User talk:Citation bot

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Bot should add more than four editors and add displayeditors=29 if there are exactly 4 editors

Status

new bug / feature request (two related features in one request)

Reported by

– Jonesey95 (talk) 23:49, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

Type of bug

Improvement

What happens

Bot limits editors to four first names and four last names.

What should happen

Bot should retrieve all editors and add "displayeditors=29" parameter if there are exactly four editors.

Replication instructions

Run the citation expander on a citation that has four editors listed but more than four editors in the original work. Here's one example: Template:Cite_doi/10.1007.2F978-0-387-78705-3 (revert the citation to four editors and then run the bot on it).

We can't proceed until

Bot operator's feedback on what is feasible

Requested action from maintainer

Remove four-editor limit from bot code and add "displayeditors=29" to citations with exactly four authors.

The bot should add "displayeditors=29" if there are exactly four editors to avoid the Lua error described for exactly 9 authors above. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:49, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

Turns Wikilink for author into broken brackets

Status

new bug

Reported by

Bgwhite (talk) 06:43, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

Type of bug

Inconvenience

What happens

Turns |author=[[Stacy Mintzer Herlihy|Herlihy, Stacy Mintzer]], [[E. Allison Hagood|Hagood, E. Allison]], [[Paul A. Offit|Offit, Paul A.]] --> |author-separator=,|author1 = Herlihy|author2 = Stacy Mintzer]]|author3=Hagood|author4=E. Allison]]|author5=Offit|author6=Paul A.]]

Relevant diffs/links

Diff. Look at the bottom. This is the 6th time today I've come across this. I don't remember seeing this before, so it must in recent changes of the code. Update: Here's another example.

We can't proceed until

Bot operator's feedback on what is feasible

For

|author=[[Stacy Mintzer Herlihy|Herlihy, Stacy Mintzer]], [[E. Allison Hagood|Hagood, E. Allison]], [[Paul A. Offit|Offit, Paul A.]]

the expected output from the bot would be

|authorlink1=Stacy Mintzer Herlihy |last1=Herlihy |first1=Stacy Mintzer |authorlink2=E. Allison Hagood |last2=Hagood |first2=E. Allison |authorlink3=Paul A. Offit |last3=Offit |first3=Paul A.

The Graphene example is not the same problem: the ref had an unbalanced ]] and the bot simply removed that without altering the rest of the ref. --Redrose64 (talk) 08:13, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

Redrose64, Graphene is the same problem as there was no unbalanced bracket in the reference.

Original ref

|author = Wang, X.; Li, X.; Zhang, L.; Yoon, Y.; Weber, P. K.; Wang, H.; Guo, J.; [[Hongjie Dai|Dai, H.]]

After Citation bot:

|author-separator = ; |author1 = Wang |first1 = X. |last2 = Li |first2 = X. |last3 = Zhang |first3 = L. |last4 = Yoon |first4 = Y. |last5 = Weber |first5 = P. K. |last6 = Wang |first6 = H. |last7 = Guo |first7 = J. |last8 = Dai |first8 = H.]] |authorlink8 = Hongjie Dai

Bgwhite (talk) 17:29, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

Ah yes: I had assumed that since your first link (Vaccine controversies) was to the problem edit, the second link (Graphene) would also be to the problem edit. Instead, it seems that it's a link to your fix for the previous edit to that page. --Redrose64 (talk) 17:36, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

Before the bot edit, most of the cite journal templates in the Graphene article used a single author parameter to store the authors. Furthermore the wikilinks were fully functional before the bot edit. The bot is inserting a ridiculous number of new parameters in these templates in an attempt to produce clean metadata that no one will use. It would be better to leave the author parameters in these templates untouched. Boghog (talk) 07:01, 27 March 2014 (UTC)

Using |author= (singular) to store multiple names doesn't seem like a good idea. Before Citation Bot got to work, Revision 600716072 contained stuff like this:

• <ref name="Saito92">{{Cite journal |author =Saito, R. ''et al.'' |title = Electronic structure of graphene tubules based on C60|doi=10.1103/PhysRevB.46.1804 |journal = Physical Review B | volume = 46 | page = 1804 |year =1992|bibcode = 1992PhRvB..46.1804S |issue =3 |first2 =Mitsutaka |first3 =G. |first4 =M. }}</ref> - with a name and "et al" in "author" and then a load of first, but not last, names later in the list.
• <ref name=SiCplusH2>{{Cite journal |author = Riedl C., Coletti C., Iwasaki T., Zakharov A.A., Starke U. |year = 2009 |title = Quasi-Free-Standing Epitaxial Graphene on SiC Obtained by Hydrogen Intercalation |journal = Physical Review Letters |volume = 103 |page = 246804 |doi = 10.1103/PhysRevLett.103.246804 |pmid=20366220 |bibcode=2009PhRvL.103x6804R |issue = 24|arxiv = 0911.1953 }}</ref> - with multiple names in "author" separated by commas.
• <ref>{{Cite journal |laysummary = http://news.ufl.edu/2009/05/07/graphene/ |author = Wang, X.; Li, X.; Zhang, L.; Yoon, Y.; Weber, P. K.; Wang, H.; Guo, J.; [[Hongjie Dai|Dai, H.]] |journal = Science |volume = 324 |issue = 5928 |year = 2009 |pmid = 19423822 | doi = 10.1126/science.1170335 |title = N-Doping of Graphene Through Electrothermal Reactions with Ammonia |bibcode = 2009Sci...324..768W |pages = 768–71 }}</ref> - with multiple names in "author" separated by semi-colons.
• <ref>{{cite journal|author=[[Peter Debye|Debije P]], Scherrer P|year = 1916|title=Interferenz an regellos orientierten Teilchen im Röntgenlicht I|journal=Physikalische Zeitschrift|volume=17|page=277}}</ref> - lists of names in "author" with some of the names wikilinked.

I prefer using "last"/"first" for persons and "author" for committees, departments and organisations. Using "authorlink" is more robust and this works with both the "last"/"first" and "author" parameters.

Citation bot made a bit of a mess in the Graphene article.

Why did it do this to the patent?

• {{citation|patent|US|6667100}} ->
• {{Cite document|patent|US|6667100|ref = harv|postscript = <!-- Bot inserted parameter. Either remove it; or change its value to "." for the cite to end in a ".", as necessary. -->{{inconsistent citations}}}}

Why does the "last2" parameter get added at the end of the list of names instead of at the beginning? Why is "et al" not cleared from "author"? Why is "author" not changed to "last"/"first" to match the rest?

• <ref name=K>{{Cite journal | author = Chen, J. H. ''et al.'' |title = Charged Impurity Scattering in Graphene |doi=10.1038/nphys935 |journal = Nature Physics | volume = 4 | pages = 377–381 |year = 2008 |bibcode = 2008NatPh...4..377C | issue=5 | first2 = C. | first3 = S. | first4 = M. S. | first5 = E. D. | first6 = M.|arxiv = 0708.2408 }}</ref> ->
• <ref name=K>{{Cite journal | author = Chen, J. H. ''et al.'' |title = Charged Impurity Scattering in Graphene |doi=10.1038/nphys935 |journal = Nature Physics | volume = 4 | pages = 377–381 |year = 2008 |bibcode = 2008NatPh...4..377C | issue=5 | first2 = C. |last3 = Adam | first3 = S. |last4 = Fuhrer | first4 = M. S. |last5 = Williams | first5 = E. D. |last6 = Ishigami | first6 = M.|arxiv = 0708.2408 |last2 = Jang }}</ref>

Why did the bot duplicate the name found in "last2"/"first2" into "last3"/"first3"?

• <ref>{{cite journal |journal=Rev. Mod. Phys. |year=2002 |volume=74 |page=601 |doi=10.1103/RevModPhys.74.601 |bibcode=2002RvMP...74..601O |title=Electronic excitations: Density-functional versus many-body Green's-function approaches |last1=Onida |first1=Giovanni |last2=Rubio |first2=Angel |issue=2}}</ref> ->
• <ref>{{cite journal |journal=Rev. Mod. Phys. |year=2002 |volume=74 |page=601 |doi=10.1103/RevModPhys.74.601 |bibcode=2002RvMP...74..601O |title=Electronic excitations: Density-functional versus many-body Green's-function approaches |last1=Onida |first1=Giovanni |last2=Rubio |first2=Angel |last3=Rubio |first3=Angel |issue=2}}</ref>

Why are only "last2" to "last6" created and not "first2" to "first6"? Why is the "author" parameter with six names in it left untouched? This causes duplication in display.

• <ref name=nmscrolling>{{Cite journal |author = S. Braga, V. R. Coluci, S. B. Legoas, R. Giro, D. S. Galvão, R. H. Baughman |year = 2004 |title = Structure and Dynamics of Carbon Nanoscrolls |journal = Nano Letters |volume = 4 |page = 881 |doi=10.1021/nl0497272 |bibcode = 2004NanoL...4..881B |issue = 5 }}</ref> ->
• <ref name=nmscrolling>{{Cite journal |author = S. Braga, V. R. Coluci, S. B. Legoas, R. Giro, D. S. Galvão, R. H. Baughman |year = 2004 |title = Structure and Dynamics of Carbon Nanoscrolls |journal = Nano Letters |volume = 4 |page = 881 |doi=10.1021/nl0497272 |bibcode = 2004NanoL...4..881B |issue = 5 |last2 = Coluci |last3 = Legoas |last4 = Giro |last5 = Galvão |last6 = Baughman }}</ref>

Why was the working Wiley URL changed to a DOI attribute and then immediately marked as "dead"?

• <ref>{{cite web|url=http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.200904383/abstract |title=Graphene-On-Silicon Schottky Junction Solar Cells |date= APR，9，2010}}</ref> ->
• <ref>{{cite web|doi=10.1002/adma.200904383/abstract |title=Graphene-On-Silicon Schottky Junction Solar Cells |date= APR，9，2010|doi_brokendate=2014-03-24 }}</ref>

I have manually fixed those and very many other errors. Although the parameter names are now the same for all references, there is very little consistency in the format of some of the data in the parameters. I have fixed all the dates, but "first names" are a mixture of either first name or initials, the latter found both with or without periods. -- 79.67.241.76 (talk) 00:43, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

Another article today, Delimiter. It messed up three refs. Bgwhite (talk) 06:35, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

"Using |author= (singular) to store multiple names doesn't seem like a good idea." – Why not? Using a single parameter to store multiple authors produces more compact templates that don't overwhelm the surrounding wikitext. The only down side is that is doesn't produce clean author metadata. However how many consumers of Wikipedia citation metadata are there? I suspect not very many. I agree that it is perhaps more logical to store multiple authors in |authors= (plural). Nevertheless, per consensus and long established usage and consistent with the current {{cite journal}} documentation, full author lists can be stored in a single field called either "authors" or "author" without need for additional numbered author parameters. Boghog (talk) 07:07, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

With a free form input using "authors", there will be no consistency of display. Before Citation Bot got to work, the Graphene article contained the following names in references:

Extended content

Comma between names (last-first): |author=Hassel O, Mack H | - no period after initial | author = Bordag M., Fialkovsky I. V., Gitman D. M., Vassilevich D. V. | - period after initial Comma in name (last-first) |author = Lifshitz, I.M. | - period after each initial, but no space between initials | author = Carlsson, J. M. | - period after each inital and space between initials |author =Mouras, S. ''et al.'' | - plus "et al." in italics |author = Fraundorf, P. and Wackenhut, M. | - one initial, with "and" between names |author = DiVincenzo, D. P. and Mele, E. J. | - two initials, with "and" between names comma in and between names (last-first) |author =Wang, Z. F., Shi, Q. W., Li, Q., Wang, X., Hou, J. G., Zheng, H., et al. | Semi-colon between names (last-first): |author = Denis, P. A.; Iribarne F. | | author = Kasuya, D.; Yudasaka, M.; Takahashi, K.; Kokai, F.; Iijima, S. | |author = Yamada, Y.; Murota, K; Fujita, R; Kim, J; et al. | - plus "et al.", but not in italics Comma between names (first-last): |author = J.A. Alexander-Webber, A.M.R. Baker, T.J.B.M. Janssen, A. Tzalenchuk, S. Lara-Avila, S. Kubatkin, R. Yakimova, B. A. Piot, D. K. Maude, and R.J. Nicholas | - space, or not, between initials, with "and" before final entry |author = O. B. Shenderova, V. V. Zhirnov, D. W. Brenner | - initials before last name |author=Dima Bolmatov, Chung-Yu Mou | - full first name before last name |author = Xiaosong Wu, Yike Hu, Ming Ruan, Nerasoa K Madiomanana, John Hankinson, Mike Sprinkle, Claire Berger, Walt A. de Heer | - list of names, comma separated | author = Junfeng Liu, A. R. Wright, Chao Zhang, and Zhongshui Ma | - either initials or full first name, with "and" before final entry |author = Jinming Cai, Pascal Ruffieux, Rached Jaafar, Marco Bieri, Thomas Braun, Stephan Blankenburg, Matthias Muoth, Ari P. Seitsonen, Moussa Saleh, Xinliang Feng, Klaus Müllen & Roman Fasel | - full first name, with "&" before final entry | author = Sungjin Park, Dmitriy A. Dikin, SonBinh T. Nguyen, and Rodney S. Ruoff | - full first name, with "and" before final entry |author = S. Eigler | - initial and last name | author = A Castro Neto, ''et al.'' | - one name plus "et al." in italics | author=Hadar Steinberg, Gilad Barak, Amir Yacoby, et al | - list of names plus "et al." not in italics errors: |author =Saito, R. ''et al.'' | ... |first2 =Mitsutaka |first3 =G. |first4 =M. | - with "et al." followed by extra "first" parameters, but no matching "last" parameters | author = Bernatowicz | ... | author2 = T. J. | ... | last3 = Gibbons | first3 = Patrick C. | last4 = Lodders | first4 = Katharina | last5 = Fegley | first5 = Bruce | last6 = Amari | first6 = Sachiko | last7 = Lewis | first7 = Roy S. | - first entry spread over "author1" and "author2" |last=Igor A. Luk’yanchuk and Yakov Kopelevich | ... |first1=Igor|last2=Kopelevich |first2=Yakov | - two full names in "last" then "first1", "last2" and "first2" repeating parts of those names separate last and first parameters with coauthors: |last = Stolyarova |first = Elena |coauthors = et al. | - deprecated parameter containing "et al." |last=Lamas |first=C.A. |coauthors=D. C. Cabra, and N. Grandi | - deprecated parameter containing list of authors individual parameters, almost the "right" way: |first1=A. B. |last1=Kuzmenko |first2=E. |last2=Van Heumen |first3=F. |last3=Carbone |first4=D. |last4=Van Der Marel | - first names (mostly) as initials |last1=Min |first1=Hongki |last2=Sahu |first2=Bhagawan |last3=Banerjee |first3=Sanjay |last4=MacDonald |first4=A. | - first names (mostly) in full

There were also references that would not display because the reference name had been duplicated, four or five different date formats including dates like "SEP，03，2013" with Chinese characters in them and many other issues. Half the "et al." were in italics and half were not.

By changing to separate parameters for names, all names display in "last, first" order with the same separators throughout. The only variation is whether the first name is stated in full or is initials, and whether there are periods after initials or not. A bot can fix those entries to be consistent. If "et al." is specified it is currently in |authorn+1= where n is the highest numbered "lastn"/"firstn" parameter. The number of authors to display can also be set using the |display-authors= parameter. -- 79.67.241.76 (talk) 11:19, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

The format of the author names could just as easily been standardized using a single author parameter which would have avoided all the parameter bloat. There is no "house style" for citations, hence there is no single "right way" to format citations. A single author parameter was the predominate style before your edits. Per WP:CITEVAR, if you want to change this style, you should have obtained consensus for this change on the article talk page before your edits. Boghog (talk) 12:35, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

If you want to list more than one author in a parameter, then use |authors=. If you want to use a single author, use |author=. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 11:28, 12 July 2014 (UTC)

Journal Capitalization

Status

feature request

Reported by

Saimondo (talk) 16:21, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

Type of bug

Inconvenience: Humans must occasionally make immediate edits to clean up after the bot

What happens

Bot writes for example "Molecular and cellular biology" instead of "Molecular and Cellular Biology" by autofilling with PMID 9858585

Relevant diffs/links

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template%3ACite_pmid%2F9858585&diff=619550325&oldid=604044373

Replication instructions

autocomplete with PMID 9858585

We can't proceed until

Agreement on the best solution

Data on NCBI seems to be ok: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC83919/ where the Journal is written as "Mol Cell Biol." on the webpage and as "MOLECULAR AND CELLULAR BIOLOGY" in the full text pdf.

What to do in those cases? Include "Molecular and Cellular Biology" in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Citation_bot/capitalisation_exclusions in sush cases?

The same with

-"The Journal of biological chemistry" e.g. PMID 9858585

-"The Journal of cell biology" e.g. PMID 9763423

an other cases seen in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChangesLinked/Category:Cite_doi_templates ? Thanks--Saimondo (talk) 16:21, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

Actually PubMed lists the journal as "Molecular and cellular biology" in the webpage meta data. A very minor case of GIGO. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 02:31, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Perhaps its worth quoting the University of Chicago Manual of Style (14th ed.) on this matter:

"In regular title capitalization, also known as headline style, the first and last words and all nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and subordinating conjunctions (if, because, as, that, etc.) are capitalized. Articles (a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, for, nor), and prepositions, regardless of length are lowercased unless they are the first or last word of the title or subtitle. The to in infinitives is also lowercased."

On the other hand, it is common in library cataloging following MARC format to capitalize only the initial word, proper nouns, and, if the title begins with an article, that article and the following noun.

Wikipedia citations should follow citation style, rather than library cataloging style. In this case, the appropriate form would be "Molecular and Cellular Biology". The Wikipedia Manual of Style provides much the same advice on the capitalization of titles. SteveMcCluskey (talk) 18:40, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

I am not very familiar with PHP (the language that Citation Bot is coded in), but it would appear that there is a mb_convert_case function:

 $str = mb_convert_case($str, MB_CASE_TITLE, "UTF-8");

that can transform a string into title case (i.e., capitalize the first and last words of the title and all nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and subordinating conjunctions). This function would probably work well for most journal names. Boghog (talk) 19:15, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

This should be easy to implement, but I anticipate that some time down the line it will upset someone. Before I implement it, could we establish consensus and file a bot approval request if necessary? Thanks. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 08:49, 25 August 2014 (UTC)

How about your implement it for adding journal titles, but don't implement it for changing existing entries. Eventually, the list of titles that violate the rules will be built up, and then you can make it is a fix for existing journal titles. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 01:48, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

You are of course right, it´s no error it´s the catalog style NCBI is using. I don´t have the complete overview what capitalization format is obtained by the doi or issn vs pmid queries. But if you use the cite-> templates-> cite journal option here in the edit window and use autofill with the doi:10.1128/MCB.00698-14 you get "Molecular and Cellular Biology" if you use the same publications PMID 25022755 with autofill you get "Molecular and cellular biology". If capitalization means also harmonization I think few wikipedians would be against it.

Furthermore, as far as I understand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style#Titles_of_works the capitalization format like above should be ok (I have the impression that most journals use capitalization for their own names on their homepages/pdfs). Should we ask on the Manual of style talk page to see if there´s a consensus for capitalization? In case someone is interested, here is a recent reply of an email I (re-)sent to NCBI some time ago:

"...Standard cataloging requires that the first word in the full journal title begins with an upper case letter and remaining words (except for proper nouns) begin with lower case. Journal title abbreviations begin with all upper-case letters. I checked the XML data for several journals and found that each of the title listed in this manner. You can see several examples at the bottom of this document:

Fact Sheet: Construction of the National Library of Medicine Title Abbreviations http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/constructitle.html Sincerely, Ellen M. L. ...

-Original Message-

Dear NCBI Team, in the xml data of a specific article https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9858585?dopt=Abstract&report=xml&format=text the journal name is written "Molecular and cellular biology" and the abbreviation is "Mol Cell Biol.". I think the correct journal name should be "Molecular and Cellular Biology" as written on the journal homepage http://mcb.asm.org/content/19/1/612.long ." Saimondo (talk) 17:29, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Citation_bot/capitalisation_exclusions seems to be being ignored by the latest bot also. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 16:12, 27 September 2015 (UTC)

Issue & Number

Status

new bug

Reported by

It Is Me Here ^{t / c} 11:31, 3 September 2014 (UTC)

Type of bug

Inconvenience: Humans must occasionally make immediate edits to clean up after the bot

What happens

If an instance of {{cite journal}} has no |issue=φ, the Bot adds it, even if the {{cite journal}} already has |number=φ, throwing up a red error in read mode.

What should happen

It should do nothing (bypass {{cite journal}}s with |number=φ).

Relevant diffs/links

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Cite_doi/10.2307.2F1477803&diff=623994852&oldid=623994152

We can't proceed until

Agreement on the best solution

Here's another one, done by citation bot 579. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:34, 10 October 2014 (UTC)

author= converted to authors= and author=

Status

new bug

Reported by

– Jonesey95 (talk) 20:56, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Type of bug

Inconvenience: Humans must occasionally make immediate edits to clean up after the bot

What happens

author= converted to authors= and author= (redundant parameters)

What should happen

Bot should choose either |author= or |authors=

Relevant diffs/links

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Palm_oil&diff=629440195&oldid=628916065

We can't proceed until

"Operator"

See the diff. The bot converted author=Vega-López, Sonia et al. to authors=Vega-López, Sonia | author=Vega-López, Sonia|displayauthors=1|author2=and others.

There is a similar problem here, where |author= was left in place while |last1= etc. were added. The bot should choose one or the other. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:56, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

This edit is similar, but it also added "author2=et al." instead of the author's actual name. Setting |displayauthors= to 1 generates "et al." automatically. If someone manually removes |displayauthors=, the author names will be wrong. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:59, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

This bug is still present. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:39, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

As shown here the bot hasn't been edited since 1 September. Still needs a relief operator. LeadSongDog come howl! 04:45, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Bot unnecessarily adding last2, last3, last4, ... parameters

Status

unresolved ongoing bug

Reported by

Boghog (talk) 19:48, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Type of bug

Deleterious

What happens

When the full author list is stored in |author=, the bot adds |last2=, |last3=, |last4=, ... without the corresponding |first2=, |first3=, |first4=, ...

What should happen

If |author= contains the full author list, then the bot should not add |last2=, |last3=, |last4=, ... parameters

Relevant diffs/links

diff, diff, diff, diff, diff, diff, ...

We can't proceed until

Bot operator's feedback on what is feasible

Requested action from maintainer

If |author= contains a complete author list, do not unnecessarily add |last2=, |last3=, |last4=, ...

This is essentially the same bug that was previously reported here but it still occurring. Boghog (talk) 19:48, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

 Not a bug. Or perhaps, only to the extent that you consider the "lastn" (etc.) parameters to be errors.

 There have been several discussions on stuffing "full author lists" into the [c]author[s] parameters (e.g.: Module_talk:Citation/CS1/Archive_9#Coauthors_2). That is certainly a dubious practice, and perhaps it is time to deprecate it. But this is not the place for that. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:19, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Absolutely a bug. It is redundant and unnecessary to add lastn parameters to these citations. Even if one wanted such parameters, the bot has done this incorrectly by not also adding the corresponding firstn parameters and removing the author parameter. Furthermore this "correct" behavior would be in clear violation of WP:CITEVAR. The use of a single author parameter to store full Vancouver formatted author lists is widely used and has long been accepted. The bot should not make changes to citations that were not asked for. What is dubious practice is firstn, lastn nonsense that clutters up Wikitext to generate meta data that no one uses or should use. Wikipedia is not a reliable source and this extends to citations. Boghog (talk) 21:05, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

There is no redundancy in separating a list of authors into individual authors, or splitting an author's last name (which is the basis for alphabetizing) from the rest. And if you think that the "lastn" and "firstn" parameters are "nonsense that clutters up Wikitext" you probably aren't happy using citation templates in the first place, so perhaps you should just use straight text, manually formatted. Except, of course, where use of templates has already been established. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:13, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

Please look carefully at the diffs above. What citation bot has done is add lastn parameters and left the existing author parameter in place. As a consequence, author last names are now listed twice, once in the author parameter and again in lastn parameters. That is redundancy. You probably aren't happy using citation templates in the first place – nothing could be further from the truth. I quite often convert non-templated citations to {{cite journal}} templated citations (see this diff, there are thousands of similar examples in my edit history). Furthermore I maintain this template filling tool that generates {{cite journal}} formatted citations. Spliting author data between firstn, lastn parameters is an excessive level of data granularity that becomes unwieldy if there are a large number of authors. The Vancouver system provides a compact comma delimited list that unambiguously defines authors' first and last names. Boghog (talk) 05:40, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Any use of any of the citation templates in the wikitext — i.e., within <ref>...</ref> tags — introduces clutter, so it is inconsistent for you object to "clutter" only in regard of author parameters. (As a side note: I find all bibliographic details clutter the text, which is why I put them into a separate section.) If your complaint is that, after adding "lastn" parameters, the bot failed to remove the corresponding "author" parameters, then I would concur that is a bug. But that is just what you are asking for: to retain the questionable "author" parameters. As to splitting the author names: that is not a bug, that is the intended result. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:41, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

Good, we now both agree that there is a bug, but your solution is a clear violation of WP:CITEVAR. Storing full author lists in a single author parameter has not been deprecated and you have not explained why this use is questionable. Quite to the contrary, the use of "firstn, lastn" parameters becomes ridiculous if there are a large number of authors. Furthermore it is completely unnecessary if the author list follows the Vancouver system. The reason to use templates is so that the data can easily be parsed to provide a consistent rendering of the citations, wiki links, maintained by bots, etc. The Vancouver system author format can easily be parsed without the need for verbose firstn, lastn parameters. It just that the maintainers of Module:Citation/CS1 have resisted doing so. ({{vcite2 journal}} provides a possible way forward if functionality were added to this template to parse the author parameter to internally generate firstn, lastn parameters). I also occasionally use list defined references, but some editors object to these because it splits the text from the supporting sources. Regardless of whether these lists are a good idea or not, most articles don't use these. Finally, templates should be concise containing no more overhead than is necessary to do its job. I see the value of separate parameters for title, journal name, date, etc. but splitting author data into firstn, lastn parameters is an excessive and unnecessary degree of data granularity. So I disagree that I am being inconsistent. Boghog (talk) 03:35, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Neither is deprecated. The right behaviour is to standardize on the predominant type, or failing that, leave the existing form. The bot is doing neither, but that is not the egregious part. The bot is populating the same author in both ways, creating the appearance of two authors of the same name! LeadSongDog come howl! 03:48, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

This is ridiculous, the bot needs to be halted until this issue is fixed. The bot shouldn't add lastn, firstn, author, authors and similar unless none of the above is specified already, that's it, I don't get why it's even a matter of discussion. Ihaveacatonmydesk (talk) 17:16, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

No, we don't agree. Or rather: I will agree there is a bug if you agree that it is in retention of misused "author" parameters. But obviously you don't. If you want to argue about apppropriate "data granularity" or "clutter", fine, but those aren't bugs, so this is the wrong place. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 19:25, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

But yes, we do agree :-). We just need to replace |author= with |vauthors= and convince the maintainers of Module:Citation/CS1 to parse the later to internally create firstn, lastn parameters. Agreed? A brilliant idea that should make everyone happy. With this solution, we can reduce the clutter while still generating clean metadata and fully supporting |authorlinkn=, |display-authors=, etc. We can also introduce error checking to make sure the content of |vauthors= is compliant with the Vancouver system. Boghog (talk) 20:43, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, still no. The core issue is "data granularity" (as you call it), and particularly whether multiple authors ("author lists") should be allowed in a single parameter. (And possibly including whether authors' names should be split into first/last.) Whether the parameter involved is |author=, |authors=, |coauthor=, |coauthors=, |vauthors=, or any other parameter, is immaterial. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:32, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

It appears that you have taken the position that is self evident that that authors names must be split into different parameters with out providing a shred of evidence that this is true. The only rational reason for maintaining such a position is that is essential for parsing and error checking the data, and as I have explained above, neither is true. The Vancouver system provides an unambiguous method for parsing author data. When the data is formatted in this style, explicit firstn, lastn parameters become superfluous. These parameters can be generated internally on-the-fly. Boghog (talk) 22:00, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

No, but the issue of whether to split or not is deep enough it should be split off from the specifics of this bot's behavior. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:51, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

You still have not explained why splitting is essentiall, but I would agree this is not the place to have this discussion. Boghog (talk) 07:51, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

@Boghog: "Just parse it automatically" is a bad idea. See http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ for why. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:50, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

I totally agree. That is precisely the reason for proposing |vauthors= so that this type of parsing is only done when this specific parameter is specified. Boghog (talk) 22:06, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Another essential part of the proposal is error checking. The string would only be parsed if it conforms to the Vancouver system. If it does not conform, an error is thrown. Boghog (talk) 22:37, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

It's not a matter of agreeing or not agreeing: the page is fine here [1], then the bot intervenes and the templates are throwing errors [2]. So it is a bug. Ihaveacatonmydesk (talk) 20:32, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

edit: I took that as an example but the examples boghog linked are better suited. My example just proves that this bot has a history of messing with authors parameters and the devs just won't (or can't) fix its behavior. Ihaveacatonmydesk (talk) 20:36, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks Ihaveacatonmydesk. I didn't realize that some of the bot edits resulted in throwing errors. The problem is worse than I thought. This needs to be fixed immediately. Boghog (talk) 20:55, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

That was an old version of the bot, that particular issue might have been fixed. Still, I consider the issues it creates now as dire as those I linked. A bot should never need this amount of babysitting. Ihaveacatonmydesk (talk) 21:04, 27 October 2014 (UTC)

I would agree that this bot has been troublesome, which is why I tend to block it from pages I work on. I would also favor blocking it. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 20:55, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

I believe that the bug described here is a duplicate of one described above. I have found that e-mailing the bot's maintainer is more effective than posting here at eliciting a response to requests perceived as urgent. In the meantime, the undo link is always available to you, and there are instructions for blocking the bot from specific articles displayed on the bot's user page. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:01, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

It's not the bot that's been troublesome, so much as that needed behaviour of the bot keeps being shifted by changes to the template code. That said, the bot hasn't made an edit since 25 October, so there's no panic needed. LeadSongDog come howl! 21:14, 30 October 2014 (UTC)

Even if the addition of lastn was not a bug (and it clearly is), firstn should be added. (And it's still happening.) — Arthur Rubin (talk) 10:49, 26 November 2014 (UTC)

Hello! Anyone there??? Boghog (talk) 20:43, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

Workaround based on {{vcite2 journal}}

As a follow-up to the above discussion, a new {{vcite2 journal}} template with an optional |vauthors= parameter has been recently created. This close variant of {{cite journal}} supports assignment of multiple authors in Vancouver format (a comma separated list containing no semi colons or periods) to a single |vauthors= parameter that generates clean author metadata. In all other respects, {{vcite2 journal}} is identical to {{cite journal}}. Hence I would request that instead of adding last2, last3, last4, ... parameters to citations with Vancouver style author format that the bot instead replace {{cite journal | author}} with {{vcite2 journal | vauthors}}. Boghog (talk) 16:02, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

Since support for |vauthors= has now been added to all Citation Style 1 templates, it is no longer necessary to use {{vcite2 journal}}. Hence it should only be necessary to replace the |author= parameter name with |vauthors=. Boghog (talk) 08:01, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

Comments cause trouble

Status

new bug

Reported by

– Jonesey95 (talk) 02:54, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

Type of bug

Inconvenience: Humans must occasionally make immediate edits to clean up after the bot

What happens

Bot changed |publisher= to |DUPLICATE_publisher= in the absence of a duplicate publisher parameter

What should happen

Bot should not do that.

Relevant diffs/links

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fathima_Beevi&diff=629715024&oldid=610463414

We can't proceed until

Bot operator's feedback on what is feasible

As far as I can tell, there were no duplicated parameters when the bot did its edit. – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:54, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

How did you get this? The bot is not currently working.--Auric talk 13:49, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

The edit is date-stamped 15 October 2014. I just discovered it yesterday while going through Category:Pages with citations using unsupported parameters. – Jonesey95 (talk) 15:48, 9 November 2014 (UTC)

Here's another similar one, adding DUPLICATE to |archiveurl= and |archivedate=. – Jonesey95 (talk) 19:53, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

This looks like it related to comments in the references in all cases. This appears to be a common thread in bot bugs on this page. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 04:45, 1 February 2015 (UTC)

Adding bogus |year= https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wealden_Line&diff=629805699&oldid=629545497

This doesn't expand: typical.{{ref doi|10.1111/j.1096-3642.1950.tb01699.x}} listed [http://www.iucnredlist.org/ List<!-- Bot -->]

DUPLICATE_ added: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=509th_Composite_Group&diff=636859536&oldid=636220208

DUPLICATE_ added: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shapley%E2%80%93Folkman_lemma&diff=655089982&oldid=651991293

This bug appears to still be present in the current version, as of this date stamp. Pinging Fhocutt (WMF). – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:46, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Give it another try? I tested the dev version (now the actual version) on testwiki and it didn't add DUPLICATE: https://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User%3AFhocutt_%28WMF%29%2FCitation_bot_test&type=revision&diff=243602&oldid=243601 . --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 23:04, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

It's still doing it here on en.WP. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:15, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Bot added |first1= when |first= was already present

Status

new bug

Reported by

– Jonesey95 (talk) 01:05, 10 November 2014 (UTC)

Type of bug

Inconvenience

What happens

Bot added |first1= when |first= was already present

What should happen

Bot should avoid creating redundant parameters

Relevant diffs/links

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template%3ACite_pmid%2F17504652&diff=633165136&oldid=587566456

We can't proceed until

Bot operator's feedback on what is feasible

issue vs. volume confusion for journals with no volumes

Status

new bug

Reported by

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 01:38, 11 November 2014 (UTC).

Type of bug

Inconvenience

What happens

for the journal ZookKeys changes the issue number to a volume number.

What should happen

Should understand that this number is an issue number with this particular journal

Relevant diffs/links

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aegista_diversifamilia&diff=630393100&oldid=629974617 - see discussion here

Replication instructions

A similar ZooKeys doi template

We can't proceed until

Bot operator's feedback on what is feasible

Requested action from maintainer

Build in specific knowledge of this journal's numbering scheme. Possibly a list of one, unless and until other similar items are found.

http://search.crossref.org/?q=10.3897/zookeys.445.7778 The cross-ref data is wrong. So, it is not a bot bug, but the bot could easily fix it. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 19:15, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Bot found |first9=LH et al. and added |author10=and others and |displayauthors=9

Status

new bug

Reported by

– Jonesey95 (talk) 05:36, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

Type of bug

Inconvenience

What happens

Bot found |first9=LH et al. and added |author10= and |displayauthors=9 without modifying |first9=, leaving the citation displaying "et al. et al." after the ninth author's first name.

What should happen

Bot should remove "et al." from |first9=.

Relevant diffs/links

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plasmodium_species_infecting_primates&diff=next&oldid=633522375

We can't proceed until

Bot operator's feedback on what is feasible

Bot used "author4=and others" in place of real author #4 on a 7-author reference.

Status

new bug

Reported by

Srleffler (talk) 12:55, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Type of bug

Inconvenience

What happens

The article cited has seven authors. Human-entered reference listed two and "last3=et al.". The bot expanded the list to seven with "displayauthors=3", but made "author4=and others" in place of the real author4's name. Author 4 was omitted completely from the list.

Relevant diffs/links

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dispersion_polymerization&diff=637280081&oldid=637163057

We can't proceed until

Bot operator's feedback on what is feasible

duplicated last name

Status

Reported by

TomS TDotO (talk) 19:48, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

What happens

In three different citations which seem to be well-formed, the bot added on parameter last2 (last 3, etc.) for some of the authors. I am leaving the change as is for the moment, for it should only cause inconvenience (temporary confusion) to the reader. So you can see for yourself what happened - see "Yamada", for example. But, of course, someone else may revert the changes (as I will after a while)

Relevant diffs/links

Evolution of mammalian auditory ossicles

We can't proceed until

Agreement on the best solution

Requested action from maintainer

None. Just thought that you should know.

Butchered author names

Status

new bug

Reported by

— Smuckola(talk) 22:33, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

What happens

butchered author names

Relevant diffs/links

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mach_(kernel)&diff=next&oldid=652183542

We can't proceed until

Agreement on the best solution

By the way, how can you justify leaving an unmaintained bot in service?

Deprecated parameter |author-separator= added

Status

new bug

Reported by

– Jonesey95 (talk) 23:16, 19 March 2015 (UTC)

Type of bug

Inconvenience

What happens

Deprecated parameter |author-separator= added

Relevant diffs/links

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mach_(kernel)&diff=next&oldid=652183542

We can't proceed until

Bot operator's feedback on what is feasible

|display-authors=9 no longer necessary for exactly nine authors

Status

new bug

Reported by

– Jonesey95 (talk) 01:32, 22 March 2015 (UTC)

Type of bug

Improvement

What happens

The bot adds |display-authors=9 when there are exactly nine authors.

What should happen

The bot should not add |display-authors=9 when there are exactly nine authors.

We can't proceed until

Bot operator's feedback on what is feasible

Requested action from maintainer

Remove code that adds |display-authors=9 when there are exactly nine authors. See Category:CS1 maint: display-authors

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T115162

The bot is still inserting this parameter (see the Hongying citation), but it is not necessary. Fhocutt (WMF), can you disable this portion of the code? – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:29, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

@Jonesey95: The reasoning for keeping this appears to be that it is better to show the 9th name rather than having et al. hide only one name. I can take it out easily, but has that reasoning changed? --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 02:00, 23 October 2015 (UTC)

Looks like the testwiki cite journal template may be out of date? https://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Fhocutt_%28WMF%29/Citation_bot_test&oldid=244444 shows the et al., which the same citation on enwiki does not. --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 02:23, 23 October 2015 (UTC)

The CS1 citation module (and its predecessor code) that renders {{cite journal}} and similar templates used to display "et al." when exactly nine authors were listed, for reasons too boring to go into. The module no longer does that; it displays all authors unless |display-authors=x is used (where x is a number less than the number of authors in the cite template). So |display-authors=9 is redundant when there are exactly nine authors listed. – Jonesey95 (talk) 02:46, 23 October 2015 (UTC)

Great, thanks for the explanation. I'll just take that special case out, then. I've updated the CS1 module on testwiki as well. --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 23:14, 23 October 2015 (UTC)

BTW, I wasn't trying to be coy or evasive by saying it was too boring to get into. Here's the boring reason relating to backwards compatibility and eventually updating the module after we cleaned up all of the old citations with a ton of help from Citation Bot. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:07, 24 October 2015 (UTC)

Bot creates CS1 errors when attempting to parse authors= parameter containing many names

Status

new bug

Reported by

Stamptrader (talk) 21:07, 19 April 2015 (UTC)

Type of bug

Deleterious

What happens

Bot keeps only the first names and loses all of the last names but one

What should happen

lastn= must be populated as well, not only firstn=

Relevant diffs/links

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Numerical_weather_prediction&diff=657129174&oldid=653604525

We can't proceed until

Agreement on the best solution

Requested action from maintainer

either fix so it no longer creates errors or disable this function

Creating spurious fields for last name of editors

Status

new bug

Reported by

AxelBoldt (talk) 22:16, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

Type of bug

Deleterious: Human-input data is deleted or articles are otherwise significantly affected. Many bot edits require undoing.

What happens

If the bot finds an author-field containing several names, it creates last-fields for all but the first of these authors without modifying the author-field, resulting in author duplication in the reference.

Relevant diffs/links

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Red_blood_cell&diff=641670942&oldid=628344854

We can't proceed until

Agreement on the best solution

Edits citations inside of nowiki tags

Status

new bug

Reported by

Izno (talk) 20:55, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

Type of bug

Inconvenience

What happens

The bot removed an accessdate from a citation without a URL (correctly) where the citation was used an example (and in this case happened to be wrapped in <nowiki>...</nowiki>.

What should happen

I'm not sure, but I think my suggestion is that the bot should not touch citations inside <nowiki>...</nowiki>.

Relevant diffs/links

//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Help_talk:Citation_Style_1&curid=34112310&diff=659936244&oldid=659925010

We can't proceed until

Agreement on the best solution

Duplicating jstor

Status

new bug

Reported by

Frietjes (talk) 14:11, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

Type of bug

Deleterious

What happens

Bot replaces a jstor url with a jstor parameter, but does not check to see if there is already a jstor parameter in the citation. hence, if there is already a blank jstor parameter, the jstor link is effectively deleted.

What should happen

Bot should first remove the empty jstor parameter, and/or any completely duplicate jstor parameters (i.e., jstor parameters with the exact same value).

Relevant diffs/links

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Noye's_Fludde&type=revision&diff=663532320&oldid=637085644

Replication instructions

create a citation with both a jstor url and a jstor parameter in the citation template

We can't proceed until

Operator<

Citation bot progress

I've been getting the parts of Citation bot that involve manual activation working again. The development version is up and running on testwiki right now. The development version is set up to only run on testwiki and will neither read nor edit enwiki pages. If you want to help test, create a page on testwiki that has broken citations. I have been mostly using old regression tests in my sandbox.

To test doibot, the tool that is hosted on Labs:

• Create or find your test page on testwiki.
• Go to https://tools.wmflabs.org/citations-dev/doibot.html.
• Follow the directions: enter the page title (for instance "User:Fhocutt (WMF)/Sandbox"), click "Submit query", and wait for the bot to work. It may take up to a minute or two, depending on how many citations are on the page and whether it is in "thorough mode".
• Please leave comments, bugs, or feedback on the associated task in our issue tracking system.

To test the citation expander gadget:

• Add the contents of https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fhocutt_%28WMF%29/common.js to your own common.js user subpage on testwiki
• Create or find your test page with broken or incomplete citations on testwiki. If the gadget is loaded properly, there should be a "Citations" button beside "Show changes". Click the button.
• It should briefly take you to an interstitial page and then, after expanding the citations, back to the "show changes" edit page on testwiki. If you use NoScript or some other extension that blocks clickjacking, this will not work.
• Fix the citations as needed, and save your changes.
• Please leave comments, bugs, or feedback on the associated task in our issue tracking system.

My goal here is to get this bot working roughly as it previously was when it was blocked so that it can be unblocked, with a focus on manually activated functions which should be easier to check. If someone familiar with both PHP and current enwiki citation policies is interested in bringing the bot up to date with current policy, I am happy to give them an overview of how it functions and review the changes they make.

--Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 01:10, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your efforts to get this bot up and running again. There are a number of unresolved bugs listed above that need to be resolved before this bot is put in operation. In particuluar:

• Deprecated {{cite pmid}}, {{cite doi}}, etc. templates (see discussion). The bot should no longer create templates containing citation data that are transcluded, rather these templates should be substituted. Please note that User:Dexbot has been systematically substituting the existing transcluded templates.
• New |vauthors= parameter (see discussion). Instead of adding redundant |lastn= to citations that already contain Vancouver style formatted authors stored in a single |author= parameter, the bot should replace |author= parameter name with |vauthors=, support for which has been recently added to all Citation Style 1 templates. Boghog (talk) 03:40, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your feedback. The bot has four main parts: the manually activated doibot tool, the citation-expander gadget, the automated citation checking bot, and (4) the bot that creates the templates. Due to the deprecation I don't intend to do anything with the template-creating portions. The citations-expander tool/gadget simply fills in the edit box with changes, so it doesn't actually use the bot account and still makes it possible for users to check the citations before submission--I think that a version of that can be up and running very soon, with the caveat that the expander portion hasn't been substantially updated since the bot was blocked. It sounds like you want at least a minimum number of bugs fixed/updates made to the automatic expander before the bots (the doibot tool and the automated citation checker) are unblocked. A list of what is essential and what is nice to update for each of these would be very helpful. Because the doibot tool is manually activated, I wonder if it would be possible to open it for use with appropriate "You are responsible for the edits that you make and this tool is outdated; please check the edits made with this tool to ensure they comply with the relevant policies" warnings on the tool page. Community Tech is currently prioritizing quick and high-impact fixes as we get up and running. --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 19:55, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

Likewise, thanks for the explanation. Just to restate the above as a list:

1. citation-expander gadget
   1. editing mode, makes changes only to the active edit window and requires the user to save the page
   2. viewing mode, makes and commits edits without further user intervention
2. manually activated citation bot tool
3. the automated citation checking/expander bot
4. bot that creates the transcluded {{cite pmid}}, etc. templates

Just to be sure, you are proposing to reactivate initially only #1-1 and not #1-2? This in theory is safer, however some editors will undoubtedly use the gadget without carefully checking the edit before saving. Also, it isn't exactly clear which parts are currently blocked. As far as I can determine, none of the parts of the bot are currently in operation. Finally, I would like to see at a minimum, the redundant |lastn= issue fixed before any part of the bot is put back into operation as this bug made a mess in a significant number of articles that had to be cleanup manually. Boghog (talk) 21:41, 4 September 2015 (UTC)

#1-1 is not being blocked, but the gadget and the file it talks to (text.php) both need updating. I believe I've fixed what needs fixing there, leaving aside the issues with the centrally-used expander. #1-2 can't function on enwiki because Citation bot is blocked, but I believe I've fixed the underlying main problems in my fixes to doibot.php. #2 also uses Citation bot and doibot.php so should have the same status as #1-2. #3 uses the Citation bot 1 account, and I doubt I have fixed the underlying problems. #4 will not be worked on unless any of that code can be used for purposes besides updating the deprecated templates.

I'd like to activate #1 and #2 whenever possible, but #1-1 is a good first target because it can be activated without acting, strictly speaking, as a bot and so without unblocking any of the bot accounts. I don't currently have access to the central repository, just the dev one, which is why none are actually activated--take a look at the versions that use testwiki if you haven't already, and it'll give you an idea of what it does right now. Regarding people clicking save without checking, I can easily make the redirect for #1-1 not load automatically and can put some scary "Warning, outdated, use at your own risk" text on the interstitial page to address some of that. I'll take a look at the |lastn= issue and hope to get that fixed reasonably quickly. --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 00:03, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

@Boghog:: Let me see if I understand the |lastn= issue. Vancouver style displays the authors as a comma-separated list, but each author's name may vary (may use periods or not, and corporate authors are credited with ((Corporation Name))). Citation Style 1 templates allow for either the use of the |vauthors= parameter or for a standard |firstn=/|lastn= list when |name-list-format=vanc. Looking above, I see there is some disagreement on whether it's preferred to list all the names and only display some of them, or only provide the shortened list. Regardless which approach is taken (I am inclined to use the |name-list-format=vanc parameter, but if it has been discussed please point me to the discussion), the bot should pick one and stick with it: properly replace the Vancouver list of names with a list of first and last, and add the vanc tag, or correctly identify a Vancouver-formatted list (I am not sure how easy this will be, with the allowed variation) and replace |authors= with |vauthors=. Am I missing anything? --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 01:09, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

@Fhocutt (WMF): Thanks for the clarification on what functions of the tool can be reactivated without unblocking. Concerning the format of Vancouver style style authors, the format is very regular and does not vary. In particular, periods are not allowed. If the value of |vauthors= contains a period, {{cite journal}} generates a .

The format is documented here:

• Patrias K (2011) [2007]. "Author for Journal Articles". In Wendling P (ed.). The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors, and Publishers [Internet] (2^nd ed.). Bethesda (MD): National Library of Medicine (US). {{cite book}}: External link in |chapterurl= (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help) (Please note that the period at the end of the author list is not included in the |vauthor= parameter value but is included in the rendered citation.)

The ((Corporation Name)) are not very common and in fact the Wikipedia template filling that generated the majority of these Vancouver style citation completely leaves these out (compare for example PMID 26336537 with the tool output). Also note that previously, the tool generated a citation using a single |author=, this has recently changed to |vauthors=.

Finally the various author parameters are compared here and a rationale for |vauthors= may be found here. Boghog (talk) 07:40, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

Patrias requires Romanization to remove diacritics etc. cs1|2 does not follow this rule and allows all letters from the Unicode Latin character sets. See Help:CS1 errors#Vancouver style error for a list of these characters.

There are cases where Vancouver system allows lowercase letters in initials. Module:Citation/CS1 cannot know if a lower case letter is appropriate (multi-letter Romanization of Greek or Cyrillic) or not so these are flagged as errors. PMID sometimes uses lowercase letters in initials of hyphenated Chinese given names. If the bot is fetching names from PMID, it should not attempt to correct or mask the error but rather leave it so that human editors can determine if the lower case initial is appropriate. PMID also has gotten some (particularly Dutch) names with nobiliary particles wrong where the first letter (usually lowercase) of the particle becomes the second initial (see the CS1 errors help page). These too should not be auto-corrected or masked. Where Unicode U+2019, right single quotation mark, appears in a name, this should be fixed by replacement with the standard typewriter apostrophe.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 11:00, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

Basically working OK for me, but then it always worked for me before. Mostly just expanding references from a bibcode or doi. One worrying "regression" is that "cite conference" references are blanked, which didn't used to happen. Lithopsian (talk) 13:01, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

Something that happens with the gadget, and always did happen, is that it croaks when there are more than a handful of references. Then it blanks the whole article (still in edit mode, not yet saved). The wmflabs tool never did this for me, even on the same article, just the toolbar gadget. Lithopsian (talk) 13:30, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

@Lithopsian: Thanks for testing! Do you have a diff for the blanked "cite conference" references? Blanking large articles probably has something to do with how the browser is handling the requests, but I'm not sure on the specifics there. If I were rewriting this I would find some other way to handle that. --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 04:03, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Good news! I don't think the cite conference problem is being caused by citation bot. testwiki doesn't seem to have that template so they always display blank. Just pasting a cite conference template into my sandbox and using the citations gadget on it works fine. Saving it gives a blank redlink. Lithopsian (talk) 10:16, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@Boghog and Fhocutt (WMF): I don't think it is going to be feasible to have the bot replace the |author= parameter name with |vauthors= when the existing author list is a proper Vancouver-style list. That is a task better suited to humans, IMO. Even if we build something that works today, as soon as the Vancouver error checking is changed the bot will probably be broken again. We should avoid building code that is complicated and fragile, unless we absolutely need to. My suggestion would be to simplify where possible. For example, if the existing citation template includes any author parameters (author, authors, vauthors, last, last1, etc.), Citation bot should just leave them alone and not try to add any author parameters. That way it is less likely to cause unexpected problems. This is just a suggestion though. Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 23:44, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

General comment - leaving author coding untouched is a very good idea, which was suggested here long ago, and was implemented at some time. Then the bot started reformatting authorlists, which caused various errors, partly due the continuous changes in citation templates. Materialscientist (talk) 00:19, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

I agree that writing fragile code to constraints that are likely to change is generally a poor idea. In this case I think that it does make more sense to stop the bot from changing existing authorlists. I don't think that should be too much more difficult than figuring out how to mechanically detect a Vancouver style list and implementing that (both sound like they will take some work with the current codebase). --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 04:13, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@Ryan Kaldari (WMF) and Fhocutt (WMF): Agreed that it would be far better to leave the |author= lists alone than to do what the bot had been doing. IMHO, the error checking in |vauthors= is way more complicated than it needs to be. Worrying about rare capitalization errors in first name initials in PubMed citations is not a good use of anyones time. The much simpler error checking in {{vcite2 journal}} that catches 99.9% errors in |vauthors= lists in my opinion is good enough. But OK, at least if the bot does not introduce new author errors, I will not object if the bot restarts. Boghog (talk) 05:03, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Handling multiple authors

@Boghog, Materialscientist, and Ryan Kaldari (WMF): I've been looking into the way the bot handles and expands multiple authors. The main issues seem to come from an odd choice to reassign several parameters (including authors and coauthor(s)) to author2, which I have temporarily fixed. There are also some hiccups when expanding "et al."--for some formattings of author lists, the list of names is not recognized as a list, so it thinks the list is a single author and fetches the rest of the author names because it looks like there are missing parameters.

My questions:

• Are there any changes which should be made for multiple authors?
• How should "et al."/"and others" be handled? Should they be left as-is? Should they be expanded when adding authors as new parameters? Should they be expanded from an existing author parameter? Is there any current consensus on this?
• If there are no cases where changes should be made for multiple authors, I propose a rule of "if a single author-related parameter is already present, it should not be changed and no more author parameters should be added, even if the rest of the citation is expanded". How does this sound? --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk)

If there is any author information already in the citation template, I think it's a minefield for us to try to modify it, especially now that Vancouver-style author lists are part of the mix. Even if we wrote code to cover all the dozens of contingencies, one of them would probably break before the month was out. I like your suggested rule. It seems like the best plan to me. I'm even reluctant for us to support adding author data in the case where no author parameters are currently present, but I guess there's a lot less chance to totally screw up the citation in that case. The worst we can do is add authors in the wrong style for the article, which hopefully humans will not mind fixing too much. Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 01:34, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

I think that copy/pasting author names can be enough of a pain, particularly for citation styles that do use individual first/last params, that it's a good idea to automatically insert some author details, even if it's not in precisely the right way. How about et al.? I suspect that runs into arguments about how much data/metadata to include in citations, but if having the rest of the authors included automatically is useful then it might make sense for the bot to handle that case. It's a complicated enough one, though (can have all authors et al., first + rest of authors et al., various coauthor params...) that it may be best to just not touch it. Thoughts? --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 02:51, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

First do no harm. I agree that it is best not to touch it. Boghog (talk) 03:45, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

I am hopeful that you are aware of |display-authors=etal in the CS1 style. If you find more authors in a particular citation, maybe you should just leave the existing authors alone and then add that, if display-authors isn't already set. I--of course--prefer more metadata to less, so, that's a separate solution. --Izno (talk) 03:48, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Using "et al." in an author parameter will put an article in Category:CS1 maint: Explicit use of et al., a maintenance category. The proper way to generate "et al." in a citation is to use the |display-authors= or |display-editors= parameter. See {{Cite_web#Display_options}} for more details.

As for your proposed rule, I would rather see the bot remove the content of a lone author parameter and then fill in all of the authors. Editors could then choose to display as many as they want by adding |display-authors=. If you go with the proposed rule, it would need to be accompanied by a way to force filling in additional author names. For example, with some versions of the Citation Bot, you could often remove the content of one or more parameters to persuade the bot to re-fill those parameters.

On a similar note, see at least one bug report section above about Citation Bot's limit of four editors. I can explain that to you at length in a separate thread if you like; the "Display options" section linked above has a short explanation. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:51, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

I'd prefer this: fill in all authors if there are none (using the most "stable" format), don't touch authors if anything is already filled in. This way the bot will not generate new errors. Editors willing to refill authors could blank the author fields, and those who prefer other author formats might use Help:Citation_tools or ask to create additional gadgets like those. Materialscientist (talk) 04:04, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

@Materialscientist: How are those editors to be alerted to the fact that other authors exist? Perhaps a hidden comment appended to the existing author field? LeadSongDog come howl! 18:58, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Just click the doi/pmid/etc. Materialscientist (talk) 22:27, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

@LeadSongDog: The "et al." in one or more of the author parameters, and the presence in the maintenance category, should indicate that there are more authors. --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 21:07, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Well, "just click" does nothing in the edit window, and only comes into play once rendered. Worse, most editors will simply presume the existing citation is already correct. They need some cue to tell them to check "this" one, of all the citations in an article. Where the bot detects a discrepancy between the citation and the crossref/pubmed/etc database, it should drop a hint for humans, since it won't be making the revision itself. LeadSongDog come howl! 03:35, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

The proper place for et al. is not the author or editor name-holding parameters; use |display-authors=etal and or |display-editors=etal.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 21:16, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

I'm aware of this. However, per discussion above this tool is going to leave that for humans or less fragile/better maintained citation tools to fix. --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 21:43, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes, good idea. I have cleaned up not a few instances of mushedtogetherauthors and find that there are enough subtleties that I think any parsing of authors should be the specific task of a dedicated, specialized bot. Similarly for the presence of explicit "et al.": that likely requires additional information beyond what is immediately present, which is probably more of stretch than Citation bot should attempt. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 19:21, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Comparison of author parameters
Feature	|lastn=, |firstn=	|vauthors=	|authors=
Clean author metadata
|author-link= support
|displayauthors= support
Author error checking
Compact

@J. Johnson: Please consider using the |vauthors= parameter (see table to the right) that is supported by CS1 style citation templates and easily parses Vancouver style comma delimited "mushedtogetherauthors". Why insist on an "absurdnumberofsuperfluousauthorparameters"? (see rationale) Boghog (talk) 20:05, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Boghog: |vauthors= is specific for Vancouver style, which I – and most other editors outside of the medical topics – do not use. I would also dispute your implicit claim that vauthors= provides "clean author metadata", or that last/first does not allow "author error checking". I also deem the rationale for vauthors to be incorrect. However, all that is off-topic for this discussion. My point is that tackling any kind of "authors" problem is sufficiently challenging that it ought to be handled separately from other kinds of cleanup. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk)

@J. Johnson: I would dispute your implicit claim that |vauthors= provides clean author metadata – that is not an implicit claim, that is an explicit claim (see explanation) that really does work. Please test |vauthors= with a metadata harvester like Zotero. Author first and last names are cleanly parsed and passed on to external citation manager applications. I would dispute .. last/first does not allow "author error checking" There is no standardization of the rendered output of the |firstn= parameter whereas |vauthors= insists on a standard format (first initial + an optional middle initial and in no cases, periods). I agree that a separate bot that respects WP:CITEVAR should handle author parameter cleanup. Boghog (talk) 21:21, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Again, this is not the place to discuss the relative merits of vauthors=, etc. But I am pleased we agree on having a separate bot for handling authors. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:31, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Request for examples

I'm continuing work on author-handling. Having good examples to work from will help me handle tricky and special cases. If you have citations that have been problematic in the past or which you think would make good test cases, please either drop a link to the diff + line number here or copy the to-be-fixed citation to the sandbox I've been using on testwiki: User:Fhocutt (WMF)/Sandbox. Thank you all for the input and suggestions so far, and any resources you can offer here. --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 21:42, 15 September 2015 (UTC)

See above for sample bug reports related to author names:

• author= converted to authors= and author=
• Bot unnecessarily adding last2, last3, last4, ... parameters
• Bot added |first1= when |first= was already present
• Bot found |first9=LH et al. and added |author10=and others and |displayauthors=9
• Bot used "author4=and others" in place of real author #4 on a 7-author reference
• duplicated last name
• Butchered author names
• Deprecated parameter |author-separator= added
• |display-authors=9 no longer necessary for exactly nine authors
• Bot creates CS1 errors when attempting to parse authors= parameter containing many names
• Remove display-authors=etal when inserting all the remaining authors

Let us know if you need additional feedback and testing. – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:36, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Thank you! I've added the examples above to my testwiki sandbox.

Please test the tool now. It should not modify authors when author name-related parameters exist, including the new vauthors. However, it should fetch and expand author data when available if there are no existing parameters. You can help by reporting bugs here or at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T111891.

Known issues:

• Will still modify editors, regardless of whether editor name parameters are present. Does this need to be fixed for the tool/bot to be used?

It should convert curved quotes to "'" in fetched author data, but I don't have any references to serve as a test case for this. If you do, please leave them here or in my testwiki sandbox. --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 01:03, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

Looking for test cases

This is a good candidate for starting to add automated tests to the bot's codebase. You can help by commenting here or on the Phabricator task with examples of citations with strange formatting and edge cases--spaces in strange places, multiline parameters or values, and similar. The idea here is to have a better way to make sure that the bot continues to parse template parameters and values correctly, even when changes are made to the code. Your help is appreciated. --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 03:41, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

You can start with some of the bug reports on this page:

• Bot should add more than four editors
• Issue & Number
• Comments cause trouble
• Bot 579 added doi-broken-date when doi-inactive-date was already present
• |display-authors=9 no longer necessary for exactly nine authors
• Removes accessdate for no-URL citations inside of nowiki tags
• Edit of talk page
• Hyphens to dashes problem
• Duplicating jstor
• Citation unrendered because of syntax error

Have fun! – Jonesey95 (talk) 13:37, 3 October 2015 (UTC)

Thanks! Most of those weren't touched by this part of the code, but I added a couple of them as examples to make sure the part I was modifying didn't change them. On the strange duplicate parameter issue when comments are present, the current version of the bot doesn't do that, at least on testwiki: https://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User%3AFhocutt_%28WMF%29%2FCitation_bot_test&type=revision&diff=243602&oldid=243601 . --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 22:57, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Citation unrendered because of syntax error

Status

new bug

Reported by

– Jonesey95 (talk) 03:42, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Type of bug

Inconvenience

Relevant diffs/links

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Latamoxef&type=revision&diff=682190504&oldid=682190396

We can't proceed until

Bot operator's feedback on what is feasible

See the citation containing DOI 10.1021/jm00193a001. The citation displays its raw text instead of a rendered citation. I thought this was caused by a line break, but I think it is unescaped square brackets in |title= or something similar. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:42, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes, the Lua module is indeed probably choking on the brackets, which need to be UTF-escaped. The bot could probably insert those on its own. --Izno (talk) 04:43, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Does it even get as far as the Lua module? It contains a double bracket [[ which has no matching close double bracket ]] (because the brackets are intended as text not as wiki-markup and are closed one at a time). My impression is that such things prevent any template from being evaluated at all, regardless of how it's implemented. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:36, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

This is a pretty obscure bug, but if someone wanted to fix it, they could run the title through a regex to look for "[[" and replace it with "[<!-- -->[" (as was done on that article). Kaldari (talk) 20:56, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Using Google Books data in Cite Journal

Status

new bug

Reported by

Kaldari (talk) 00:40, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

Type of bug

Inconvenience

What happens

Weird addition of author1 and first1 instead of last1 and first1 for a citation with no existing author parameters.

Relevant diffs/links

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Homing_pigeon&diff=prev&oldid=682284024

We can't proceed until

A specific edit to the bot's code is requested below.

Requested action from maintainer

Investigate why this happened and potentially fix it.

Correct author should have been James Nevin Miller. Where is the bot getting its metadata from on this one? There is no doi or other id; there is a Google books url, but Google books isn't going to have author data for individual articles within the old magazines it reproduces. If the bot thinks it should use the author from Google books, it is indeed a bot bug, because never going to be right for a {{cite journal}} citation. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:29, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

Google books data is sometimes rubbish

Status

new bug

Reported by

– Jonesey95 (talk) 04:42, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

Type of bug

Inconvenience

What happens

Bot puts journal name into title=

What should happen

Bot should put journal name into journal=

Relevant diffs/links

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ataye_River&type=revision&diff=682349962&oldid=545633253

We can't proceed until

Bot operator's feedback on what is feasible

I suspect this is the same issue as the one immediately above it: the bot thinks it can interpret Google Books metadata, and fails badly for journal articles that are published within journal issues listed as books by Google Books. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:56, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

(EC) I think you have to propose a solution if you want this fixed - the bot took the "title" from the Google books link, which is generally appropriate. Example of solution: ask the bot to leave the title untouched IF the template type is "cite journal" AND the url contains "books.google" AND the citation is not retrievable through crossref/pmid/etc databases, but still fix the title if the template is "cite book"? (I admit this criterion is somewhat too complex.). Materialscientist (talk) 04:57, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

In my experience the metadata at Google books is too unreliable to ever use without human intervention. It's often a good starting point, but it regularly does things like replacing the actual publisher name with the name of a business entity that later bought the publisher, using publication years that are much later than the actual publisher, mangling author names, listing minor contributors (e.g. the author of a preface) as the author of a whole book, listing multiple book series for a book only one of which is correct, listing publisher names as authors and author names as publishers, filling in the "edition" field with descriptive text instead of the edition number, listing only one author or editor for a book that has more than one, etc. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:33, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes. I think we should avoid any automated, or even semi-automated, any extractions from Google metadata. Even having a human pass on such extractions is too slack, as, at best, such data is in no way authoritative, and suitable only as hints for further research. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 21:51, 23 September 2015 (UTC)

I think manual extractions are ok as long as they are doublechecked against either the preview or a hardcopy. And editors who don't have a preview or a hardcopy shouldn't be adding the citation at all. But the bot can't do any of that, it can only copy what Google already has wrong, and that's not good enough. —David Eppstein (talk) 03:04, 30 September 2015 (UTC)

In such cases we are not doublechecking the metadata; we're using it to find an authoritative instance from which to extract the data directly. At any rate, I think we are agreed that a bot should not be making any changes or additions based on the Google metadata. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:01, 2 October 2015 (UTC)

Unknown is not a journal name

Status

feature request

Reported by

(t) Josve05a (c) 06:51, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Type of bug

Inconvenience

Relevant diffs/links

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Digital_object_identifier&diff=prev&oldid=682510640

We can't proceed until

Bot operator's feedback on what is feasible

In this case it looks like bad data at ADS rather than the bot's fault. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:56, 24 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes, but I think that the bot can have one line of code that refuses to add a journal name that is unknown. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 15:22, 1 October 2015 (UTC)

Substitute instead of transcluding new {{cite pmid}} templates

Status

new feature request

Reported by

Boghog (talk) 19:19, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

Type of bug

Improvement: The bot should substitute {{cite pmid}}, {{cite doi}}, and {{cite isbn}} templates instead of transcluding citation data from template space.

We can't proceed until

Bot operator's feedback on what is feasible

Per this consensus, a request should be made that the function of Citation Bot be changed so that {{cite pmid}}, {{cite doi}}, and {{cite isbn}} are substituted instead of transcluded. There is also this consensus that existing {{cite pmid}}, etc. templates should be substituted in all WP:MED articles. I am planning to submit a WP:BRFA for a new bot to carry out this task. However before doing that, it would be important that Citation Bot stop creating new transcluded templates and instead substitute them. Boghog (talk) 19:19, 7 February 2015 (UTC)

Don't forget to fix {{cite hdl}} and {{cite jstor}} and any {{cite pmc}} that might exist. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 01:22, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the reminder. {{cite hdl}} – 41 transclusions, {{cite jstor}} – 819 transclusions. The {{cite pmc}} template doesn't exist. Boghog (talk) 06:59, 8 February 2015 (UTC)

Cite pmc became cite pmid per Wikipedia:Templates_for_discussion/Log/2012_May_21#Template:Cite_pmc. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 18:40, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

• @Boghog and AManWithNoPlan: What ever happened to this? It's clear that consensus was achieved in the linked discussion - From the closing: "Existing and future DOI details should be included in articles, however, the bot function should remain, with a BRFA raised to change its function to use cite journal within articles without separate subpages." So it's clear that Citation bot should not be creating new cite doi/pmid/etc subpages, yet here he is, doing it. We're not waiting for consensus on that, we're waiting for the operator, so I changed the "waiting for" parameter on the template. cymru.lass (talk • contribs) 18:01, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

I am still waiting for the bot operator (@Smith609:) to make this change. Without this change, there will be a lot of unnecessary follow-up edits. There is also this related RFC. If that RFC closes the way the first one did, then there will be an even stronger consensus to substitute instead of transcluding these cite templates. Boghog (talk) 19:36, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

I'm waiting for the discussions on deprecating cite:doi and cite:pmid to close and for there to be clear consensus on what the way forward here is. Once that is clear, the change should be possible, if probably not quite as straightforward as it sounds. --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 23:27, 9 October 2015 (UTC)

Depreciation won the day again. If there is no matching sub-page then it should be converted into a {{cite journal}} and expanded as best as possible with the available metadata. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 17:56, 25 October 2015 (UTC)

@AManWithNoPlan and Fhocutt (WMF): Per the consensus to deprecate, I've created phabricator:T119932, which includes removing all the functionality related to those templates. Regarding substituting existing templates, I think that would be a task best handled by a dedicated new bot (via a WP:BOTR request), rather than having Citation bot do it. Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 04:40, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

@Dexbot and Ladsgroup: can do it. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 05:16, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

I've done most of it already. I'll finish it soon. I also have approval to do it. Waiting to remove my cast :)Ladsgroup^overleg 03:35, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

I removed about 1200 more cases. Everything left need human attention :)Ladsgroup^overleg 09:56, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

@Ladsgroup: I assume that most of the human attention in {{cite pmid}} and {{cite doi}} is acutally just white space like {{cite doi | 10.1206/0003-0090(2006)297[0001:TATOL]2.0.CO;2 }}. Awesome work with your bot by the way. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 17:04, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Most of problems came from using "cite doi" (two spaces) which is strange thing to use. I'm re-running :)Ladsgroup^overleg 17:30, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

Please also check for "cite PMID", which seem to have been used in several subpages of template:PBB.LeadSongDog come howl! 21:26, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

@Ladsgroup: since I don't think he watches this page AManWithNoPlan (talk) 21:41, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

One more thing. Some one (bot or human) needs to go back and delete all {{cite pmid}}, {{cite isbn}}, {{cite jstor}}, {{cite hdl}}, {{cite pmc}}, and {{cite doi}} that are not linked to anymore. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 22:41, 2 December 2015 (UTC)

I'll do "cite pmid" soon. We need to delete cite doi subpages that are orphan. I don't have admin access to do it:)Ladsgroup^overleg 12:22, 3 December 2015 (UTC)

@Ladsgroup: Thanks for all the work. Looks like doi with underscores in them lead to pages with spaces which dexbot didn't like AManWithNoPlan (talk) 05:28, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Adding pages cards when they are not necessary

Status

new bug

Reported by

Hawkeye7 (talk) 07:02, 1 November 2015 (UTC)

Type of bug

Inconvenience: Humans must occasionally make immediate edits to clean up after the bot

What happens

Adds "pages=" when there is already a "p=" or "pp=" card. This causes red error messages "More than one of |pages= and |pp= specified"

What should happen

Should not insert them when they already exist

Relevant diffs/links

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Calutron&type=revision&diff=688482098&oldid=688481880

We can't proceed until

Agreement on the best solution

the number of aliases in these templates is crazy. Also bug with page=. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 15:01, 1 November 2015 (UTC)

Google https

Status

new bug

Reported by

AManWithNoPlan (talk) 02:41, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

Type of bug

Inconvenience

What happens

https links to google books are converted to http

Replication instructions

Run the bot on a https google books url

We can't proceed until

A specific edit to the bot's code is requested below.

Requested action from maintainer

Do the exact opposite: convert http to https

Here is the RFC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals%29/Archive_127#RfC:_Should_we_convert_existing_Google_and_Internet_Archive_links_to_HTTPS.3F AManWithNoPlan (talk) 02:41, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

This should be fixed shortly. Kaldari (talk) 21:42, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Dealing with half dead DOI

Status

new bug

Reported by

AManWithNoPlan (talk) 00:42, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

Type of bug

Improvement:

What happens

marks a DOI as invalid even if it works if there is no crossref entry

We can't proceed until

Agreement on the best solution

Requested action from maintainer

Only mark DOI invalid if dx.doi.org also fails

I thought this was fixed and marked it as so. Currently, doi is flagged as invalid if crossref fails, which is reasonable, but need to also check is dx.doi.org also failed AManWithNoPlan (talk) 00:42, 18 November 2015 (UTC)

Questions: Interest in and prerequisites for starting up automated citation fixing

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T110774

I've gotten Citation Bot back up and running for the manually activated tools (MediaWiki:Gadget-citations and https://tools.wmflabs.org/citations/doibot.html). Previously, Citation bot 1 also used maintenance categories to guide its task of continuous automatic citation fixing. I'm investigating interest in and requirements for bringing back this function of Citation bot. My questions:

• Is there community interest in bringing back a constantly running, fully automated Citation bot?
• What minimum standard would the bot need to meet to run automatically?
• Are there any current problems with the bot that mean that it should be limited to running when manually activated?
• Although an already-approved bot may not need an active maintainer, citation style appears to be an active and contentious enough area that an automatically running Citation bot should have one. I will soon be busy with work identified in the Community Wishlist Survey and will not be able to maintain this bot. However, I am willing and able to help a new maintainer become familiar with the code. Is anyone interested in maintaining Citation bot?

--Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 22:31, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

On your last point: yes, citations are sufficiently critical that any automated bot should have an active maintainer in the house. On your second point, we might consider what period of time – a weak proxy for number of edits – is sufficient to have a good probability of hitting any problems. ~ J. Johnson (JJ) (talk) 22:52, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

On the first question, I do belive so. As long as it is not making too many bad fixes, there is community interest for there to be a bot that fixes stuff like this. (There are intrest for all things which makes the encyclopedia better, problem is only if it going to cause problems while doing so. Hency why people oppose(d) new extentions).

On the second question I belive that would be something for the BAG (Bot Approval Group) to detemine, but I'd say a trial run of ~50-100 pages and evaluate.

(t) Josve05a (c) 03:18, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Vertical bar (pipe) inserted unencoded into citation template

Status

new bug

Reported by

Lithopsian (talk) 19:06, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Type of bug

Inconvenience

What happens

Some abstracts contain vertical bar characters and the bot copies these into the citation which is interpreted as another field. An example is bibcode 1991bsc..book.....H.

What should happen

Bot should encode the vertical bar (pipe) character.

Relevant diffs/links

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User%3AJonesey95%2Fsandbox2&diff=prev&oldid=694077824

Replication instructions

Create a cite journal template with the bibcode above, then run Citation Bot on it.

We can't proceed until

Agreement on the best solution

Lithopsian, please link to an edit by the Citation Bot. If you don't know how to do that, link to an article where you saw the problem happen, and someone here will insert a link to the bot's edit. – Jonesey95 (talk) 21:05, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

It appears to be this diff. The problem is that the source of the metadata, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1991bsc..book.....H, has a vbar within an author's name, I think erroneously as the author in question doesn't use a middle name or initial, and the bot doesn't recognize it and quote it to prevent it becoming a parameter delimiter. So I think there are really two issues here: (1) bad data elsewhere that we can't do much about, and (2) better bot handing of special characters in external data. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:39, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

I have added a diff in the bug description above. When vertical bars occur in URLs, replace each vertical bar with %7c. When vertical bars occur in parameter values that are not URLs, replace each vertical bar with |. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:46, 6 December 2015 (UTC)

Yes that's it. Sounds like a sensible solution. I've not seen one of these where the vertical bar is anything other than a mistake, but I suppose it is possible in some cases. Even for a mistake, it is perhaps best for the bot to keep the character, without breaking the formatting, and someone to take it out by hand if it is really obnoxious. Lithopsian (talk) 12:25, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Sometimes for news site or web site sources, the pipe character or spaced dash may come up in |title= values, where it should really be treated as a field delimiter between title and publisher. I'm not sure if citationbot checks for that, but certainly there are some other tools that are getting it wrong. It would be good if citationbot caught and corrected those errors, rather than just converting the character to have a less-obvious error. LeadSongDog come howl! 17:06, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Bot created arXiv= parameter error

Status

new bug

Reported by

– Jonesey95 (talk) 03:56, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Type of bug

Inconvenience

What happens

Bot changed a valid |eprint= parameter into an invalid one by removing the class

What should happen

Bot should leave valid parameters alone

Relevant diffs/links

Search for 0508091 in this diff

We can't proceed until

Bot operator's feedback on what is feasible

Requested action from maintainer

Modify code to match {{cite arxiv}}

The bot removed the class portion of the arXiv parameter value in {{cite arxiv}}. It should not have done so. There are two kinds of arXiv parameters, explained in the documentation as follows:

• arxiv or eprint (Mandatory): arXiv/Eprint identifier, without any "arXiv:" prefix. Prior to April 2007, the identifiers included a classification, an optional two-letter subdivision, and a 7-digit YYMMNNN year, month, and sequence number of submission in that category. E.g. gr-qc/0610068 or math.GT/0309136. After April 2007, the format was changed to a simple YYMM.NNNN. Starting in January 2015, the identifier was changed to be 5 digits: YYMM.NNNNN.
• class: arXiv classification, e.g. hep-th. Optional. To be used only with new-style (2007 and later) eprint identifiers that do not include the classification.

The bot should not modify valid |arxiv= or |eprint= parameters. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:56, 7 December 2015 (UTC)

Unhandled error

Long error

Establishing connection to Wikipedia servers with username Citation_bot... Using account Citation bot. Fetching parameter list ... done.Activated by Josve05a Expanding 'Donald_Trump'; will commit edits. [01:30:04] Processing page 'Donald Trump' — edit—history * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Donald Trump: Master Apprentice * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting - https://books.google.com/books * Expanded from Google Books API * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and in Life * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting - https://books.google.com/books [..> process> lebooks> details> ddifnew> add] + Adding isbn * Expanded from Google Books API * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Donald Trump: Profile of a Real Estate Tycoon: Easyread Super Large 20pt Edition * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting - https://books.google.com/books [..> process> lebooks> details> ddifnew> add] + Adding isbn [..> process> lebooks> details> ddifnew> add] + Adding date * Expanded from Google Books API * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Expand citation: Donald Trump emphasizes plans to build 'real' wall at Mexico border - Checking AdsAbs database Similar title not found in database [..> process> rossref] - Checking CrossRef database for doi. [..> process> indpmid] - Searching PubMed... nothing found. * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Money * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting - https://books.google.com/books * Expanded from Google Books API * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting - https://books.google.com/books * Expanded from Google Books API * Initial authors exist, skipping authorlink in tidy * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting * initial authors exist, not correcting  ! Unhandled error. Please copy this output and report a bug.  ! Unhandled error. Please copy this output and report a bug.  ! Unhandled error. Please copy this output and report a bug. history / last edit

(t) Josve05a (c) 01:33, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Update: Security fixes and code cleanup

I just finished and merged some substantial updates to the Citation bot codebase.

• I found and fixed many cross-site scripting vulnerabilities
• Citation bot will now entirely ignore any remaining Template:Cite doi/pmid/jstor templates, and related code has been removed
• As there is no one currently interested in taking on maintainership, I removed all code related to the previous automated citation-fixing capabilities. It should be easy for a new maintainer to write an automated bot that does not rely on the Template:Cite doi-type system.

If anything is newly broken, you can leave a comment here or file a ticket on Phabricator. --Fhocutt (WMF) (talk) 21:24, 17 December 2015 (UTC)