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List of archives Before 2020 Archive 0 (Early bug reports) Archive 1 (May 2008 – Jun 2011) Archive 2 (Jun 2011 – Nov 2015) Archive 3 (Nov 2015 – Jul 2016) Archive 4 (Jul 2016 – Oct 2016) Archive 5 (Oct 2016 – Sep 2017) Archive 6 (Sep 2017 – Oct 2017) Archive 7 (Oct 2017 – Jul 2018) Archive 8 (Jul 2018 – Aug 2018) Archive 9 (Aug 2018 – Aug 2018) Archive 10 (Sep 2018 – Oct 2018) Archive 11 (Oct 2018 – Nov 2018) Archive 12 (Nov 2018 – Jan 2019) Archive 13 (Jan 2019 – Feb 2019) Archive 14 (Feb 2019 – Mar 2019) Archive 15 (Mar 2019 – Jun 2019) Archive 16 (Jun 2019 – Jul 2019) Archive 17 (Jul 2019 – Aug 2019) Archive 18 (Aug 2019 – Oct 2019) Archive 19 (Oct 2019 – Mar 2020) Archive 20 (Mar 2020 – May 2020) Archive 21 (May 2020 – Jul 2020) Archive 22 (Jul 2020 – Sep 2020) Archive 23 (Sep 2020 – Dec 2020) Archive 24 (Dec 2020 – Apr 2021) Archive 25 (Apr 2021 – Jun 2021) Archive 26 (Jun 2021 – Aug 2021) Archive 27 (Aug 2021 – Sep 2021) Archive 28 (Oct 2021 – Dec 2021) Archive 29 (Dec 2021 – Dec 2021) Archive 30 (Dec 2021 – Mar 2022) Archive 31 (Mar 2022 – May 2022) Archive 32 (May 2022 – Jul 2022) Archive 33 (Jul 2022 – Oct 2022) Archive 34 (Oct 2022 – Apr 2023) Archive 35 (Apr 2023 – Aug 2023) Archive 36 (Aug 2023 – Oct 2023) Archive 37 (Oct 2023 – Dec 2023) Archive 38 (Dec 2023 – May 2024) Archive 39 (May 2024 – Nov 2024) Archive 40 (Nov 2024 – Jan 2025) Archive 41 (Jan 2025 – Jul 2025) Archive 42 (Jul 2025 – Dec 2025) Archive 43 (Dec 2025 – present)

This page has archives. Topics inactive for 90000 days are automatically archived by ClueBot III if there are more than 4.

As of 2025, the active maintainer of Citation bot (merges pull requests on GitHub and does deployments to Toolforge) is AManWithNoPlan. The Citation bot GitHub is https://github.com/ms609/citation-bot.

Note that the bot's creator (Smith609) and assistants (Kaldari and AManWithNoPlan) 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.

Please click here to report an error.

Or, for a faster response from the maintainers, submit a pull request with appropriate code fix on GitHub, if you can write the needed code.

1. Implement support to expand from https://doi.org/10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U192476 to {{Who's Who}}
   Example: https://teknopedia.ac.id/w/index.php?title=Friern_Hospital&diff=prev&oldid=1167644213
2. Implement support to convert cite web to {{BioRef}} and {{GBIF}}
3. Use https://www.crossref.org/blog/news-crossref-and-retraction-watch/
4. journal/publisher that only differ by 'and' and '&' should be treated as identical https://teknopedia.ac.id/w/index.php?title=Congenital_cartilaginous_rest_of_the_neck&diff=prev&oldid=1199200383
5. Free archive.org links such as curl -sH "Accept: application/json" "https://scholar.archive.org/search?q=doi:10.1080/14786449908621245" | jq -r .results[0].fulltext.access_url
6. Use GET instead of POST for better proxy caches when talking to data-bases when possible.
7. Start to convert Google Books URL to "new" format https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/m8W2AgAAQBAJ?gbpv=1&pg=PA379
8. 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.

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]

Apart from User talk:Citation bot/Archive 32 § Web->Book: I don't think that it was right in this case... (May 2022) linked in the thread above, there was some conversation at User talk:Citation bot/Archive 39 § Introduces ref error when citing Penguin publisher website (May 2024). There could be others. I have to go to work. Folly Mox (talk) 13:01, 30 October 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.

Stop it.

Posting as a message rather than a new bug because this is not a new bug. It is an old bug that has been ignored far too long by the developers (see #Causing template errors, above). It needs to be fixed. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:07, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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 ongoing failure to remove journal= from conversions to cite book, creating new CS1 errors and wasted time for human editors: Special:Diff/1245112056. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:53, 18 September 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]

Note to maintainers Since this is quite an old report, but we have done some fixes related to {{cite journal}} and {{cite book}} we need to look in to if we fixed this, or if it is still happening. If yes see if we have multiple reports of the same kind to group it in to an issue on github. Redalert2fan (talk) 22:29, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It should be enough to do a pass for new {{cite xxx}} being added in the edit if every other cite was {{citation}} (or {{cite xxx|mode=cs2}}. The exception should be that {{cite arxiv}}, {{cite bioRxiv}}, {{cite citeseerx}}, {{cite medrxiv}}, and {{cite ssrn}} all have |mode=cs2 added to them instead of being converted to {{citation}}.

Same for author2/first2 --> last2/first2. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 16:21, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This is the same issue as § Changing every citation of a publisher's webpage to Cite book above (September 2023), User talk:Citation bot/Archive 39 § Causing template errors (November 2023), User talk:Citation bot/Archive 39 § A class of new(?) errors (November 2023), User talk:Citation bot/Archive 39 § Introduces ref error when citing Penguin publisher website (May 2024), etc. I believe most of the cases that cause template errors have been fixed this year, but the underlying behaviour has not. Maybe this exact class of parameters wasn't addressed because it includes both |website= and |page=.

TBH Citation bot is such a popular and high-volume tool that it might actually be worth holding a centralised discussion about whether this functionality is desired instead of having the same conversation here every few months. Folly Mox (talk) 14:14, 20 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Same here:

https://teknopedia.ac.id/w/index.php?title=Root-finding_algorithm&diff=1263375628&oldid=1263149178&variant=en — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dominic3203 (talk • contribs) 01:56, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Even when used as a reliable source for basic information for a work such as release date et al, Amazon pages tend to be erroneously converted (Special:Diff/1263465110, Special:Diff/1265696226) into the ref for the associated work. ミラP@Miraclepine 16:34, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The bot stays away from the |quote= since it is often formatted by people for some specific reason. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 19:15, 12 July 2025 (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]

Also: Special:diff/1261279289 at Apollo et Hyacinthus where |last=, |first= and |author-link= are unnecessarily replaced by |last1=, |first1= and |author-link1=. -- Michael Bednarek (talk) 06:33, 5 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this "also" is the real bug. For multiple authors, making them all numbered does make sense in terms of consistency, but for a single author, replacing |last= by |last1= and so on is in fact WP:EDITORHOSTILE and should be disabled. — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 22:40, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

It only changes first to first when there are multiple authors. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:09, 17 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed. I thought that I've noticed similar changes recently, but upon examining carefully, I see now that there and in the diff provided above, the structure looks like {{Cite book|title=The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia|last=Eisen|first=Cliff|author-link=Cliff Eisen|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=2006|location=Cambridge|last2=Keefe|first2=Simon P.|author-link2=Simon P. Keefe}}, with a second author present, but at the very end, separated from the first author by many other parameters. This is what WP:EDITORHOSTILE calls "harder to understand". So if the bot renames the author parameters in such cases, I would suggest to also reorder them properly (and reformat with spaces for readability according to WP:EDITORHOSTILE and {{Cite book}}'s TemplateData "format": "{{_ |_=_}}"). — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 02:56, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

GitHub tracking added. --Redalert2fan (talk) 23:05, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

GitHub tracking added. And the reason that the bot edited the page was because it was activated to run on it by a user via the category mode. --Redalert2fan (talk) 23:08, 30 December 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]

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]

Thank you very much for your clarification and help. I will take a look once I've had some sleep. Alexanderino (talk) 12:31, 7 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Not quite fixed, still need to do follow up cleanup, e.g. [7]. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 16:28, 18 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

that's will take some time. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 02:09, 28 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Also cosmetic [8]. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 07:18, 20 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

GitHub tracking added. Redalert2fan (talk) 23:09, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

GitHub tracking added. --Redalert2fan (talk) 23:10, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

GitHub tracking added. --Redalert2fan (talk) 23:11, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

GitHub tracking added for work vs publisher part of this bug report. --Redalert2fan (talk) 23:14, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This is still happening today (Special:Diff/1335740683) and searching Wikipedia for "Efi, Chita" finds many examples where this garbage (both the fake author name and the redundant work name) have been added and not caught and reverted. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:33, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

This indeed was not worked on, since nobody picked up Fixing Issue #5301. Redalert2fan (talk) 14:47, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, new here, not sure if this is the right place, but this looks like the same problem (or a very similar one): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fundamental_theorem_of_calculus&diff=prev&oldid=1288133688 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 158.121.180.24 (talk • contribs) 20:19, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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]

Seems due to bad metadata. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:37, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, the diff is no longer accessible, so we can't diagnose the bug anymore. Tagging this for archiving to clean up the talk page. New bug reports will be handled faster to prevent issues like this. --Redalert2fan (talk) 15:37, 28 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

In that draft, Citation bot changed this:

{{cite book | last1=Judet | first1=Pierre | date=2014 |chapter=La "Savoie industrielle". Des territoires industriels en mouvements |trans-chapter=The "Industrial Savoy". Industrial territories in motion |chapter-url=https://shs.cairn.info/histoire-economique-et-sociale-de-la-savoie--9782600018289-page-245?lang=fr | title=Histoire économique et sociale de la Savoie de 1860 à nos jours |trans-title=Economic and Social History of Savoy from 1860 to the present | series=Publications d'histoire économique et sociale internationale |publisher=Librairie Droz | pages=245–297 | doi=10.3917/droz.varas.2014.01.0245 | isbn=978-2-600-01828-9 }}

Judet, Pierre (2014), "La "Savoie industrielle". Des territoires industriels en mouvements" [The "Industrial Savoy". Industrial territories in motion], Histoire économique et sociale de la Savoie de 1860 à nos jours [Economic and Social History of Savoy from 1860 to the present], Publications d'histoire économique et sociale internationale, Librairie Droz, pp. 245–297, doi:10.3917/droz.varas.2014.01.0245, ISBN 978-2-600-01828-9

to this:

{{cite book | last1=Judet | first1=Pierre | date=2014 |chapter-url=https://shs.cairn.info/histoire-economique-et-sociale-de-la-savoie--9782600018289-page-245?lang=fr | chapter=Histoire économique et sociale de la Savoie de 1860 à nos jours |trans-chapter=Economic and Social History of Savoy from 1860 to the present | series=Publications d'histoire économique et sociale internationale |publisher=Librairie Droz | pages=245–297 | doi=10.3917/droz.varas.2014.01.0245 | isbn=978-2-600-01828-9 }}

Judet, Pierre (2014), "Histoire économique et sociale de la Savoie de 1860 à nos jours" [Economic and Social History of Savoy from 1860 to the present], Publications d'histoire économique et sociale internationale, Librairie Droz, pp. 245–297, doi:10.3917/droz.varas.2014.01.0245, ISBN 978-2-600-01828-9 {{cite book}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:50, 28 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

thanks, so the original trans-chapter and chapter are removed and the present title and trans-title is changed to trans-chapter and chapter. Redalert2fan (talk) 16:12, 28 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Previous title did contain an error, but new one was worse. This comes from Archive title code. Will look at. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 10:59, 27 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Once we can migrate to PHP 8.4, this will get MUCH better. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 19:58, 1 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@AManWithNoPlan Since we are on PHP 8.4 now, is this fixed? Redalert2fan (talk) 14:50, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Redalert2fan Hmm, kind of? It's different, but still not right... Jay8g [V•T•E] 22:25, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

GitHub tracking added. --Redalert2fan (talk) 23:15, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Same annoying and pointless cosmeticbot behavior still happening nearly a week later: Special:Diff/1301704057, Special:Diff/1301703128 —David Eppstein (talk) 07:32, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:22, 6 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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]

The addition of the author as the same is also not correct. Redalert2fan (talk) 15:18, 28 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Fixed by previous patch. --Redalert2fan (talk) 15:07, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

on further review it was not fixed, but now is included in the next patch. Redalert2fan (talk) 15:22, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Latest patch also did not fix it even though it should. Leaving this for further investigation. --Redalert2fan (talk) 23:15, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

GitHub tracking added. Redalert2fan (talk) 23:27, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've noticed this as a semi-frequent pattern. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:35, 25 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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]

Per the RFC. See also User_talk:Citation_bot/Archive_41#Yeet_PMID/OCLC_links_from_citations. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:59, 27 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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]

Indeed. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:24, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

How do I prevent the bot from making this bad edit again? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:09, 8 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]

Both linked and unlinked should be TNT'd. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:15, 12 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

We can't learn the bot Polish (yet), but you are right that the bot shouldn't have added work. GitHub tracking added. --Redalert2fan (talk) 23:19, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Also in this edit the URL should have been added as a |chapter-url=. Jonatan Svensson Glad (talk) 14:49, 21 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The bot could be made to make the edit that you requested, but it can't know for all cases if somebody actually intended to cite the webpage or the book. Therefore, I don't think it would be smart to implement it. --Redalert2fan (talk) 21:04, 26 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Headbomb: I see that Advances in Enzymology and Related Subjects of Biochemistry is indeed not a journal, but shouldn't it be the series? Although in that case the title and series will become the same like this edit.--Redalert2fan (talk) 19:11, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

There's bad metadata somewhere, which makes this particularly annoying. The last time I checked, and it was a while back, Advances in Enzymology and Related Areas of Molecular Biology and Advances in Enzymology and Related Subjects of Biochemistry are the same title/series/whatever, the series just got renamed as some point and you end up with titles from different era in the metadata. I don't remember which is new and which is old, or when the switch happened. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:18, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ah I see, that makes it quite hard to sort it out correctly, I missed that they are actually not the same in the edit in my sandbox. Advances in Enzymology and Related Areas of Molecular Biology was already on the list for not a journal. I've added advances in Enzymology and Related Subjects of Biochemistry to the list so atleast it won't be added as a journal anymore.

Because of the bad metadata there probably are indeed more instances (or will be) where the title is one of them and the series is the other. That's not something I can fix. Redalert2fan (talk) 19:34, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

See User:Monkbot/task 21: Replace page(s) with article-number

Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 16:26, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

but we don't actually want that. Redalert2fan (talk) 15:02, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

GitHub tracking added. --Redalert2fan (talk) 23:21, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Kpopstarz is not an author, nor should a same work and author be added. last1=Net | first1=Topstarnews is not correct. work=톱스타뉴스(TopStarNews.Net) should probably not repeat the website url. |last1=기자 is not correct (see report above). --Redalert2fan (talk) 18:01, 22 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Fix for author implemented. Redalert2fan (talk) 12:35, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Topstarnews still being added. more investigation needed. Kpopstarz fixed. Redalert2fan (talk) 16:10, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Add tracking for work part of topstarnews (should not include url).

Tracked in github.com
Issue #5301

Redalert2fan (talk) 23:22, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

GitHub tracking added. --Redalert2fan (talk) 23:22, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

--JBL (talk) 20:20, 24 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This seems like a very similar issue to one raised several months ago. Stepwise Continuous Dysfunction (talk) 18:54, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I did try to look through the old but still-open bug reports to find a match, but there are so many... —David Eppstein (talk) 19:08, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@David Eppstein: Good news, this bug appears to be fixed -- see this test edit based on the diff in your example. Jay8g [V•T•E] 05:42, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You also tested examples where the title= was the book title and the work= was a book series, and all the other permutations, I hope? Just getting this one example right isn't enough to be convincing. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:47, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Well, you'll have to find some examples of that... Jay8g [V•T•E] 06:29, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

So no, then. In that case I don't consider the bug fixed.

If you're going to convert cite web to cite book you need all cases correct, not just the one case that triggered the bug report.

Here's an example where cite web should be converted to cite book with the cite web title => contribution and the cite web work => series (and with the book title missing and to be filled in) from Wikidata (where it is given in CS2 form but with the cite web parameter set): Erxleben, Fredo; Günther, Michael; Krötzsch, Markus; Mendez, Julian; Vrandečić, Denny (2014), "Introducing Wikidata to the Linked Data Web", Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 50–65, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-11964-9_4, ISBN 978-3-319-11963-2, retrieved 2024-08-18

And here's an example where the conversion should go title => title and work => series, from Ricci curvature (where again it is in CS2 form but with the cite web parameter set): Najman, Laurent; Romon, Pascal (2017), "Modern approaches to discrete curvature", Lecture notes in mathematics, Springer (Cham) —David Eppstein (talk) 06:37, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This is what the bot currently does for the first example diff and for the second example no changes will be made. Please check if this is the expected behaviour for the first example. For the 2nd example, since nothing was broken further because nothing was edited that should not be considered a bug in my opinion.

And for housekeeping, even though the exact instance from the report has been fixed since there is some discussion I have removed the fixed tag to prevent archiving. --Redalert2fan (talk) 10:58, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

First diff: Incorrect. "Lecture Notes in Computer Science" is the name of a book series. It should not be put into the title parameter. The correct book title is "The Semantic Web – ISWC 2014" or maybe a longer version

"The Semantic Web – ISWC 2014: 13th International Semantic Web Conference, Riva del Garda, Italy, October 19-23, 2014. Proceedings, Part I". This is not in the citation as given (that was the point of giving this example) but the bot should be able to figure it out from the doi. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:12, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Prior to 2025-09-26 the article "Paracelsus" had a "cite book" reference that had parameters "|orig-year=1894" and "|publication-date=1976", but no "|date=" parameter.

On 2025-09-26 07:25 UTC Citation bot modified "|orig-year=1894" to "|year=1894". This caused an ISBN/Date incompatibility error. It should have modified the "|publication-date=1976" parameter.  ~2025-33904-40 (talk) 16:40, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Diff. The second citation. –Novem Linguae (talk) 17:47, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The bot is temporarily limited to editing one page (per user) at a time by the maintainers. This is on purpose per unblock discussion. Single page request should work. Category runs or linked from should not work.

Redalert2fan (talk) 22:06, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

to clarify, this is for after the bot is unblocked. Redalert2fan (talk) 22:53, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

One of the thoughts behind this is that it is easier to spot incorrect edits / bugs due to the lower maximum volume of edits. It should trigger users to be more careful. Therefore it would be helpful if users pay more attention and check the web interface and the edits that are made.

The idea is to improve the citations, and more correct edits at a slower rate is preferential to a high rate of edits without verification that contain unreported bugs. Redalert2fan (talk) 00:17, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Could be API interaction or the order the bot executed the code due to the citations not being exactly identical that gives the different result.Redalert2fan (talk) 22:50, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As I said on my talk page, I'd be interested to see a consensus somewhere that says that these identifiers shouldn't be included since they can be helpful in cases of linkrot, and there is really no downside to including them. Note that WP:ELNO does not apply to references, and #1 does not say what you seem to be claiming it says. Jay8g [V•T•E] 22:43, 9 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

We can distinguish ids as (1) providing a copy of the reference itself, like most dois and some bibcodes, (2) providing a review or abstract of the reference, like MR and zbl, (3) providing nothing beyond the same metadata that is already in the reference, like the ones added in this report. There have been many past discussions on the uselessness of type (3) ids. They do not help readers in cases of linkrot because they provide no different links than the ones here. They do not help readers at all. They merely annoy readers by sending them to a web page that doesn't help them read the reference, and by making it harder for them to find a link that actually goes to the reference. There have been many past discussions on this issue. See e.g. User talk:Citation bot/Archive 41#Useless bibcodes redux and User talk:Citation bot/Archive 42#Bad pmid. But more to the point, see WP:BRD: when your bad edit was reverted, the onus was on you to establish a consensus for the change, rather than just repeating your bot edit to ram it through without consensus. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:26, 9 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion started at Wikipedia_talk:Citing_sources#Does_WP:CITEVAR_prohibit_adding_metadata_to_citations?. Jay8g [V•T•E] 23:52, 9 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Reported by @Trappist the monk: who noted and undid some sort of error or errors with chaper-url vs chapter vs title. Oddly, the bot's edit summary mentions an "osti" but no osti is changed. Also, the red error text in the citations of that revision says "More than one of |contribution-url= and |chapter-url= specified; More than one of |contribution= and |chapter= specified." but no |contribution-url= or |contribution= fields exist in the citations. Abductive (reasoning) 20:49, 10 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Umm, I think that you are mistook. Following the bot's edit, This template, has both of |contribution= and |chapter= and has both of |contribution-url= and |chapter-url=. In the wikitext, Ctrl+F search for CITEREFQFFDB Fault 573. Because |contribution= and |chapter= are aliases of one another, only one of those parameters is allowed in any single cs1|2 template. The same restriction applies to |contribution-url= and |chapter-url=.

  As part of that same edit, the bot added |osti=10105840 to this template. In the wikitext, Ctrl+F search for 10105840.

  —Trappist the monk (talk) 23:52, 10 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  Well, there's the report from the field. Abductive (reasoning) 04:11, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It is not always the case that broken dois should be removed. Sometimes they are correct and later become unbroken. So deleting the broken doi would only be acceptable if this process results in finding a replacement doi. —David Eppstein (talk) 08:40, 14 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Agree. I think what Johnjbarton is suggesting here is that Citation bot could in flight look for replacement/valid DOIs for those marked as broken, and replace any found. Then any broken DOIs with no replacement found are left as is. I expect in some cases this will work, but I think most DOI breakage is the link not working but crossref metadata still present and pointing at that DOI i.e. there is no replacement DOI available and it needs journal publisher side fix to their website/database. Rjwilmsi 09:15, 14 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've encountered three ways the DOI can fail:

1. bad wikipedia value. Personal experience this is the most common.
2. bad DOI database value added by publisher
3. bad publisher website (eg mis-parsing their own URL)

Of course I suppose that a publisher site could simply go away but I've not seen that.

Is there a way to create a list of (broken-DOI/ resolved URLs)? Johnjbarton (talk) 16:37, 14 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure why, but on this article the bot has twice converted a "cite web" reference to the RP Photonics Encyclopedia into an inappropriate "cite journal" reference. The site is not a journal. RP does however have DOIs. Is the bot assuming that anything with a DOI must be a journal? That is a poor assumption.--Srleffler (talk) 04:37, 5 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

This should convert to {{cite encyclopedia}}, yes. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 06:12, 5 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Need to investigate if this is just this specific encyclopedia that is wrongly converted, if we need to add it to the data list or if the bot is indeed making a poor assumption based on the DOI. I think there is more encyclopedia stuff reported. --Redalert2fan (talk) 08:45, 5 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Redalert2fan: Citation Bot used to do this a lot for reasons I could never figure out (it doesn't seem to be related to the DOI). I think the fix was the insanely large NON_JOURNAL_WEBSITES list. Jay8g [V•T•E] 20:06, 6 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

It appears that you're using the references more like external links than as references to support specific claims in the article. Also, yes, titles are required for citations; I don't think you're going to get support for removing that requirement (it is certainly not a bug). Jay8g [V•T•E] 19:53, 6 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Yet another example of Abductive running the bot and not bothering to fix a red error message that results. Stepwise Continuous Dysfunction (talk) 19:41, 29 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

{{citation}} might have been missed while the code for cite book was prevented to add work. Redalert2fan (talk) 15:15, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Same as § Cosmetic bot converting title= to chapter= in cite encyclopedia above —David Eppstein (talk) 19:05, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Can we please get the bot to stop adding book series and series volume numbers in general, unless they are used consistently among the citations on a particular page and obviously desired by the human editors there? Most of the time writing the book series adds significant clutter without adding reader-relevant value (it's a piece of trivia which is largely irrelevant and does not help the reader locate the book, except in relatively rare examples). –jacobolus (t) 20:08, 29 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Books series and volume should be added when the bot can figure them out. The LNCS volume for instance, is absolutely relevant. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:12, 29 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Also Abductive. Stepwise Continuous Dysfunction (talk) 19:38, 29 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Flipping first and last names seems like it would be error-prone (I imagine it would be roughly as likely for the metadata to be messed up as for the citation in Wikipedia to be messed up, and that's without getting into the issue of different name formats in different countries). Jay8g [V•T•E] 08:16, 26 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Let's please not get the bot trying to replace "at=pp.." to "pages=". Such change has no practical benefit, and lots of edge cases where it could screw up. In particular, "at=pp.." is helpful when including a hyperlink to the page, because it gives a bigger click target for readers, and also "at=§ X, pp. y–z" is routinely helpful. –jacobolus (t) 20:04, 29 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Changing the names around was already decided previously as something we wouldn't do, complex to implement since some languages/scripts do it exactly oposite of each other, and there will be a lot of false positives.

The actual feature request can be implemented, but seeing there is some oposition to it, it should probably be decided first if it is desirerd or not. --Redalert2fan (talk) 15:10, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Ah that's pretty annoying. Going to have to look in to that deeper. --Redalert2fan (talk) 14:27, 26 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

It is because bioRxiv and medRxiv are in TEMPLATES_WE_BARELY_PROCESS (name explains itself) not in TEMPLATES_WE_PROCESS (web,news,journal etc.). In TEMPLATES_WE_PROCESS the bot expands, normalizes, and corrects citations with much more “intelligent”/full logic. The logic in this path is designed to suppress edits where only cosmetic changes (including template name capitalization) are present. Unfortunately we can't simple move bioRxiv and medRxiv there. This type of edit will need to specifically be supressed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Redalert2fan (talk • contribs) 14:40, 26 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

That Idea turned out to be not correct. Redalert2fan (talk) 17:45, 26 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

only removing |work= as in diff should probably not be done just by itself if there are no other changes. Redalert2fan (talk) 16:00, 26 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

On COVID-19, Citation bot keeps adding a display-authors= parameter to one of the references even though there is a cs1 config|display-authors template at the top. This causes a CS1 maintenance message: "CS1 maint: overridden setting". I've reverted Citation bot at least twice on this article but it keeps doing this. This may have happened on other articles too. Velayinosu (talk) 00:06, 29 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Two instances out of three that I see in the history were by Abductive. Stepwise Continuous Dysfunction (talk) 20:06, 29 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Same thing happening over and over again at Ancient North Eurasian. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 15:43, 10 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The bot changed "Linear Algebra and its Applications" to "Linear Algebra and Its Applications", in special:diff/1335537447. Arguably we could pick a capitalization to consistently apply for "its" in titles irrespective of the cited sources, but in this particular case there are several other examples of lower-case "its" in titles mentioned on the same Wikipedia article, so it's not like the bot was enforcing a consistent style. The bot should probably refrain from such changes. (I'm not entirely clear on what style the journal uses itself. Our article Linear Algebra and Its Applications is inconsistent between title and article text, and the journal cover doesn't seem to match the webpage. –jacobolus (t) 20:16, 29 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Title case capitalises 'major' words, (i.e. nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, subordinating conjunctions), while keeping 'minor' words (i.e. articles, short prepositions, coordinating conjunctions) lowercase. Its is a pronoun, thus is capitalized. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 12:56, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

If there is a style that should be enforced for this specific journal, it can be enforced, we just need to know the correct one. Redalert2fan (talk) 15:19, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Another bad edit unsupervised by User:Abductive. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:45, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The edit looked fine to me. How would an observer deduce that it was bad looking at the diff? Abductive (reasoning) 01:47, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Abductive: You can install this . Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:59, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I installed it, but isn't the difference between these styles cosmetic? Abductive (reasoning) 02:07, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Ideally {{citation}} would be best, but an alternative solution would be to use {{cite web|mode=cs2|...}}.

The cite preprint templates {{cite arXiv}}, {{cite SSRN}}, {{cite bioRxiv}}, {{cite medRxiv}} with |mode=cs2, would always be better to use than {{citation}} though. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:56, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Not necessary to set |mode=cs2 in individual templates when {{CS1 config|mode=cs2}}. When you do, cs1|2 will add the article to Category:CS1 maint: overridden setting.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 02:10, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

For those templates I agree, but this one was a cite web. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:40, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Not that the edits are individually noticeable as bad, but the whole point of the exercise here is to catch the bot's mistakes—and fix them to make a better bot. Humans should not have to clean up the bot's mess, nor a human's mess if the bot can do it. Abductive (reasoning) 21:13, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

You trigger the bot, you're responsible to check its edits. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:18, 1 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The question then becomes: Was it actually fixed last time and did something change causing it to return? Is this a slightly different issue than what was fixed before? Or did the maintainer think they fixed it but apparently they did not? (these are just some thoughts from me). Don't want to pressure you with too much of a search, but if you happen to know the previous report that you are referring to it can be useful for reference. Unfortunately the historical descriptiveness of GitHub pull requests for citation bot is rather lacking, so what the "fix" might have been previously will also be a bit of a search if this is a returning issue. Redalert2fan (talk) 00:26, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

See User talk:Citation bot/Archive 1 § Bot replaces book reference by journal's book review, User talk:Citation bot/Archive 23 § Book vs book review, User talk:Citation bot/Archive 24 § Bot mangles book citation in today's DYK by merging in metadata from journal review of book, and User talk:Citation bot/Archive 18 § Books and their reviews for four different supposedly-fixed instances of the same sort of problem. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:45, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

It could be very well that those instances were indeed fixed, looking at it it seems to be a rare bug indeed since the last report was from you in 2020, although ofcourse that doesn't discount the possibility that it hasn't been happening without anyone noticing. Looking on Github there is indeed code that tries to catch this specific issue, and from the archives it seems to have been made more restrictive over time.

It works uses a scoring system based on the presence of various typical book (and review) citation parameters. If the score is 3 or higher it will think it is a book review.

Investigating this one: The bot correctly detected that the original citation was not a book review using the scoring system, it got a score of 2, therefore it correctly then tried to expand the data for the normal book using the API. But the API incorrectly gave it the data from the book review! After it got that incorrect data the scoring system now gave it a score of 0 and because of that proceeded to add the data.

The question is why did the scoring system give it an even lower score even though the proposed output has more paramters that are consistent with a review? That is the part that needs to be looked in to and fixed. Redalert2fan (talk) 14:02, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Going deeper, it seems like that the code gives a negative 2 score to journal, which is a more likely book review item even though we want to block scores above 3. And it gives positive scores to all items that are present in books. There is probably something wrong with the scoring system or the logic is switched around. A citebook with just an ISBN will get +5 but that is not a book review for sure. Currently a citebook with a journal (which is not even allowed) would end up with a score of 1. Redalert2fan (talk) 15:24, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Bug tracked at: https://github.com/ms609/citation-bot/issues/5420 Redalert2fan (talk) 11:26, 15 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Github tracking added. I will be attempting to fix all these during february. --Redalert2fan (talk) 20:51, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Another useless work=: Special:Diff/1335870807 adds work=California State University, Northridge when the reference already has the more specific publisher=California State University, Northridge Faculty Senate. Again, the fix is not to add exclusions one-by-one: the fix is never to add work= to a citation that already has publisher=. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:08, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

There is no way to add exclusions one-by-one for this because there is no exclusion parameter available in the code for this one. The fix could be to do so as you suggest. It could also be something else. That is what I intended to convey with " attempting to fix all these". Redalert2fan (talk) 21:16, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Another two from Abductive. Stepwise Continuous Dysfunction (talk) 06:04, 1 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

And one more. Stepwise Continuous Dysfunction (talk) 06:08, 1 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

This might be a 'no win' because I have seen many instances where publisher=<name of the periodical> when it should have been work=<name of the periodical>. Though it seems to be more of a problem with cite web and cite news than with cite journal. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 21:15, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

If you know it is the name of a periodical, then moving the publisher to the work might be appropriate. But the cases in question are all cite webs. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:17, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Regardless of which one is more correct, it is clear that we should not add both. If publisher is present but the bot wants to add work we will reject it. It is unlikely that I can ensure that the bot will not make mistakes with moving them so I will not be trying to implement that.

What I can do for when we encounter this is also add a warning in the web interface that notifies the user that they should check if the present use of publisher is correct (as an additional trigger) Redalert2fan (talk) 21:22, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

There is code for handling "normal" math which may change current titles. There is special code that actually enforces correct "LaTeX" formatting when adding new titles, I added that some time ago. That new code is explicitly not allowed to edit current LaTeX formatted math even if the current form is wrong, it will throw a warning to the user to check the formatting even though it can succesfully fix it. Running this citation by itself does not give any math related warnings.

The issue here is that the bot fetches data (using the crossref API) which gives the title as "The length of an ''s'' -increasing sequence of ''r'' -tuples" and overwrites the current title - you can verify it if you empty the title parameter and run the bot, it adds the incorrect version. So the bot does not see that the title is similair enough for it to not change it, it thinks the original title and the one it is trying to add are completely different and picks the new one. So there was actualy no math "handling" done on this citation. The title recognition logic needs to be updated.

If the bot thinks the current title and the fetched title are completely different, there is a high likelihood of one or both being problematic in a way that the bot cannot resolve. It should refuse to edit and raise an alert for human attention. It should certainly not guess that it is right and whoever put that title there in the first place was somehow mistaken in doing so. This is especially true for titles containing mathematics formatting for which it is very likely that the online metadata formats the mathematics badly and that the Wikipedia editor who added the citation has corrected the formatting already. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:08, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I actually think for this instance it does not need to give a warning, it should just not have made the edit at all. Correction for this bug is to not overwrite titles using <math>.

And to re-iterate this is not a function of handling of math formatting, the bot can recognise actually poorly formatted mathml mathematics and convert it to correct LaTeX. It does this when adding new titles (no title present), and it warns users for existing poor formatting that should be converted. Titles received from API using incorrect mathml will be recognised so if a user already corrected them to LaTex they will already not be overwritten. Redalert2fan (talk) 22:46, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Further investigation: diff When the citation already contains the journal it keeps the title. Redalert2fan (talk) 23:14, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

How we got it is displayed when using the web interface:

>Consult APIs to expand templates

>Using Zotero translation server to retrieve details from URLs and identifiers

>Retrieved info from https://arc-cbbc.nl/2020/05/marjolein-dijkstra-receives-an-erc-advanced-grant/

+Adding work: ARC CBBC

+Adding last1: Heus

+Adding first1: Anne-Lot de

Now where Zotero gets that data from I can't quickly see, a quick page inspection does not have it in the metadata and visually checking an archived version on the wayback machine does also not display an author. --Redalert2fan (talk) 22:16, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

This response reflects what I see as a continuing and problematic attitude that when Wikipedia and outside sources like Zotero differ, then Wikipedia is always wrong and Zotero is always right. That is simply untrue. Zotero is as far as I know mostly user-generated content like Wikipedia with no greater reliability than Wikipedia. It should not override Wikipedia content.

If this sounds testy, it is because my watchlist in the last few days has consisted largely of Citation bot edits, checking those edits has consumed far too much of my editing time, and I have been finding far too high an error rate in those edits. Erroneous edits by Citation bot should be rare, so rare that I find at most maybe one a month or so. When I find many different errors in one day or a few days, it indicates that something has gone very wrong in Citation bot development and that the bot is turning into a net negative for the project, wasting more editor time than it saves. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:24, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Not to discount any of the feelings about the bot you posted here, that is all fair.

The translation server from zotero is used to "to retrieve details from URLs and identifiers" - Quoting: "The Zotero Translation Server is a Node.js-based service that allows users to leverage Zotero’s translator library to extract metadata from websites, DOIs, or ISBNs " and "Zotero uses so-called “translators” to detect and import data from websites. For citation bot it is used to fetch webdata from the webpage, it does not use user-generated content. Redalert2fan (talk) 22:59, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

"Heus, Anne-Lot de" is the proper Dutch spelling. Not valid for Flanders, though. I asked this at Dutch wiki, since I'm not a native speaker of Dutch.

See nl:Wikipedia:De kroeg/Archief/20240902. tgeorgescu (talk) 02:30, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• This is for an 1873 article in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. I believe that the volume is the year, and note that the bot did not add the year. I also note that the bot did not make this "correction" when it edited History of the metre in December, and there were no intervening edits. Abductive (reasoning) 22:04, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Another instance of the publishing organization incorrectly being moved from publisher= to work=: Special:Diff/1335937126. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:28, 1 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

And another where it redundantly adds the organization as work= without removing it from publisher=: Special:Diff/1335939737. It is getting to the point where every time I see a Citation bot edit on my Watchlist I expect it to be a bad one. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:30, 1 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Yet another where it moves publisher= to work= for an organization name: Special:Diff/1335941544. Any bets on how many more of these it takes for me to just block the bot? —David Eppstein (talk) 02:32, 1 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

3 ... Special:Diff/1335950470 —David Eppstein (talk) 02:46, 1 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Abductive, Abductive, Abductive, Abductive, and Abductive again. Really given the number of bug reports related to Abductive triggered edits by people other than Abductive, the solution here is to yank CB access from Abductive. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:16, 1 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

First of all the bugs should be fixed, regardless of who requests the edits. Second The category mode was turned "off" so people would be better able to check their edits, if someone "bypasses" (can't find a better word) that by running 5 single pages at the same time and doesn't check edits that is at their own risk.

There is no way (currently) in the code to prevent specific users from using the bot. Redalert2fan (talk) 14:32, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I woke up this morning to find another 18 bad changes to work= (duplicating publisher or in some cases replacing publisher), on my watchlist alone: [43] [44] [45] [46] [47] [48] [49] [50] [51] [52] [53] [54] [55] [56] [57] [58] [59] [60]. I have blocked citation bot until this is changed to stop. Occasionally when publisher= already exists the addition of work= is a good change; far more often it is incorrect. At least one of these bad edits also included the problem of adding an author who is not the actual author of a piece of text but merely the staff member who uploaded it to a web page, already reported last March in § Far too aggressive in using hidden web page metadata and apparently never fixed.

There were many more useless bot edits adding bibcodes that do not provide any useful information, and at least one undo on my watchlist of such an edit by another editor; that is not a blocking offense in my mind but see Wikipedia talk:Citing sources § Proposal to stop adding Bibcode values to citations unless they provide information for an ongoing discussion that seems to be trending against doing that.

These were all at the initiative of User:Abductive and there have been suggestions above that Abductive be topic-banned from using Citation bot. Perhaps someone should start a WP:ANI thread to discuss that. But this problematic work= issue goes beyond Abductive's edits; if it weren't them it would be someone else. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:03, 1 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I looked at each one of the diffs that you provided. {{citation}} assumes (always has) that in the absence of a work parameter (|journal=, |magazine=, |newspaper=, |periodical=, |website=, |work=), the source it is citing is a book so renders the citation accordingly: the value in |title= is italicized. For example, this from Natalie Crawford (one of only three working urls among the listed diffs):

{{citation|url=https://www.usafa.af.mil/News/Article/619534/2012-thomas-d-white-national-defense-award-goes-to-rand-corporation-official/|title=2012 Thomas D. White National Defense Award goes to RAND Corporation official|date=November 15, 2013|first=Veronica|last=Ward|publisher=United States Airforce Academy|access-date=2023-03-19}}

Ward, Veronica (November 15, 2013), 2012 Thomas D. White National Defense Award goes to RAND Corporation official, United States Airforce Academy, retrieved 2023-03-19

If we follow that citation's title link, we see that the cited source is not a book but rather a news article on a website. A quoted upright title is the correct format for such sources. Replacing |publisher= with either of |website= or |work= instructs {{citation}} to render a properly formatted citation:

{{citation|url=https://www.usafa.af.mil/News/Article/619534/2012-thomas-d-white-national-defense-award-goes-to-rand-corporation-official/|title=2012 Thomas D. White National Defense Award goes to RAND Corporation official|date=November 15, 2013|first=Veronica|last=Ward|website=United States Airforce Academy|access-date=2023-03-19}}

Ward, Veronica (November 15, 2013), "2012 Thomas D. White National Defense Award goes to RAND Corporation official", United States Airforce Academy, retrieved 2023-03-19

I random-sampled three of the listed articles with dead urls:

Xiaoyu Luo: dead link archive snapshot

Sharon Goldwater: dead link archive snapshot

Sylvia de Neymet: dead link archive snapshot

None of those sources are books so using {{citation}} in book mode is incorrect. For these three citations (and the Airforce Academy source), the bot, while perhaps imperfect in its execution, was correct in applying a work parameter for these sources. Perhaps that is also true for the others in your list?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 23:18, 1 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

No, adding work=The Royal Society of Edinburgh to a citation that already includes publisher=Royal Society of Edinburgh (on Xiaoyu Luo) is not correct. It is redundant, uninformative, and misplaced because the royal society is an organization not the name of a work that they publish. If you think that this citation needs a work to satisfy some obscure formatting requirement, you are wrong and your opinion here is discountable. A dogmatic belief that a one-size-fits-all template is somehow calling this a book and formatting it wrong because of that is your belief only. And using a badly-programmed bot to enforce your wrong opinion to the exclusion of all others, grinding everyone else down with thousands of edits clogging up their watchlists, is the oppopsite of the consensus process that Wikipedia follows. This citation is merely a citation to a thing with a single-level title rather than a two-level title/work contribution/title (or whatever) pair of titles. If the citation template formats all such things as book, in a way that creates incorrect appearance of citations, then that is also a bug in the citation template but it in no way obviates the problematic behavior of Citation bot. And in this case the bot somehow conjured up the name of the work from a deadlink, so I am skeptical about the source of its information as well as about the quality of the results. An archived copy reveals that it would be reasonable (although, I believe, not necessary), to put work=Fellows. Needless to say that is not what the bot did. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:54, 1 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Again, Trappist is wrong on this, the US Airforce Academy is the publisher, not the website/work. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:23, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I fully support blocking the bot until these issues are addressed. The idea is to eventually allow free rein to all users to run massive jobs, which of course would exponentially increase the errors. Users would be getting blocked from using the bot every day. Abductive (reasoning) 00:29, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I would also support a temporary indefinite block on the bot until we can address the above issues. It has caused some duplication errors in the past, especially with the work and publisher parameters. sjones23 (talk - contributions) 02:08, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

To be clear my block was intended only as temporary. It was indefinite only because I have no idea how long it might take to resolve these issues. —David Eppstein (talk) 08:38, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

That is clear, last time it was a 72 hour block that had to be changed in to an indefinite one untill fixed as well. Redalert2fan (talk) 14:49, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Block reported on Github as well. Specific bug was already reported but nobody picked up fixing it (last check 1 Feb). Tracking added to this section. Redalert2fan (talk) 14:56, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Is the idea really that we want to enable more large batches of unsupervised work? I'd rather the bot be available for small supervised edits than always getting banned because of the unsupervised edits run amok.   — Chris Capoccia 💬 00:06, 10 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Batch work is a godsend when you have targetted issues and worklists. The issue here is that Abductive constantly abuses that feature and sends the bot on unsupervised, unreviewed, untargetted random trawls. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:40, 10 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

It's also breaking {{citation|journal=}} by changing |title= to |chapter=. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 12:59, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Are the various bugs listed in this section caused by newly added code, or are they bugs that have existed for a while and are only being reported now (presumably because of a sudden high number of them)? I ask because I am curious about the release and testing of new code. Is there a test page of citations that revised code runs against before being released? Or that could be used to agree on a desired outcome via discussion here? Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:26, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The various bugs are most likely due to a lack of maintenance over the past ~2 years. The current maintainers do not seem to have the time to respond to and fix all the bugs. Anyone can help out on at: https://github.com/ms609/citation-bot should they be able to code in PHP. All proposed updates will/are still currently checked by @AManWithNoPlan

The test suite of the bot can be found at: https://github.com/ms609/citation-bot/tree/master/tests/phpunit/includes Redalert2fan (talk) 14:25, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

When the bot got blocked last time and I dived in to submitting patches to this repo, I was expecting it to be abandonware. Turns out the maintainer, AManWithNoPlan, is not very active on wiki but is extremely active on GitHub, constantly writing patches, approving patches (my patches all got merged within 1 day), and deploying the bot. So I would not say that this repo is inactive or that the maintainer is overwhelmed. I think it is well maintained.

The bot has an extremely big and thorough automated test suite. It takes over half an hour to run, running thousands of tests and testing external APIs. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:07, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The back end indeed is very well maintained, perhaps my message gave a wrong impression. I was intending to refer to bugs reported on this page.

And good news, the test suite no longer takes 30 minutes, it still does all the same tests as before but I managed to enable multiple process execution so it now only takes 7-8 minutes. Redalert2fan (talk) 19:20, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Hehe no worries. I think it's normal for any complex software to have hundreds of open tickets, and for only the biggest bugs to get prioritized. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:26, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

For the last few days before the block my watchlist was overrun by huge numbers of Citation bot edits. For the last day I can still see in its entirety on my watchlist, February 1, among still-visible changes on my watchlist, 90 out of 189 of the edits were made by Citation bot, mostly or entirely "Suggested by Abductive". The bot was blocked mid-day my time so the rate of changes was even higher on earlier days. It is unclear to me whether the greatly increased rate of problems was caused by changes to the bot code, changes to the underlying sources from which the bot draws its metadata, or just the extremely high rate of bot activity caused by Abductive's runs. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:45, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Abductive's not the only one who used Citation bot. Some of us had to fix up some of the errors made after running that bot. sjones23 (talk - contributions) 18:49, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

That's why I said "still-visible changes". The 18 I linked at the top of this thread were from that day, for instance, but I didn't count them this time because they were no longer visible on my watchlist after edits by me and/or others. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:55, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I figured that would be the case. sjones23 (talk - contributions) 18:56, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, I checked. 89 of the 90 were suggested by Abductive; one was by Headbomb (who I should say has always used the bot responsibly and not on the large-scale unsupervised fishing expeditions we tend to see from Abductive). —David Eppstein (talk) 19:01, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

"Some of us had to fix up some of the errors made after running that bot."

Yes, but because we unleash the article on specific articles, and we check after the bot, we catch and fix those as they come, and report issues as they arise. The occasional thing can slip by (as evidenced by DE's find above). You only have to look in the archives to find hundreds of my bug reports and tweak requests over the years. Abductive, OTOH, triggers the bot willy nilly on as many articles as possible and rarely if ever checks for errors. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:49, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Since the errors above all stem from {{citation}}, maybe the bot could temporarily stop touching {{citation}} while things are resolved? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:50, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

That's not true of § issue and volume can't both be #163 and § Should not add useless nii.ac.jp and infoscience.epfl.ch urls above, at least. But there may be an observer effect here: I am reporting on things from my watchlist, which is disproportionately articles I have written, which disproportionately use Citation Style 2. The frequency of those issues among all articles may be very different. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:15, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I mean there are other bugs, but they definitely disproportionally affect {{citation}}. The amount of bad edits I see accross articles using mainly CS1 style is well under 5%. And likely well under 1% too. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:48, 3 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Headbomb: In any case, the {{Citation}} part might need to be changed to match the appropriate online sources we've been using like {{Cite web}}, {{Cite news}}, {{Cite press release}}, {{Cite journal}} and so on. sjones23 (talk - contributions) 08:28, 12 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Some of this seems like really trivial bickering. For the first case above, Patricia Grambsch, does it really matter whether Mayo Clinic is publisher or work? If anything, the publisher is Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research and it doesn't seem that wrong to say the website is Mayo Clinic. Also the whole URL is a page not found. A little disputable annoyance about publisher vs work turns into a major issue because a particular editor is sending the bot off on thousands of articles and not checking anything. Is that really a constructive way to use the bot?  — Chris Capoccia 💬 01:00, 6 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding the Mayo Clinic's website, it is a work published by Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research. sjones23 (talk - contributions) 08:12, 12 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

• The very last edit the bot made before it was blocked introduced this error, which I think is of a type not reported before. Abductive (reasoning) 00:39, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Anyway, something is messed up. Abductive (reasoning) 03:02, 2 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The exact pattern can be tweaked...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9780470132494.ch23 can be wiley.com ... ends in .ch# or has (whatever)/10.#/<ISBN13>.ch#

Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 08:42, 5 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

|format=pdf is added by the template so is not needed. The authors are correct. The work/publisher bug is reported above. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:04, 7 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Umm, |last1=John |first1=Gilliland is definitely wrong at ref 40 (permalink).

—Trappist the monk (talk) 19:10, 7 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

It mixed last and first, yes. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:06, 8 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

* 10.1002/lol2. (L&O Letters) full open access Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 07:17, 12 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

There's also for Limnology and Oceanography and subjournals

• 10.1002/lno. (If they are older than 3 years, e.g. February 2023) L&O
• 10.1002/lob. (If they are older than 3 years, e.g. February 2023) L&O Bulletin
• 10.1002/lom3. (If they are older than 3 years, e.g. February 2023) L&O Methods

*10.4319/lo. (all older than 3 years old, so all are free access) L&O

• 10.1002/loe2. (all older than 3 years old, so all are free access) L&O e-Lectures
• 10.4319/lol. (all older than 3 years old, so all are free access) L&O e-lectures
• 10.1215/21573689 (all older than 3 years old, so all are free access) L&O Fluids
• 10.1215/21573698 (all older than 3 years old, so all are free access) L&O Fluids
• 10.4319/lom. (all older than 3 years old, so all are free access) L&O Methods

Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 07:41, 12 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Also,

• 10.21105 (Open Journal) Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:17, 12 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Just to confirm I see you put 10.1002/lol2. here but 10.1002/lol2 (without the .) in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration/sandbox, which one is correct? --Redalert2fan (talk) 20:37, 12 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

same for loe2 Redalert2fan (talk) 20:43, 12 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

With dots. I fixed it. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:27, 12 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

In the module, the incipits of the doi suffix are treated as lua patterns (similar to regex). In lua patterns, like regex, a dot matches any character. If you really mean lol2. instead of loc2a, for example, then the lua pattern should be lol2%..

—Trappist the monk (talk) 22:40, 12 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Tweaked. Dots is what is meant. Feel free to correct. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:17, 12 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

And I'm personally not sure if there is support for "If they are older than 3 years" as in If the bot checks that so I'm just holding off on those for now. --Redalert2fan (talk) 20:37, 12 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Look for code around PNAS dois, with prefix 10.1073/pnas. There's a 6 month embargo on those, which I believe the bot handles (implemented around Aug 2021). Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:29, 12 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Nothing for special DOI handling comes up after a quick search for PNAS. Only specific handling for this is fixing capitalization.

10.1073/pnas is not in the free DOI list either. It is on a list of DOI's that need to be periodically checked by a human. It also is used in the a single test of the test suite for PMID and PMC expansion from a DOI. But all those things do not seem relevant to any embargo. Redalert2fan (talk) 00:13, 13 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Well then let's make that a feature request. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:10, 13 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Would probably require extra external API interaction(s) Redalert2fan (talk) 11:57, 13 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Patch for DOI's without any time limitations: https://github.com/ms609/citation-bot/pull/5476. Put a strike trough in the text above to mark which ones are done. --Redalert2fan (talk) 12:44, 13 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I believe all Ubiquity Press 10.5334/ and Copernicus Publications 10.5194/ journals are open access. Folkezoft (talk) 21:38, 14 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Pretty sure those are already covered by the bot. Do you have a diff of the bot not flagging them? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:45, 14 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I can confirm they are on the list, so they should be covered. Redalert2fan (talk) 11:06, 15 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Folkezoft pinging for feedback. Redalert2fan (talk) 12:43, 16 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Nothing further to add, I must have missed them on the list. Folkezoft (talk) 17:12, 16 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]