or to convert it to an appropriate parameter. A 503 error means that the bot is overloaded and you should try again later – wait at least 15 minutes and then complain here.
When encountering a {{cite journal}} or {{citation}} with |journal=bioRxiv or |journal=bioRxiv: The Preprint Server for Biology [case insensitive], the bot should convert the citation to a proper {{cite bioRxiv}}, i.e.
{{cite journal |last1=Larivière |first1=Vincent |last2=Kiermer |first2=Véronique |last3=MacCallum |first3=Catriona J. |last4=McNutt |first4=Marcia |last5=Patterson |first5=Mark |last6=Pulverer |first6=Bernd |last7=Swaminathan |first7=Sowmya |last8=Taylor |first8=Stuart |last9=Curry |first9=Stephen |date=2016-07-05 |title=A simple proposal for the publication of journal citation distributions |journal=bioRxiv |page=062109 |url=http://biorxiv.org/lookup/doi/10.1101/062109 |language=en |doi=10.1101/062109 |hdl=1866/23301 |s2cid=64293941 |hdl-access=free}}
Wolf, Luise; Silander, Olin K.; Van Nimwegen, Erik J. (2014). "Expression noise facilitates the evolution of gene regulation". bioRxiv10.1101/007237. says "Now published in eLife doi: 10.7554/eLife.05856"
When working multiple articles at once, such as via the web interface on a category or linked page, include the category name or linked page one the final output report.
Changing every citation of a publisher's webpage to Cite book
I have remained silent on this issue even though it has irritated me for a while now. And now that there is discussion above about the widespread useless cosmetic edits this bot continues to waste everyone's time with, I'll raise it: Why must every citation of a publisher's webpage be changed to to Cite book? I can only speak for myself, but every time I cite such book webpages I am not citing the book itself. I am specifically referencing the information published on the webpage. So of course I do not want the citation to be changed to Cite book with a bunch of parameters of the book itself (ISBN, date, etc) added. So I inevitably stop the bot or replace the reference with a third-party source. I realise the defense will be "It doesn't hurt" or that some users are actually citing the book. And I realise this is not the most pressing issue, but why must the bot come to its own conclusion of the editor's intent? I see another user complained of this issue last year. Οἶδα (talk) 22:25, 27 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
This may be the kind of situation where it's safest to explicitly tell citation bot not to muck with the citation. It's hard to automatically judge whether the human editor actually wanted "cite web" or "cite book". (There are many examples of people using "cite web" to cite resources that should actually be books, journal articles, etc.) –jacobolus(t)01:38, 28 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I understand. But it still feels like an another unnecessary task for this bot to insert itself into every article it can possibly find. For example, this edit is completely useless and actually corrupts my intention of the citation. Call me crazy but I don't want or need a bot telling me what I am citing (and actively altering my citations accordingly). Οἶδα (talk) 21:32, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
When I've quoted publisher blurbs in the past, I usually set |type=publisher's blurb for clarity. In the specific case you've linked just above, another option would be not to cite the publisher's landing page at all, and add the book to a "Selected works" subsection or something. Indeed, the altered citation is sequential to another one, and so seems a bit superfluous. Or, alternatively, use "Citation bot bypass" somewhere in your citation as suggested by jacobolus above.Given the overall lazy referencing culture of less experienced editors, it's likely that in the majority of cases, people who drop a link to a publisher landing page are probably trying to cite the book itself, so this behaviour of assuming that's the case is net beneficial. Folly Mox (talk) 22:13, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I cannot personally maintain that the majority of users citing a publisher's webpage are lazily intending to cite the book itself. My experience suggests otherwise which is why I have taken issue, but I realise my editing purview might be skewed. However, if that is observably true then I will resign to accepting this as a forgivable externality. Οἶδα (talk) 06:35, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
In fairness to your point, I haven't looked into the data about how frequently this sort of change is appropriate; it could be the case that my own perspective is the skewed one. Folly Mox (talk) 08:32, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I couldn't find a list of tasks that the bot has been approved for (other than the very first approval) nor a thorough description of all of its mystical activities. I was surprised to find it would change "Cite web" to "Cite book" (for unclear reasons). The only cure, if the bot is unchanged, seems to be the <!-- Citation bot bypass--> mechanism documented at User:Citation_bot#Stopping_the_bot_from_editing - R. S. Shaw (talk) 04:12, 6 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Bot replaces cite web with cite book, it removes the URL completely
What should happen
Nothing, the ref cited a Library Journal review that's listed on the Amazon site for the book, now it cites just the book, there's no link to click to see the review.
Identical to § Changing every citation of a publisher's webpage to Cite book above. While the choice of formatting may be questioned (can't the Library Journal review be located somewhere less objectionable than Amazon?) the behaviour here is the same underlying misfeature of altering any webpage citation where a book's bibliographic information is presented, as if the citation was meant to be to content of the book rather than e.g. a publisher's blurb or library listing. I think there are more discussions of this in the talkpage archives here; I used to favour this feature, but I'm no longer so sure it's a net positive. Folly Mox (talk) 11:36, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I asked this in the discussion of an earlier bug but it was archived without providing an answer. Can you please explain
How is it not a violation of WP:CITEVAR for Citation bot to convert manually-formatted references into templates, as it is doing e.g. at Special:Diff/1216926071? A human might do this but a bot automatically doing it is completely something else, especially in cases such as here where it does not even improve the consistency of formatting (the article is still a mix of CS1, CS2, and manually-formatted references).
For those of us who might deliberately format references manually because we don't want bots messing with our citations, or we made a deliberate decision that the citation templates were inadequate for some specific citation, do we now have to start explicitly locking the bots out of articles altogether?
Where is this included in the BAG-approved tasks for this bot?
I find the bot's edit summary "Changed bare reference" to be significantly misleading. This is not a bare-url reference. It is a well-formatted reference that happens to be manually formatted. Where is there any guideline or policy suggesting that such references are a problem that needs to be fixed?
I mix manually formatted citations and template-formatted citations on pages all the time, deliberately. I would be extremely annoyed if a bot took it upon itself to change that deliberate decision. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:17, 2 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Changing an incorrect cite journal to cite book [1]: Good (although would have been better as cite conference).
Creating a new CS1 error where there was none before, because it left the paper title in the book title parameter and did not change the journal parameter to a book title parameter: doubleplusungood.
It's not creating error, it's flagging errors that were already there, but not reported. |journal=FM 2014: Formal Methods was wrong before. That the bot didn't manage to fix it doesn't make it a new error. Now the error is reported. This is an improvement, even though ideally the bot would be able to figure out and fix the error itself. Headbomb {t · c · p · b}23:11, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
INCORRECT. It is creating an error, because formerly readers could see the paper title, see the book title (called a journal, but still formatted in italics the way readers would expect a book title to look), and see that it was a paper in a book with that title. After the edit, readers were presented only with the paper title, formatted as a book title, falsely telling them both in visible appearance and reference metadata that the reference was to an entire book-length work. It is not merely that it is creating CS1 errors, although that is bad enough. It is also making the reference less accurate in both its metadata and in its visible appearance. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:20, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've gotten really exhausted with this category of error introduced by Citation bot, which I encounter every day I edit. I used to creep its contributions and clean up after it, but I've started just reverting its edits that cause this kind of template error, regardless of any value added, and only sometimes actually fix up the citations myself. Few of the editors who call Citation bot on large sets of pages ever check in after it to see if it's causing errors, so typically no one notices my reverts.I saw a few weeks back that for one subset of conferences (IEEE maybe? or SPIE?) Citation bot has successfully been changing {{cite journal}} to {{cite book}} without introducing errors and growing the backlogs. So there has been a partial fix, but it's pretty frustrating that this known error has been perpetuated in thousands of edits spanning months.Citation bot does not have an approved BRFA task to change citation template types, and changing to {{cite book}} has been the one that's particularly fraught and error-prone ever since support for the aliases of |periodical= was dropped from {{cite book}} a year ago. The easiest thing would be if support were readded, but that seems highly unlikely. I do think that eventually, if this bug isn't fixed, I'll end up asking BAG to ban Citation bot changing template type to {{cite book}}. Disabling the functionality would be an improvement over the current situation. Folly Mox (talk) 00:02, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
STILL HAPPENING: Special:Diff/1282071056. I swear the bulk of the newly reported CS1 errors that I find on the bambots cleanup listings such as [2] are caused by Citation bot. It is extremely frustrating that the bot is creating reference cleanup work for others rather than preventing others from having to do that work, month after month and year after year, with no hint that the damage will stop. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:05, 26 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Adds cs1-formatted reference to article whose references are entirely in cs2
In this edit the bot turned a bare-url reference, in an article all of whose many templated references were in Citation Style 2 (some using cite templates with mode=cs2), into a cite web template in Citation Style 1
What should happen
Not that. There is no reason to use cite web when the citation template works ok. In this case it could have been cite report if the bot were more intelligent, but that's above and beyond the bug in question
|title=Phylogenetic Placement and Circumscription of Tribes Inuleae s. STR. And Plucheeae (Asteraceae): Evidence from Sequences of Chloroplast Gene NDHF
What should happen
|title=Phylogenetic Placement and Circumscription of Tribes Inuleae s. str. and Plucheeae (Asteraceae): Evidence from Sequences of Chloroplast Gene ndhF
I think Citation bot is to aggressive in it's capitalization of every three-/four-letter combinations and words following a dot. Also on other references it many times incorrectly capitalizes words inside parentheses. Jonatan Svensson Glad (talk) 19:56, 16 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Here is a case study in how Citation bot gradually garbles references, in this case to a journal paper, garbled because the journal issue was also published as a book and the bot adds more and more of the book metadata to the citation until it is broken. There isn't really a single bug to point to, but most of the problem is through the process of repeated editing by Citation bot.
In Euler's totient function, the Ford 1998 paper "The distribution of totients" is from a special issue of The Ramanujan Journal. The entire issue was also printed as a book, Analytic and Elementary Number Theory: A Tribute to Mathematical Legend Paul Erdos. (Both the book series and the journal had the same publisher and editor.)
Special:Diff/562263776, 2013-06-30: A human editor adds the citation, with only journal metadata. It is given zbl and issn ids but no other link.
Special:Diff/605019090, 2014-04-20: User:Rjwilmsi uses a script to add the book doi to the journal citation. The first crack in an otherwise ok journal citation?
Special:Diff/837446184, 2018-04-20: User:Nemo bis uses OAbot to add an arXiv id. The arXiv link calls it a new and corrected version of the paper rather than a reprint, but it lists the journal metadata (not the book metadata), clearly indicating the author's preference for that citation. So far, we have a citation where the full journal metadata is consistently displayed, together with two ids (the arXiv and doi) that point to different versions but may be useful to readers as easier to access than the official journal version; this is not unusual.
Special:Diff/1060227676, 2021-12-13: The first edit by Citation bot is the first to make the reference visibly schizophrenic, and starts its process of gradually grinding mildly-inconsistent citations into something unrecognizable. It takes the journal citation and adds series= and isbn= parameters from the book doi, neither of which belong in a cite journal but are at least displayed without error. This gives us a journal article, labeled as being in a journal that is in a named series or maybe a journal issue that is in a named series (incorrect), with an isbn that is both incorrect and unhelpful (readers are not going to use it to find this paper). Note that this book happens to be volume 1 in this book series; the citation keeps the volume numbering from the journal metadata (volume 2). The book's pagination happens to be the same as the journal's, fortunately.
Special:Diff/1251661460, 2024-10-17: Citation bot changes cite journal to cite book, causing a CS1 citation format error because of the remaining journal= parameter, which the cite book citation cannot use. (The book citation also ignores the journal number= parameter, which remains present but not displayed.) As well as this, the changed citation is now actually erroneous in saying that the book is "vol. 2"; it is neither volume 2 of its series nor part of a multi-volume book. The edit is immediately undone by a human editor.
I hesitate to think what the citation would look like if the last two edits weren't undone before the bot did something else to it again. I have separated out the book reprint and arXiv update from the journal citation but I'm skeptical that some bot won't come around and add back the doi to the journal citation and start the same cycle all over again.
—David Eppstein (talk) 07:13, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And now Citation bot has been sent to run over the same article only a day after the previous run, as part of another batch run rather than out of any particular attention from this thread. After my separation it added the correct doi to the journal citation so we should be ok for now. But in most cases such frequent re-polishing is a waste of resources. Can we maybe try not to run the bot so frequently on the same articles? —David Eppstein (talk) 20:24, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In my experience, conflated citations to the same content published in multiple sources are some of the most time-consuming to tease apart (I usually repair by providing both publications to prevent future garbling, with the second one prepended with "Republished as" or similar).Hard to believe edits like Special:Diff/1251661460 are still happening. I guess it must not be possible to program Citation bot to look at the parameters specified in the citation it's editing to ensure they're all supported by the template type it thinks should be used instead.I would also appreciate it if Citation bot could decline activation at articles it has edited within the past week or so, to give watchlisters a break from reviewing and/or encourage activators to try filling out citations unassisted. (It would also be nice if it didn't revert people reverting it, but that certainly wouldn't be worth the overhead). Folly Mox (talk) 16:40, 25 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@AManWithNoPlan: Then they should use an explicit to indicate intention if that's ever the case. Same for the other hardcoded special whitespace like thinspaces. Everything not explicitely coded should be convert to a plain space. Headbomb {t · c · p · b}18:05, 14 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Converts conference citation to journal citation and changes title case
In this specific case, the conversion to a more recent and more complete version of the paper happens to be acceptable. The bot got lucky. But in other cases, there might have been a reason to continue citing the conference version of a paper, even one with the same arxiv preprint number as a later journal version, and this conversion would be unsafe. The change from sentence case to title case, for a journal paper, is an unwanted style change, inconsistent with the use of sentence case for other journal papers referenced in this article.
We can't proceed until
Feedback from maintainers
COSMETICBOT changing names for author parameters with no actual effect
Special:Diff/1269593606 changes last=, first=, and author-link= (on a multi-author publication) to last1=, first1=, and author-link1=. In this context, these parameters are synonyms so the change makes no effect to the rendered citation.
In Special:Diff/1269671741 it added work= to a cite web that already had a publisher= with substantially the same text, the name of the organization whose web site was cited. Regardless of whether we should prefer having a citation that names the web site or that names the organization that owns the web site, it is not useful to repeat the same text twice.
Either properly convert it to a publication type for a periodical (although calling the periodical, ORMS Today, a journal, is a stretch; it is a newsletter or magazine), or leave it alone; don't leave it in a broken half-converted state.
Agree it's probably best not to alter a parameter name to |some-url= if it doesn't contain a url. The affected template was already throwing a single error (unsupported parameter) due to the existing typo, and this increased the errors to two. Folly Mox (talk) 15:48, 25 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The bot maintains a list of 'common typos and parameters that changed names', and this is one of them. I will think about how to best handle GIGO of this style. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 17:11, 1 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
IAU Circular/IAU Circ./IAU Circ and Central Bureau Electronic Telegrams/Cent. Bur. Electron. Telegr./Cent Bur Electron Telegr/CBET have issues, not volumes. The # is the article number/page. This can be parsed directly from the bibcode when present. Headbomb {t · c · p · b}18:06, 4 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Citation bot removes "|chapter=" when "|trans-chapter=" exists, resulting in CS1 error
The bot removes the "|chapter=" parameter. This is mandatory when "|trans-chapter=" exists. If it's not present, a CS1 error ({{cite book}}: |trans-chapter= requires |chapter= or |script-chapter=) appears.
Alexanderino, you had the |chapter= parameter duplicating the |title= parameter in this citation (which I fixed here). Agree that the check for requisite additional parameters should happen before removing duplicate parameters so as to avoid this sort of error, but it's always a slog to capture all the potential GIGO cases.
Incidentally, the three cites in that section to L'auto should have been calling {{cite periodical}} or {{cite news}} instead of {{cite book}}. I fixed that here, additionally specifying issue dates and page numbers so the references can still be verified if the Gallica url stops working. Can you check the other citations to ensure the full information is included? Folly Mox (talk) 12:25, 7 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
When it converts cite web to cite book (the correct choice), but with a cite web whose title= and work= are respectively the chapter title and book title, it leaves those parameters as they are. This produces an incorrect citation (showing the chapter title as the book title and not showing the book title) and produces a citation template error (because work= is not recognized as a valid parameter for cite book).
What should happen
The title=/work= pair should be migrated to chapter=/title=
Relevant diffs/links
Special:Diff/1277560761 (which actually should be cite conference, but that wouldn't make a difference here).
We can't proceed until
Feedback from maintainers
Incidentally (see previous section) this is another instance where User:Dominic3203 ran the bot but then failed to check that its results were good. Dominic3203, you need to take responsibility for bot edits that you initiate. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:55, 25 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@David Eppstein Yeah yeah I know…
I have reduced my time using this bot, because I have so much to do in real time. Rather than spending hours here, now it is better for the "experts" to hunt down errors.
Time will tell. Dominic3203 (talk) 01:20, 26 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Special:Diff/1278238470. But if the bot is not smart enough to do something like that, it should recognize its limitations and not make citations worse.
Not that; work= is unrecognized as a parameter for cite book. The added "work" is the imprint under which the book in question was published; we don't have a citation parameter for imprints (separate from the publisher, which was already listed). The deadlink url in the citation is merely the publisher's page describing their book. Another bad edit suggested by User:Dominic3203 and not properly checked.
Not that. There's no point in listing the same organization twice, once as work and once as publisher. The more important metadatum here is the publisher; if their web site has no other name then we should omit it and not have a work= parameter set at all.
This is a typical example of recent Citation bot edits, overriding web citation content with metadata from the html headers of the web page. The bot is far too trusting that this metadata reflects the actual date and authorship of the page in question. Sometimes it might, sometimes it might not, and in this case it does not. The bot added work=EATCS to a citation that already had EATCS in the (more correct) publisher field; this is wrong, because EATCS is the (abbreviated) name of an organization, not the name of the web site of the organization, but only mildly wrong. Worse is that it believed the web page metadata in listing Efi Chita as author of the web page. It is probably accurate that Efi Chita formatted the text as a web page and posted it as a web page. They are not the author of the text in question, as should be obvious to any human who looks at the page and puts some thought into it. It is a laudatio for a prize, written most likely by the chair of the prize committee but maybe with some joint authorship by the other committee members. Efi Chita is not a committee member. They are an information technology specialist at a Greek publishing company, presumably a company contracted by EATCS to run the web site. They should not be credited as an author of the content merely for being the one to post it to the web. The bot cannot tell the difference so it should not be making this kind of edit.
In an edit, Citation bot modified a citation to the book chapter "Making Time: Conservation of Biological Clocks from Fungi to Animals". The chapter is reprinted (and possibly updated) from an initial publication in the journal Microbiology Spectrum. Some of the changes are fine (|pmid=28527179 |pmc=5446046). The changes that treat {{cite book}} as {{cite journal}} create error messages and add parameters that won't be displayed (|journal=Microbiology Spectrum |volume=5 |issue=3). It also adds the bogus parameter "|pages=10.1128/microbiolspec.FUNK–0039–2016".
The doi is from a reprint of the journal version and not from the cited journal version itself. This is a common problem where a good reference gets contaminated by a little bit of metadata for a related reference (a reprint or review) and the bot uses this small contamination as an excuse to blow it up into bigger problems. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:42, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Lecture Notes in Mathematics is a book series not a title
In Special:Diff/1288138202 the bot removed the correct title and series of a book in the series Lecture Notes in Mathematics and replaced the title with the name of the series. Another bad edit under the responsibility of User:Dominic3203.
No, that is the bot confusing a book review with the book under review and garbaging a citation to a book by mashing it up with metadata from the book review. It is a severe bug but not the same bug. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:46, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I can't think of a good way to distinguish between review and original work, given some review have all the same metadata that the original work has. In some cases, the review is in fact what is being cited. If possible, I would recommend raising a red flag to signal more careful human review is needed in some cases, such as when the word "review" (or in this case "Books Received") is found on the destination page or perhaps in certain database fields. This red flag might be raised gratuitously in the case of say, literature reviews, but hopefully not enough to produce alert fatigue. -- Beland (talk) 22:07, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
[12] - I have no idea what happened here. It took a seemingly normal book citation with title and chapter parameters and renamed the title parameter to chapter, then removed the chapter name, leaving it with no title parameter.
Not that. The url is a web page where a copy of this book can be found and the name of the web site is not a part of the name of the book. Also, work= is never a valid parameter for cite book and should never be added to cite book.
The title of Artistdirect needlessly gets added when already present in a citation, with the new mention dubiously having italics and an upper-case stylization for some letters after the beginning "A"
The bot has no idea about the localization parameters, other than it has code to de-localize parameters on en.wiki when people copy refs to en.wiki AManWithNoPlan (talk) 12:18, 23 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
And modifying the bot to use localization paramters will be a long and tedious process. The set/unset/get functions would have to be modified to internally maps from the english parameters to the local ones. The harder part are the parts of the code that directly change variables and do not use the get/set/unset functions. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 12:30, 23 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It might be simpler to convert everything when the template is read-in and then covert back when done processing. Although cleaning up the code that directly changes variables is probably a good idea long-term. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 12:33, 23 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. We use en.wiki cite templates. I will help with localisation. But who will ask for aproval? Previous requests were submited hereKrleNS (talk) 19:51, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
const SR_TRANS = [
'Altered' => 'Промењен',
'Alter:' => 'Промени:',
'URLs might have been anonymized. ' => 'УРЛ адресе су можда анонимизиране. ',
'Added' => 'Додано',
'Add:' => 'Додај:',
'Removed or converted URL. ' => 'Уклоњен или конвертован URL. ',
'Removed URL that duplicated identifier. ' => 'Уклоњен URL који је дуплирао идентификатор. ',
'Removed access-date with no URL. ' => 'Уклоњен датум приступа без URL. ',
'Changed bare reference to CS1/2. ' => 'Промењене гола референце на CS1/2. ',
'Removed parameters. ' => 'Уклоњени параметри. ',
'Some additions/deletions were parameter name changes. ' => 'Неке допуне/брисања без промене имена параметра. ',
'Upgrade ISBN10 to 13. ' => 'Надограђен ISBN10 на ISBN13. ',
'Removed Template redirect. ' => 'Уклоњено преусмерење шаблона. ',
'Misc citation tidying. ' => 'Различита сређивања навода. ',
'Use this bot]].' => 'Користи овог бота]].',
'|Report bugs]]' => '|Пријави грешку]]',
'Formatted ' => 'Форматиран ',
'Suggested by' => 'Предложено од',
'Linked from' => 'Повезано од',
'[[Category:' =>'[[Категорија:',
$err1 = 'Следећи текст би вам могао помоћи да схватите где је грешка на страници (потражите усамљене знакове { и } или незатворени коментар).';
$err2 = 'Ако то није проблем, онда покрените једну страницу са додатком &prce=1 у URL да бисте променили механизам за парсирање';
In this edit on Constitution of the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, Citation_bot added the date 28 April 2014 to two (redundant) uses of an undated, unarchived blog source. Leaving aside the question of whether the blog satisfies WP:BLOG (Civiroglu.net says "Personal website of Mutlu Civiroglu" at top right, so I'm quite dubious about keeping it; some better quality sources are used in other places in the article, but cleanup is still needed), the software question is where the bot dug up the date from. This source is not ArXiv, the ADS, an academic journal publisher, or similar. I've reverted the edit. Boud (talk) 15:22, 25 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Incorrect HDL added, the bot used doi:10.1001/archpsyc.1965.01720310065008 and added a HDL to a different work. I'm not sure where the HDL came from but somehow it was linked
Using {{cite book}}, a previous editor wrote the citation to include a url= that gave the address of a specific single page in a book (and thus the output implied that this is the url of the whole book). They also compounded that error by giving an access-date= (which is rarely appropriate for books). I corrected the citation so that it became page=[Google books page url ending in &pg=1234 1234] but failed to delete the access-date= . Citation-bot responded by recreating the erroneous url=, again creating a the false impression that this is a url for the whole book.
What should happen
if the template is {{cite book}}, delete the access-date=, don't add an inaccurate url=
You not only ignored |access-date=, but you also ignored |archive-url=, |archive-date=, & |url-status=, and you left out the ext link markup at |page=. If you create a junk citation, is it any wonder that Citation bot, attempts to undo what you did?
After some more edits by you, the two citations that you touched are still broken: see ref 1 and ref 6 (both permalinks).
If only one page or page range is being cited, I think it's fine to set url=... aimed at that specific page (or the first page in the range). This is widespread across Wikipedia, and seems more useful for readers than most alternatives. If several separate page ranges are being cited from the book, it's then more useful to put the links on each page range. If a chapter is being cited, or if the specific page is within a particular chapter, it's often more convenient to set the chapter-url. –jacobolus(t)03:09, 7 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Not that. The landing page for the article [21] labels the title of the cited article starting with "Chapter 2", making it obvious that this is an edited volume not a journal. More, the landing page for the volume [22] says at the top "Book series". Additionally, citation bot should never introduce new errors to citation templates. In this case, this raised an error that the periodical in a cite journal link is ignored. That is, the only effect of the bot's edit was to cause an error, not to change the visible appearance or hidden metadata of the citation at all. That should never happen. This edit was credited to User:Abductive, who should be warned to take more care and reponsibility to check the Citation bot edits they initiate and fix the problems they sometimes create.
Should apply to everything that looks like a hyphen in the 5th position, the non-breaking hyphen, endash, emdashes, double hyphens, etc... Headbomb {t · c · p · b}01:25, 6 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Despite how "News" isn't actually part of the title for Associated Press, it for unclear reasons was wrongfully added next to that anyway, and that also shouldn't implement italics for a news agency's name.
To be explicit, the journal name previously used a non-breaking hyphen character (‑) and Headbomb wants an ordinary hyphen (-) instead. The latter is more appropriate because it's fine to put a line break in the name Eighteenth‑Century Studies after "Eighteenth‑". This seems like a very low-priority change that should probably only be done when bundled with other changes. –jacobolus(t)18:44, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This would affect ~5 articles every month or so. Require bundling with other changes would be pointless, the point is to get rid of those editor-hostile oddities in citations. Headbomb {t · c · p · b}20:09, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Purge hard coded non-breaking spaces and replace with regular space
I don't think "Citation bot" should be editing non-citation parts of the article. Let some other bot or human do that if it seems necessary. –jacobolus(t)18:39, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is about citations, not the rest of the article. The diff includes more, but check the espn.com and lequipe.fr references. Headbomb {t · c · p · b}19:59, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Chatul: The DOI points to the same place as the URL link, and is paywalled. It's unexpected for readers for a link on the title to lead to a paywalled resource; in general I think the bot has the right idea here of leaving the DOI and removing the URL (I routinely make similar changes manually). If you really want to, you could try to consistently link all of the titles to DOI links on some particular article, establishing a page-specific citation convention, but if you do, you should probably make sure that it's consistent article-wide and also add url-access=subscription to show a little red lock icon and make it clear to readers that they won't be able to read the paper by clicking that link unless they are paid subscribers to the publisher. –jacobolus(t)18:31, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Personally I'd rather have the URL left off if it points to a paywalled resource, but I think this is best left to local consensus on a page by page basis. –jacobolus(t)23:24, 6 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Bot adds last1=Gear |first1=Top for references to www.topgear.com but this is just the website name "Top Gear". Appreciated if "Top Gear" can be added to the list of disallowed author names.
Not that. The added author appears to be the name of a random staffer who uploaded the content to the web, not the person who wrote the citation (probably that year's award committee chair, László Babai), and adding work=EATCS is wrong in two ways, because EATCS is an organization not a work and because it was already listed as expanded form as the publisher.
The ones it got wrong were all Internet Archive links
We can't proceed until
Feedback from maintainers
Bot edit did nothing but add one space character
The bot should not be making edits such as special:diff/1309371869 ("Suggested by Headbomb"). It is not important whether or not the citation template has a space before the final }}. The bot should not adjust whitespace like this at all (leave it to humans if someone cares), but it's especially obnoxious if there's no meaningful change whatsoever. –jacobolus(t)18:23, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, but mathml tags wrapped in nowiki are neither "useful types of human-readable content" nor particularly "machine-friendly". All this title needs to be correctly formatted and human-readable are some subscript tags (it involves a chemical formula, not mathematics). —David Eppstein (talk) 21:02, 5 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That's true, but I don't think that the machine-readable version can accept subscript tags either. As a general matter, I think it would be handy if we could specify something along the lines of
title=Cyclic ferroelectric switching and quantized charge transport in <chem>CuInP_2S_6</chem> {{cs1 fallback|Cyclic ferroelectric switching and quantized charge transport in CuInP₂S₆}}
And get it to render as "Cyclic ferroelectric switching and quantized charge transport in " but have the machine-readable metadata recorded as Cyclic ferroelectric switching and quantized charge transport in CuInP₂S₆. –jacobolus(t)23:21, 6 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Relatedly, changing a journal article title from sentence case to title case in the process of an arxiv-to-journal conversion Special:Diff/1309755278 is also bad.
I think this happens because the paper itself has the title written on it as "Hexagonal Inflation Tilings and Planar Monotiles", as does the publisher's web page. –jacobolus(t)23:23, 6 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What I mean is: perhaps the bot is designed to apply the style preferred by the paper publisher. That style seems somewhat common on Wikipedia (for better or worse). I'm not sure about exactly how the capitalization was chosen for citations in List of aperiodic sets of tiles, but they aren't consistently using one type of capitalization. Perhaps {{CS1 config}} should have a "capitalization=sentence" or "capitalization=title" parameter to indicate local preference. –jacobolus(t)07:19, 7 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I like the idea of indicating a local preference, but I think it would be a bad idea if the citation templates were to use that to autocapitalize (just as it is a bad idea for the bot to change this capitalization). There are too many exceptions in both directions of words that should stay capitalized or lowercase regardless of the choice of capitalization for software to reliably get it right. Also, it depends on the kind of citation; my preference is sentence for article titles, and title for book and journal titles, but I've seen sentence for both or title for both. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:55, 7 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Fair enough: I can certainly imagine bots making a mess of this, as they do of most of the rest of their citation changes. Just to be clear then: your position is that bots should leave capitalization alone as long as the title listed in the citation is otherwise correct, and irrespective of what kind of capitalization is found among other citations on the page? Having bots err on the side of not taking potentially obnoxious actions seems fine with me.
Capitalization in Wikipedia article citations, even on carefully edited articles, is likely to stay wildly inconsistent. But there's not really too much harm in that, and someone can manually fix it if they feel like it. –jacobolus(t)08:02, 7 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I suspect that it's generally quite inconsistent even within the published literature, especially in publications where the only real copyediting is by the authors themselves. It's something I care about but my experience is most of my coauthors don't. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:13, 7 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This edit seems about right, though pages=21 should be page=21, and it would probably be clearer to write website=The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery rather than work=The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery. To suppress bot edits to a particular citation though, add a comment before the first parameter of the template (the docs suggest <!-- Citation bot bypass-->) –jacobolus(t)10:46, 12 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
In Special:Diff/1311135505 (first difference), it added a doi to a web page citation to a journal editorial board. The doi does not go to the correct web page. It goes to a different but related page, the main landing page for the journal itself. Reaching the editorial board from that page requires finding and navigating two levels into a navigation menu on the doi page.
In Special:Diff/1311372245 (triggered by but obviously not checked carefully by User:Abductive), the bot adds |work=Fundacja na rzecz Nauki Polskiej to a citation that already had |publisher=Foundation for Polish Science. Obviously it would not be reasonable to expect the bot to understand that they say the same thing, but I think it should not be adding work= when publisher= is present.
This bot has only ran in certain wikis, and we need more. My suggestion is that you add this bot to the Croatian, French, German, Polish and Spanish Wikipedia. This could benefit the bot very well. WikiHelper3906 (talk) 15:26, 21 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
"Removed URL that duplicated identifier." except the removed URL links directly to the supplementary content being cited, while the DOI only goes to the document itself.
What should happen
URLs with more info than the DOI should not be removed.
There are a number of edits made by the bot here. I'm not sure all of them are ideal, but the most concerning is that it takes what I had coded as Volume 20 and replaces it with Volume 20 and Issue 20, which is incorrect, as this is an annual journal and doesn't have issue numbers. I'm not sure where it's pulling this info from? Maybe it's a data source problem, but maybe it's a bot problem?
What should happen
Nothing. The citation correctly said that it was volume 20 of the annual.
@CRau080: If you follow the URL of the reference, and use your browser's "view page source" feature (it might have a slightly different name) and search for 2014, you will find the HTML element
![{\displaystyle {\mathrm {CuInP} {\vphantom {A}}_{\smash[{t}]{2}}\mathrm {S} {\vphantom {A}}_{\smash[{t}]{6}}}}](https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/9f3dc335f1d01fd107c6eac4139b3b12b25ffab4)
