User talk:Citation bot

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Note that the bot's maintainer and assistants (Thing 1 and Thing 2), can go weeks without logging in to Wikipedia. The code is open source and interested parties are invited to assist with the operation and extension of the bot. Before reporting a bug, please note: Addition of DUPLICATE_xxx= to citation templates by this bot is a feature. When there are two identical parameters in a citation template, the bot renames one to DUPLICATE_xxx=. The bot is pointing out the problem with the template. The solution is to choose one of the two parameters and remove the other one, or to convert it to an appropriate parameter. A 503 error means that the bot is overloaded and you should try again later – wait at least 15 minutes and then complain here.

Please click here to report an error.

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

• Implement support to expand from https://doi.org/10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U192476 to {{Who's Who}}
  Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Friern_Hospital&diff=prev&oldid=1167644213
• Implement support to convert cite web to {{BioRef}} and {{GBIF}}
• Use https://www.crossref.org/blog/news-crossref-and-retraction-watch/
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK25497/ set NLM_APIKEY and NLM_EMAIL
• journal/publisher that only differ by 'and' and '&' should be treated as identical https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Congenital_cartilaginous_rest_of_the_neck&diff=prev&oldid=1199200383
• Convert ' to ' https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Onosma_taurica&diff=prev&oldid=1199201801
• Free archive.org links such as curl -sH "Accept: application/json" "https://scholar.archive.org/search?q=doi:10.1080/14786449908621245" | jq -r .results[0].fulltext.access_url

I have remained silent on this issue even though it has irritated me for a while now. And now that there is discussion above about the widespread useless cosmetic edits this bot continues to waste everyone's time with, I'll raise it: Why must every citation of a publisher's webpage be changed to to Cite book? I can only speak for myself, but every time I cite such book webpages I am not citing the book itself. I am specifically referencing the information published on the webpage. So of course I do not want the citation to be changed to Cite book with a bunch of parameters of the book itself (ISBN, date, etc) added. So I inevitably stop the bot or replace the reference with a third-party source. I realise the defense will be "It doesn't hurt" or that some users are actually citing the book. And I realise this is not the most pressing issue, but why must the bot come to its own conclusion of the editor's intent? I see another user complained of this issue last year. Οἶδα (talk) 22:25, 27 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This may be the kind of situation where it's safest to explicitly tell citation bot not to muck with the citation. It's hard to automatically judge whether the human editor actually wanted "cite web" or "cite book". (There are many examples of people using "cite web" to cite resources that should actually be books, journal articles, etc.) –jacobolus (t) 01:38, 28 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I understand. But it still feels like an another unnecessary task for this bot to insert itself into every article it can possibly find. For example, this edit is completely useless and actually corrupts my intention of the citation. Call me crazy but I don't want or need a bot telling me what I am citing (and actively altering my citations accordingly). Οἶδα (talk) 21:32, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

When I've quoted publisher blurbs in the past, I usually set |type=publisher's blurb for clarity. In the specific case you've linked just above, another option would be not to cite the publisher's landing page at all, and add the book to a "Selected works" subsection or something. Indeed, the altered citation is sequential to another one, and so seems a bit superfluous. Or, alternatively, use "Citation bot bypass" somewhere in your citation as suggested by jacobolus above.

Given the overall lazy referencing culture of less experienced editors, it's likely that in the majority of cases, people who drop a link to a publisher landing page are probably trying to cite the book itself, so this behaviour of assuming that's the case is net beneficial. Folly Mox (talk) 22:13, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I cannot personally maintain that the majority of users citing a publisher's webpage are lazily intending to cite the book itself. My experience suggests otherwise which is why I have taken issue, but I realise my editing purview might be skewed. However, if that is observably true then I will resign to accepting this as a forgivable externality. Οἶδα (talk) 06:35, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In fairness to your point, I haven't looked into the data about how frequently this sort of change is appropriate; it could be the case that my own perspective is the skewed one. Folly Mox (talk) 08:32, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I couldn't find a list of tasks that the bot has been approved for (other than the very first approval) nor a thorough description of all of its mystical activities. I was surprised to find it would change "Cite web" to "Cite book" (for unclear reasons). The only cure, if the bot is unchanged, seems to be the <!-- Citation bot bypass--> mechanism documented at User:Citation_bot#Stopping_the_bot_from_editing - R. S. Shaw (talk) 04:12, 6 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know that that's the solution ({{cite journal}} almost always already contains |title=), but despite being a sometimes commenter on this talk page, I actually came here now to report the same error at Special:Diff/1183763093. Maybe Citation bot should check for |periodical= and its aliases before changing the type of citation template wrapper. I've been working on Category:CS1 errors: periodical ignored (26,095), and I'm never going to be able to keep up with Citation bot creating this error. Folly Mox (talk) 13:16, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In both cases, it is a bit of problem with the wrong template and information being entered by a human being. I will see what more can be done. The bot did shrink Category:CS1 errors: periodical ignored (26,095) by tens of thousands a while back, but it seems to have hit a steady-state with the bot both fixing and adding members to this category. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 15:49, 7 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Special:Diff/1186701879 is another example, a few minutes ago, of Citation bot creating template errors by changing citation wrapper template without appropriate reparameterisation of values already present. For clarity, the existing citation ({{cite web}} to a publisher landing page for a book) wasn't great, but this behaviour is not desirable: altering the template called without checking whether it contains unsupported parameters.

For changing {{cite web}} to {{cite book}} where |website= is present, I can't think of a case where it would be an error to reparameterise |website= to |via=, unless |via= is already present. Folly Mox (talk) 00:09, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I've begun reverting Citation bot whenever it produces this error, which seems to account for between 1% and 2% of its recent edits. I know I take a critical tone here frequently (still traumatised by ReferenceExpander), but Citation bot does a lot of really good work. I do appreciate it and the maintainers.

Also I'm aware that the whole reason this type of edit causes a template error in the first place is the underdiscussed and unnecessary removal of support for the |work= parameter from {{cite book}} without adequate preparation time.

I do plan to start contacting editors who frequently run Citation bot, introduce this error, and then never check the output or help fix it, as required by the guidance at the top of Citation bot's userpage. I know the responsibility does not fall solely on the maintainers. Folly Mox (talk) 18:21, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Books series occupy a space somewhere between books and journals. Similar to journals, books series are published on a regular (or at least semi-regular) basis with volume numbers. To at least some editors, book series look like journals, so I think it should not be suprising that they sometimes use the {{cite journal}} template for book series. And it is not just editors. Automated tools like WP:RefToolbar will generate at least a partial citation to the chapter selecting "cite journal" and specifying a DOI. In contrast RefToolbar "cite book" option does not even support chapters. Citeoid in VisualEditor will also generate a "cite journal" template including the chapter as the title if the DOI is entered. Wikipedia template filling tool will also generate cite journal templates for chapters in book series. I would argue that using {{cite journal}} for chapters in book series, is not wrong. Furthermore this usage does not throw any error messages. Converting journals to books without reparameterization is throwing errors. IMHO, Citation Bot should not convert these templates unless it also adjusts the parameters. I think the principle of first, do no harm applies here. Boghog (talk) 12:21, 1 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I've run across a number of cases that fall into this genre, most recently this one. Here, the book series is Journal of Neural Transmission. Supplementum at Springer; others I can remember off the top of my head are Methods in Enzymology and Progress in Drug Research, both at Elsevier.

It seems to me that if Citation bot is both 1. altering the template type to {{cite book}} while 2. getting valid data for a parameter named journal (as can be seen in the linked diff: it expands the abbreviated form), then the bot should be reparameterising |journal= to |series= if |series= is not set.

I've stated before that Citation bot needs to have more awareness of what parameters are present in the citation it's editing when it changes the template type, but it also occurs to me that it's way too aggressive at changing templates to {{cite book}} whenever it finds an isbn. A lot of the errors stem from editors citing webpages with bibliographic information (like library records, publisher landing pages, or book retailers) in order to establish the existence of a book, which is not great practice and has been discussed on this talkpage before. But many other errors come from the fact that conference proceedings and journal issues can also have isbns, and those require different parameters and are created using different templates by other citation tools.

In my journey through Special:RandomInCategory/CS1 errors: periodical ignored, my rough estimate is that 50% of these errors (±10%) are introduced by Citation bot. Folly Mox (talk) 11:42, 5 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A user brought to my attention a possibly new type of error by the bot which causes "}}: |website= ignored" and "|journal= ignored" messages. I'm not clear on what's going on, so here are the diffs they found: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Abductive (reasoning) 22:19, 25 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It is often GIGO. The bot adds corrected parameters and leave some bad stuff behind. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 22:03, 27 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I will look into trying to reduce this. I know that the bot fixed many more of these than it creates. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 14:22, 29 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your work on this. It's probably difficult when almost all the engagement on this talkpage is complaints. I believe you when you say Citation bot has fixed this class of error more often than it has introduced it, and I appreciate that. Folly Mox (talk) 12:58, 1 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This has already improved a lot over where it was last week! Folly Mox (talk) 11:36, 3 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This bug seems eradicated for many of the more common cases, but I did find another example today, at Special:Diff/1189067865. My fix looked like this. Folly Mox (talk) 19:51, 9 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ran into a few more GIGO style manifestations of this bug today, but also a bunch of conference proceedings hosted by Springer, all of which caused this same error: Special:Diff/1189110528, Special:Diff/1189117384, and Special:Diff/1189119689 (the last of which alone caused five errors). Folly Mox (talk) 03:37, 10 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Suggestion: IF [changed "cite web" to "cite book"] AND ["|website=" exists] THEN [change "website=" to "via="] - - this would preserve useful info. Cheers Protalina (talk) 15:31, 24 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

On Charles Clinton, Citation bot removes "?seq=9" from this URL. That bit of code give the Page # within the larger cite, so why does Citation bot remove it? It makes sense to me to leave that bit of code in there but the bot doesn't seem to think so. It's removed it twice, once here and once here, so maybe I'm wrong... Would appreciate some clarification. Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 03:36, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Also, if by some chance I am correct, is there any way to stop people from running the Bot needlessly on this supposed issue? Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 03:37, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The landing page is the same in either case. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:09, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It isn't the same for me... The one without the ?seq lands me on the main page, the URL with the ?seq=9" lands me on the exact page with the quoted text... Shearonink (talk) 04:55, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I also see the preview page showing page 9 of 17 with the ?seq parameter. —David Eppstein (talk) 08:06, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Oh good David Eppstein it isn't just me... The ?seq code might be taking us & other registered editors to the exact page because we have a JSTOR account through the WP Library I guess... But even if people don't have a JSTOR account the *code* should be left there, otherwise the URL seems useless. I like to give readers the option of going down the rabbithole of verifiability if they want to. Why is WP giving readers an URL that is to the entire book or article as the Citation bot default when the bot is run on the article? Shearonink (talk) 15:49, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Actually currently JSTOR thinks it is providing me access through UT Dallas, I guess because I was there for a conference last summer. But yes, this should be left in place, like the pg= parameter of Google Books links, for the same reason. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:27, 4 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This bug is still ongoing and still leading to new CS1 errors in articles. Example: Special:Diff/1213121977, creating a {{cite book}} with a |journal= parameter and triggering a CS1 error. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:24, 12 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Previous note: This is more of a FYI / request for clarification than a bug report, although there might be a problem with these edits. Bot edit: Special:Diff/1210636446 changed a number of URLs I added manually using the recent new Google books URLs back to the "Classic" Google books version. Working with the new URL format was a bit of pain, especially getting a page number link to function, and I'm not even sure it is an improvement, but it looks like Google is trying to move to the new format? On all the old style links page I see a link to "try the new Google books". The new style URL looks like this: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Encyclopedia_of_Music_in_the_20th_Centur/m8W2AgAAQBAJ?gbpv=1&pg=PA379 , the Classic style the bot is converting to is: https://books.google.com/books?id=m8W2AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA379 Is this still correct behavior? My feeling is that this wasn't a helpful edit, but I'm worried that neither URL format is necessarily stable now if Google are in the process of changing or deprecating their Books URLs. What format should Wikipedia use? Is there a better place to ask this question? Salpynx (talk) 19:31, 27 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

A better new url would be https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/m8W2AgAAQBAJ?gbpv=1&pg=PA379 since that chunk of text has no effect. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 14:11, 28 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I will work on reworking the code to make "new" URLs. I will have to do it as a pull request to work out the kinks, and it will take time. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 15:10, 15 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Another example: diff which throws a Cite journal requires |journal= error. If a {{cite journal}} has both |journal= and |series= with identical or similar values, then |series= should be dropped, not |journal=. Boghog (talk) 11:16, 26 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Here Methods in Enzymology is a book series, not a journal, so that's the fix that should be done here. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:53, 27 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Same for Advances in Genetics, also a book series, not a journal. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:55, 27 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not fixable. This is generally a result of the web-browser giving up too soon. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 13:12, 26 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Alon Alush:, see previous discussion at User talk:Citation bot/Archive 38#Please remove claim that editors may use the bot to check a single article, because it consistently fails. I'm don't know of any browser that is capable of giving such a site-specific message, but it fruitless to spend time argue the whys and wherefores. The fact of the matter is that the ✔ Citations button will fail if the article is longer than a couple of screenfuls. Don't waste your time, just use Expand citations from the tools column left of the editing page. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 16:20, 26 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If for some reason, you want to edit just part of a page and the button fails, then copy the section (maybe the whole page???) to a sandbox and use the Expand citations option. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 14:11, 27 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I asked this in the discussion of an earlier bug but it was archived without providing an answer. Can you please explain

1. How is it not a violation of WP:CITEVAR for Citation bot to convert manually-formatted references into templates, as it is doing e.g. at Special:Diff/1216926071? A human might do this but a bot automatically doing it is completely something else, especially in cases such as here where it does not even improve the consistency of formatting (the article is still a mix of CS1, CS2, and manually-formatted references).
2. For those of us who might deliberately format references manually because we don't want bots messing with our citations, or we made a deliberate decision that the citation templates were inadequate for some specific citation, do we now have to start explicitly locking the bots out of articles altogether?
3. Where is this included in the BAG-approved tasks for this bot?
4. I find the bot's edit summary "Changed bare reference" to be significantly misleading. This is not a bare-url reference. It is a well-formatted reference that happens to be manually formatted. Where is there any guideline or policy suggesting that such references are a problem that needs to be fixed?

—David Eppstein (talk) 20:29, 2 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

There's already citation templates on that page. No CITEVAR violation happened. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:09, 2 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I mix manually formatted citations and template-formatted citations on pages all the time, deliberately. I would be extremely annoyed if a bot took it upon itself to change that deliberate decision. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:17, 2 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It should however, preserve the editors. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:11, 2 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I think a template change to Template:Cite journal would be better. Spinixster (trout me!) 02:50, 3 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The fix [3]. This is a book series, but individual books are untitled. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 06:50, 3 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It's not really a bug, but I think it's a worthy addition to the bot. Spinixster (trout me!) 02:53, 8 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]