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

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

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

Note that the bot's creator (Smith609) and assistants (Kaldari and AManWithNoPlan) can go weeks without logging in to Wikipedia. The code is open source and interested parties are invited to assist with the operation and extension of the bot. Before reporting a bug, please note: Addition of DUPLICATE_xxx= to citation templates by this bot is a feature. When there are two identical parameters in a citation template, the bot renames one to DUPLICATE_xxx=. The bot is pointing out the problem with the template. The solution is to choose one of the two parameters and remove the other one, or to convert it to an appropriate parameter. A 503 error means that the bot is overloaded and you should try again later – wait at least 15 minutes and then complain here.

Please click here to report an error.

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

---

1. Implement support to expand from https://doi.org/10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U192476 to {{Who's Who}}
   Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Friern_Hospital&diff=prev&oldid=1167644213
2. Implement support to convert cite web to {{BioRef}} and {{GBIF}}
3. Use https://www.crossref.org/blog/news-crossref-and-retraction-watch/
4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK25497/ set NLM_APIKEY and NLM_EMAIL
5. 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
6. 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
7. Use GET instead of POST for better proxy caches when talking to data-bases when possible.
8. Start to convert Google Books URL to "new" format https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/m8W2AgAAQBAJ?gbpv=1&pg=PA379
9. When encountering a {{cite journal}} or {{citation}} with |journal=bioRxiv or |journal=bioRxiv: The Preprint Server for Biology [case insensitive], the bot should convert the citation to a proper {{cite bioRxiv}}, i.e.
   • {{cite journal |last1=Larivière |first1=Vincent |last2=Kiermer |first2=Véronique |last3=MacCallum |first3=Catriona J. |last4=McNutt |first4=Marcia |last5=Patterson |first5=Mark |last6=Pulverer |first6=Bernd |last7=Swaminathan |first7=Sowmya |last8=Taylor |first8=Stuart |last9=Curry |first9=Stephen |date=2016-07-05 |title=A simple proposal for the publication of journal citation distributions |journal=bioRxiv |article-number=062109 |url=http://biorxiv.org/lookup/doi/10.1101/062109 |language=en |doi=10.1101/062109 |hdl=1866/23301 |s2cid=64293941 |hdl-access=free}}
   • Larivière, Vincent; Kiermer, Véronique; MacCallum, Catriona J.; McNutt, Marcia; Patterson, Mark; Pulverer, Bernd; Swaminathan, Sowmya; Taylor, Stuart; Curry, Stephen (2016-07-05). "A simple proposal for the publication of journal citation distributions". bioRxiv 062109. doi:10.1101/062109. hdl:1866/23301. S2CID 64293941.
   • The bot should keep |author/last/first/date/year/title/language=, convert |doi= to |biorxiv=, and throw the rest away.
   • {{cite bioRxiv |last1=Larivière |first1=Vincent |last2=Kiermer |first2=Véronique |last3=MacCallum |first3=Catriona J. |last4=McNutt |first4=Marcia |last5=Patterson |first5=Mark |last6=Pulverer |first6=Bernd |last7=Swaminathan |first7=Sowmya |last8=Taylor |first8=Stuart |last9=Curry |first9=Stephen |date=2016-07-05 |title=A simple proposal for the publication of journal citation distributions |language=en |biorxiv=10.1101/062109}}
   • Larivière, Vincent; Kiermer, Véronique; MacCallum, Catriona J.; McNutt, Marcia; Patterson, Mark; Pulverer, Bernd; Swaminathan, Sowmya; Taylor, Stuart; Curry, Stephen (2016-07-05). "A simple proposal for the publication of journal citation distributions". bioRxiv 10.1101/062109.
   • If it was from a {{citation}}, append |mode=cs2 to it.
   • To be extra safe, this should only be done when the DOI starts with 10.1101. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 08:20, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
   • Same for with |journal=medRxiv or |journal=medRxiv: The Preprint Server for Health Sciences [case insensitive] and convertions to {{cite medrxiv}}
10. If encountering a {{cite bioRxiv}} that is fully published, convert it to a {{cite journal}}
    • Wolf, Luise; Silander, Olin K.; Van Nimwegen, Erik J. (2014). "Expression noise facilitates the evolution of gene regulation". bioRxiv 10.1101/007237. says "Now published in eLife doi: 10.7554/eLife.05856"
    • So TNT the citation
    • {{cite journal |biorxiv=10.1101/007237 |doi=10.7554/eLife.05856}}
    • and expand it
    • Wolf, Luise; Silander, Olin K.; Van Nimwegen, Erik (2015). "Expression noise facilitates the evolution of gene regulation". eLife. 4 e05856. bioRxiv 10.1101/007237. doi:10.7554/eLife.05856. PMC 4468965. PMID 26080931.
    • New DOI is in crossref. https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1101/007237
    • Same for {{cite medRxiv}} to {{cite journal}}
11. When working multiple articles at once, such as via the web interface on a category or linked page, include the category name or linked page one the final output report.

Identical to § Changing every citation of a publisher's webpage to Cite book above. While the choice of formatting may be questioned (can't the Library Journal review be located somewhere less objectionable than Amazon?) the behaviour here is the same underlying misfeature of altering any webpage citation where a book's bibliographic information is presented, as if the citation was meant to be to content of the book rather than e.g. a publisher's blurb or library listing. I think there are more discussions of this in the talkpage archives here; I used to favour this feature, but I'm no longer so sure it's a net positive. Folly Mox (talk) 11:36, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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

Changing an incorrect cite journal to cite book [1]: Good (although would have been better as cite conference).

Creating a new CS1 error where there was none before, because it left the paper title in the book title parameter and did not change the journal parameter to a book title parameter: doubleplusungood.

Stop it.

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

It's not creating error, it's flagging errors that were already there, but not reported. |journal=FM 2014: Formal Methods was wrong before. That the bot didn't manage to fix it doesn't make it a new error. Now the error is reported. This is an improvement, even though ideally the bot would be able to figure out and fix the error itself. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:11, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

INCORRECT. It is creating an error, because formerly readers could see the paper title, see the book title (called a journal, but still formatted in italics the way readers would expect a book title to look), and see that it was a paper in a book with that title. After the edit, readers were presented only with the paper title, formatted as a book title, falsely telling them both in visible appearance and reference metadata that the reference was to an entire book-length work. It is not merely that it is creating CS1 errors, although that is bad enough. It is also making the reference less accurate in both its metadata and in its visible appearance. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:20, 20 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I've gotten really exhausted with this category of error introduced by Citation bot, which I encounter every day I edit. I used to creep its contributions and clean up after it, but I've started just reverting its edits that cause this kind of template error, regardless of any value added, and only sometimes actually fix up the citations myself. Few of the editors who call Citation bot on large sets of pages ever check in after it to see if it's causing errors, so typically no one notices my reverts.

I saw a few weeks back that for one subset of conferences (IEEE maybe? or SPIE?) Citation bot has successfully been changing {{cite journal}} to {{cite book}} without introducing errors and growing the backlogs. So there has been a partial fix, but it's pretty frustrating that this known error has been perpetuated in thousands of edits spanning months.

Citation bot does not have an approved BRFA task to change citation template types, and changing to {{cite book}} has been the one that's particularly fraught and error-prone ever since support for the aliases of |periodical= was dropped from {{cite book}} a year ago. The easiest thing would be if support were readded, but that seems highly unlikely. I do think that eventually, if this bug isn't fixed, I'll end up asking BAG to ban Citation bot changing template type to {{cite book}}. Disabling the functionality would be an improvement over the current situation. Folly Mox (talk) 00:02, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Still ongoing failure to remove journal= from conversions to cite book, creating new CS1 errors and wasted time for human editors: Special:Diff/1245112056. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:53, 18 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

STILL HAPPENING: Special:Diff/1282071056. I swear the bulk of the newly reported CS1 errors that I find on the bambots cleanup listings such as [2] are caused by Citation bot. It is extremely frustrating that the bot is creating reference cleanup work for others rather than preventing others from having to do that work, month after month and year after year, with no hint that the damage will stop. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:05, 26 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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

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

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

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

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

Same here:

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

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

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

@AManWithNoPlan: Then they should use an explicit   to indicate intention if that's ever the case. Same for the other hardcoded special whitespace like thinspaces. Everything not explicitely coded should be convert to a plain space. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:05, 14 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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

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

GitHub tracking added. And the reason that the bot edited the page was because it was activated to run on it by a user via the category mode. --Redalert2fan (talk) 23:08, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

IAU Circular/IAU Circ./IAU Circ and Central Bureau Electronic Telegrams/Cent. Bur. Electron. Telegr./Cent Bur Electron Telegr/CBET have issues, not volumes. The # is the article number/page. This can be parsed directly from the bibcode when present. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:06, 4 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Alexanderino, you had the |chapter= parameter duplicating the |title= parameter in this citation (which I fixed here). Agree that the check for requisite additional parameters should happen before removing duplicate parameters so as to avoid this sort of error, but it's always a slog to capture all the potential GIGO cases.

Incidentally, the three cites in that section to L'auto should have been calling {{cite periodical}} or {{cite news}} instead of {{cite book}}. I fixed that here, additionally specifying issue dates and page numbers so the references can still be verified if the Gallica url stops working. Can you check the other citations to ensure the full information is included? Folly Mox (talk) 12:25, 7 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This function should apply accross all namespaces if it doesn't already. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:41, 13 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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

No, that is the bot confusing a book review with the book under review and garbaging a citation to a book by mashing it up with metadata from the book review. It is a severe bug but not the same bug. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:46, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I can't think of a good way to distinguish between review and original work, given some review have all the same metadata that the original work has. In some cases, the review is in fact what is being cited. If possible, I would recommend raising a red flag to signal more careful human review is needed in some cases, such as when the word "review" (or in this case "Books Received") is found on the destination page or perhaps in certain database fields. This red flag might be raised gratuitously in the case of say, literature reviews, but hopefully not enough to produce alert fatigue. -- Beland (talk) 22:07, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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

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

In that draft, Citation bot changed this:

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

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

to this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should apply to everything that looks like a hyphen in the 5th position, the non-breaking hyphen, endash, emdashes, double hyphens, etc... Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:25, 6 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be explicit, the journal name previously used a non-breaking hyphen character (‑) and Headbomb wants an ordinary hyphen (-) instead. The latter is more appropriate because it's fine to put a line break in the name Eighteenth‑Century Studies after "Eighteenth‑". This seems like a very low-priority change that should probably only be done when bundled with other changes. –jacobolus (t) 18:44, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This would affect ~5 articles every month or so. Require bundling with other changes would be pointless, the point is to get rid of those editor-hostile oddities in citations. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:09, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The bot used to do that before, somehow it stopped. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:50, 27 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think "Citation bot" should be editing non-citation parts of the article. Let some other bot or human do that if it seems necessary. –jacobolus (t) 18:39, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This is about citations, not the rest of the article. The diff includes more, but check the espn.com and lequipe.fr references. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:59, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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

The bot should not be making edits such as special:diff/1309371869 ("Suggested by Headbomb"). It is not important whether or not the citation template has a space before the final }}. The bot should not adjust whitespace like this at all (leave it to humans if someone cares), but it's especially obnoxious if there's no meaningful change whatsoever. –jacobolus (t) 18:23, 3 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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

@David Eppstein, there was some related discussion relevant to math (or other currently banned markup in citation template parameters) at Wikipedia talk:COinS#the COINS warning: where not to use, exactly? My proposal there is that we could try to explicitly specify a seprate machine-friendly title vs. human-friendly title, and then we wouldn't need to ban useful types of human-readable content from the citation templates. –jacobolus (t) 20:22, 5 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ok, but mathml tags wrapped in nowiki are neither "useful types of human-readable content" nor particularly "machine-friendly". All this title needs to be correctly formatted and human-readable are some subscript tags (it involves a chemical formula, not mathematics). —David Eppstein (talk) 21:02, 5 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That's true, but I don't think that the machine-readable version can accept subscript tags either. As a general matter, I think it would be handy if we could specify something along the lines of

title=Cyclic ferroelectric switching and quantized charge transport in <chem>CuInP_2S_6</chem> {{cs1 fallback|Cyclic ferroelectric switching and quantized charge transport in CuInP₂S₆}}

And get it to render as "Cyclic ferroelectric switching and quantized charge transport in ${\displaystyle {\ce {CuInP_2S_6}}}$" but have the machine-readable metadata recorded as Cyclic ferroelectric switching and quantized charge transport in CuInP₂S₆. –jacobolus (t) 23:21, 6 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Relatedly, changing a journal article title from sentence case to title case in the process of an arxiv-to-journal conversion Special:Diff/1309755278 is also bad.

I think this happens because the paper itself has the title written on it as "Hexagonal Inflation Tilings and Planar Monotiles", as does the publisher's web page. –jacobolus (t) 23:23, 6 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, but case is a style choice, not a semantic part of the title. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:44, 7 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

What I mean is: perhaps the bot is designed to apply the style preferred by the paper publisher. That style seems somewhat common on Wikipedia (for better or worse). I'm not sure about exactly how the capitalization was chosen for citations in List of aperiodic sets of tiles, but they aren't consistently using one type of capitalization. Perhaps {{CS1 config}} should have a "capitalization=sentence" or "capitalization=title" parameter to indicate local preference. –jacobolus (t) 07:19, 7 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I like the idea of indicating a local preference, but I think it would be a bad idea if the citation templates were to use that to autocapitalize (just as it is a bad idea for the bot to change this capitalization). There are too many exceptions in both directions of words that should stay capitalized or lowercase regardless of the choice of capitalization for software to reliably get it right. Also, it depends on the kind of citation; my preference is sentence for article titles, and title for book and journal titles, but I've seen sentence for both or title for both. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:55, 7 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough: I can certainly imagine bots making a mess of this, as they do of most of the rest of their citation changes. Just to be clear then: your position is that bots should leave capitalization alone as long as the title listed in the citation is otherwise correct, and irrespective of what kind of capitalization is found among other citations on the page? Having bots err on the side of not taking potentially obnoxious actions seems fine with me.

Capitalization in Wikipedia article citations, even on carefully edited articles, is likely to stay wildly inconsistent. But there's not really too much harm in that, and someone can manually fix it if they feel like it. –jacobolus (t) 08:02, 7 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect that it's generally quite inconsistent even within the published literature, especially in publications where the only real copyediting is by the authors themselves. It's something I care about but my experience is most of my coauthors don't. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:13, 7 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Seems to be related to the MathML issue below. Adding tracking. --Redalert2fan (talk) 00:28, 29 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@David Eppstein Orginal reported bug should be fixed. Bot will no longer make the mistake while adding or converting parameters that include math tags inside citation templates. It will now properly convert it. Should it also fix existing errors? --Redalert2fan (talk) 14:02, 29 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

How do I prevent the bot from making this bad edit again? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:09, 8 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This edit seems about right, though pages=21 should be page=21, and it would probably be clearer to write website=The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery rather than work=The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery. To suppress bot edits to a particular citation though, add a comment before the first parameter of the template (the docs suggest <!-- Citation bot bypass-->) –jacobolus (t) 10:46, 12 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whats the problem on this one? I think I'm missing something --Redalert2fan (talk) 21:08, 26 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tracked in github.com
Issue #5301

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

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

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

Authors are hard for the bot. Perhaps just have it leave this alone?  Mr.choppers | ✎  03:44, 7 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Will need to investigate why it starts with 2 instead of 1. Article lists "By Agencies, ToI Staff and Jacob Magid" as the authors, so probably it is miscounting due to one of the others being (correctly) blocked. Redalert2fan (talk) 17:38, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've encountered three ways the DOI can fail:

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

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

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

I think there is a different bot that does this already if I recall correctly, but can't remember which one. If anyone know please point it out. --Redalert2fan (talk) 22:52, 26 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I am sure that this has probably been fixed, but it took me over five years to discover this Citation bot error & I am going to complain anyway. With this edit Citation bot set |isbn=9780815621690 for 15 16 citations, 14 15 of which were incorrect. [expletive deleted]

It would have been nice to somehow have been notified that this error had occurred with a notice to the talk page. Peaceray (talk) 19:11, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I presume that you meant this edit?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 19:19, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, this is the correct diff. Peaceray (talk) 20:42, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm uh not really sure what to do with this, are you asking that we time travel back to 2020 and post a notice on the talk page? I would love to have a time machine but unfortunately that is outside of the coding capabilities.

Tested all refs from the diff provided by Trappist the monk and found no incorrect additions of ISBNs. Redalert2fan (talk) 20:10, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Redalert2fan: Are you seriously implying that the addition of the same value of |isbn=9780815621690 to 16 different citations was correct? Eight of these were {{cite journal}} citations & one was a {{cite news}} citation.

Obviously we are not going to fix something that occurred over five years ago. However, going forward, when an error of this magnitude is discovered, why not put a notification about the error on the talk pages of the articles changed between the coding error was introduced & when it was fixed? Peaceray (talk) 20:42, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

No that's not what I am implying. To reassure you that this behavior no longer exists I tested all the citations that were changed in the diff provided and found that currently the bot does not add any incorrect ISBN's to those citations. It is quite obvious that the edit was incorrect. That's why I said tested, not checked.

If this incorrect behavior was still around we would have had to fix it though, old bugs are still valid bugs. You are in your right to report the bug for sure and it sure is annoying if someone or somebot breaks something. Of course, bugs usually are not around for years.

As far as I can see in the archive the incorrect additions to that specific page was not specifically reported. Perhaps between current day and 2020 someone reported a similar bug, or one of the maintainers just happened to fix whatever the issue was by coincidence. When it was fixed and what the fix was for this instance is therefore hard to say.

Usually a user will revert the bad edits right away and then file a bug report here. When the bug is fixed it will be marked here as fixed.

For implementing your suggestion It will be hard to define the scope of the notification to be send. It is nearly impossible to retrieve when a coding error was made, unless lets say we tweak the code today and suddenly everything breaks. Some code that has been around for years might suddenly be affected by bad data from the outside. Sometimes it takes a few minutes to fix, sometimes people spot something after years because there is such a low rate of edits of a specific type. Should we be able to define a period of between when a bug was introduced then the question will be which talk pages will we post a comment on? Talk pages of all articles that were edited in said period? Talk pages of articles that might have been affected? Only those affected by the specific instance of the bug? How will we know which pages are affected if there was no report? For reference Citationbot has since 2008 made 6 million edits, that is 350 thousand edits per year.

Now I totally get why you are requesting the feature, It seems like a great thing to have but thinking a bit further lets say 3 years ago user Bobby introduced bad references to 100 pages, we wouldn't ask him to go to all talk pages today to report he made an error. Nor if vandal Tommy secretly changed 50 pages over 50 days would we post on the 50 talk pages that they were vandalized between x and y date because of z. We would just revert and report. I don't think any other bot has a feature like this either, but if you do we can take a look at their implementation. Redalert2fan (talk) 22:09, 30 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

If we happen to know that a defect was introduced at a certain point, then when a fix was instituted, we would have a start & end time. I do not think that we would want to revert because there may have been intervening edits. I envision that it should be possible to write a script that takes the defect introduction time & the fix time, identify the articles that Citation bot touched, then write a notice to the associated talk page that there may have been errors than an editor needs to check. I think that this would be something separate from Citation bot itself, so no new features for it, just a new script. It would take human intervention to run the script, & the impetus would probably be someone reporting the problem here.

Of course, if we do not know if there was a problem & it inadvertently got fixed, then we may never know the time scope of the problem.

I apologize for not noticing this sooner, but I edit in a lot of different areas, & my main focus when doing page patrol on my watch list concentrating on new or unregistered editors, as those editors sometimes intentionally or unintentionally make bad edits. I just happened to notice this particular problem when a temporary account added some citations to the article. I just did not expect this particular behavior from Citation bot, but hey, I used to code applications & know that no matter how hard we try, there's always some defect that manages to get through. I do want to let you know that I appreciate the work that you do to code & maintain Citation bot. Thank you! Peaceray (talk) 04:37, 31 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds like this one got fixed. Yay. Sucks that it happened but it sounds like there's no additional code changes that need to be made. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:38, 31 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Marking as  Fixed so it gets archived. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:15, 2 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

	The Original Barnstar
	In 2025, other editors thanked Citation bot 1090 times using the thanks tool on the English Wikipedia. By that measure, this made Citation bot the #6 most thanked account in 2025. Congratulations and, well, thank you to Citation bot and its maintainers. Happy New Year! Mz7 (talk) 18:34, 31 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The two I found in that diff, "Climate change and mosquito-borne diseases in China: a review", and "Potential impact of climate change on emerging vector-borne and other infections in the UK", look correct: the bot changed a page parameter to an article-number parameter for metadata that (checking the source) appears to be an article-number and not a page number. Can you be more specific about which change you think is incorrect and why? — Preceding unsigned comment added by David Eppstein (talk • contribs)

Looked at it too, I can't see any mistakes in page/article-numbers made. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:22, 1 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@David Eppstein and Headbomb: Apologies for the invalid report. I've seen the bot change large numbers, some of which have an "e" in front, that are obviously not page numbers. These numbers were so small that they seemed to be valid page numbers. Happy New Year! — Preceding unsigned comment added by GoingBatty (talk • contribs)