User talk:Citation bot

Archives

List of archives

Before 2025

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 – Mar 2026)
Archive 44 (Mar 2026 – Present)

This page has archives. Topics inactive for 90000 days are automatically archived 1 or more at a time by if there are more than 4.

As of 2026, 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.

Submit a Bug Report

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.

Feature requests

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/
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
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
Use GET instead of POST for better proxy caches when talking to data-bases when possible.
Start to convert Google Books URL to "new" format https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/m8W2AgAAQBAJ?gbpv=1&pg=PA379

URL removed

Status: new bug
Reported by: Mika1h (talk) 10:57, 30 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Bot replaces cite web with cite book, it removes the URL completely
What should happen: Nothing, the ref cited a Library Journal review that's listed on the Amazon site for the book, now it cites just the book, there's no link to click to see the review.
Relevant diffs/links: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shatnerverse&diff=prev&oldid=1254239468
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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]

STILL creating new CS1 errors

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]

Adds cs1-formatted reference to article whose references are entirely in cs2

Status: new bug
Reported by: —David Eppstein (talk) 21:20, 28 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: In this edit the bot turned a bare-url reference, in an article all of whose many templated references were in Citation Style 2 (some using cite templates with mode=cs2), into a cite web template in Citation Style 1
What should happen: Not that. There is no reason to use cite web when the citation template works ok. In this case it could have been cite report if the bot were more intelligent, but that's above and beyond the bug in question
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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}}.

author/first --> last/first

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 16:21, 15 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What should happen: [3]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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

web vs book

Status: new bug
Reported by: 🌿MtBotany (talk) 02:07, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: The bot reformatted citations to a website that has ISBN and OCLC numbers due to being derived from a volume of a book series.
Relevant diffs/links: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Penstemon_crandallii&oldid=1256314002
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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]

Amazon link bug

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]

Converts conference citation to journal citation and changes title case

Status: new bug
Reported by: —David Eppstein (talk) 09:01, 9 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Special:Diff/1268341479
What should happen: In this specific case, the conversion to a more recent and more complete version of the paper happens to be acceptable. The bot got lucky. But in other cases, there might have been a reason to continue citing the conference version of a paper, even one with the same arxiv preprint number as a later journal version, and this conversion would be unsafe. The change from sentence case to title case, for a journal paper, is an unwanted style change, inconsistent with the use of sentence case for other journal papers referenced in this article.
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

COSMETICBOT changing names for author parameters with no actual effect

Status: new bug
Reported by: —David Eppstein (talk) 19:16, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Special:Diff/1269593606 changes last=, first=, and author-link= (on a multi-author publication) to last1=, first1=, and author-link1=. In this context, these parameters are synonyms so the change makes no effect to the rendered citation.
What should happen: Not that per WP:COSMETICBOT
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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

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

Indeed. I thought that I've noticed similar changes recently, but upon examining carefully, I see now that there and in the diff provided above, the structure looks like

{{Cite book|title=The Cambridge Mozart Encyclopedia|last=Eisen|first=Cliff|author-link=Cliff Eisen|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=2006|location=Cambridge|last2=Keefe|first2=Simon P.|author-link2=Simon P. Keefe}}

, with a second author present, but at the very end, separated from the first author by many other parameters. This is what WP:EDITORHOSTILE calls "harder to understand". So if the bot renames the author parameters in such cases, I would suggest to also reorder them properly (and reformat with spaces for readability according to WP:EDITORHOSTILE and {{Cite book}}'s TemplateData "format": "{{_ |_=_}}"). — Mikhail Ryazanov (talk) 02:56, 18 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Half-assed conversion of cite web to cite journal

Status: new bug
Reported by: —David Eppstein (talk) 17:53, 23 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Special:Diff/1271282424
What should happen: Either properly convert it to a publication type for a periodical (although calling the periodical, ORMS Today, a journal, is a stretch; it is a newsletter or magazine), or leave it alone; don't leave it in a broken half-converted state.
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

IAU Circular / CBET volume/issue/page

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:06, 4 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What should happen: [4], more or less
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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]

Series: Current Topics in Behavioral Neuroscience / Curr. Top. Behav. Neurosci. / Curr Top Behav Neurosci

Status: more to do
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:45, 12 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What should happen: [5]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Not quite fixed, still need to do follow up cleanup, e.g. [6]. 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]

Cosmetic?

Status: new bug
Reported by: Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 13:51, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: this edit
What should happen: No edit should be made, per WP:COSMETICBOT; this is a cosmetic edit. See this discussion of the edit.
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Also cosmetic [7]. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 07:18, 20 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Converts badly-formatted book review into worse-formatted mishmash of the book and its review

Status: new bug
Reported by: —David Eppstein (talk) 07:55, 1 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Special:Diff/1276511503
What should happen: Special:Diff/1278238470. But if the bot is not smart enough to do something like that, it should recognize its limitations and not make citations worse.
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Lecture Notes in Mathematics is a book series not a title

Status: new bug
Reported by: —David Eppstein (talk) 18:34, 30 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: In Special:Diff/1288138202 the bot removed the correct title and series of a book in the series Lecture Notes in Mathematics and replaced the title with the name of the series. Another bad edit under the responsibility of User:Dominic3203.
What should happen: Not that.
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Book review confusion

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]

Messed up book citation with title and chapter

Status: newbug
Reported by: Jay8g [V•T•E] 18:53, 9 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: [8] - I have no idea what happened here. It took a seemingly normal book citation with title and chapter parameters and renamed the title parameter to chapter, then removed the chapter name, leaving it with no title parameter.
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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]

Added to previously correct title

Status: new bug
Reported by: Jay8g [V•T•E] 19:29, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: [9]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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]

Pointless whitespace-only edit

Status: new bug
Reported by: Jay8g [V•T•E] 01:53, 15 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Not sure what happened here, but the bot should not make edits that just add a space character
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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]

Added incorrect HDL

Status: new bug
Reported by: Jon Kolbert (talk) 15:46, 25 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Incorrect HDL added, the bot used doi:10.1001/archpsyc.1965.01720310065008 and added a HDL to a different work. I'm not sure where the HDL came from but somehow it was linked
What should happen: No HDL added at all as it is to a different work
Relevant diffs/links: Special:Diff/1302363847
Replication instructions: See this link
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Fix ISSN with lowercase x, not hyphen instead of hyphen

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:22, 6 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What should happen: [10] [11] [12]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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]

Double last/first

Status: new bug
Reported by: Redalert2fan (talk) 19:00, 11 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: |last1=Freed |first1=Jamie |last2=Freed |first2=Jamie
What should happen: only add |last1=Freed |first1=Jamie
Relevant diffs/links: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Greater_Bay_Airlines&diff=prev&oldid=1305380893
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

adds volume=no. 10

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:17, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: [13]
What should happen: [14]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Italic tags

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 11:45, 19 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What should happen: [15], [16], [17], [18]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Bot changes "volume" to "issue" when only a single value is given

Status: new bug
Reported by: UtherSRG (talk) 14:54, 22 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: "volume" changed to "issue"
What should happen: Not this. :)
Relevant diffs/links: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chaetopterus_bruneli&diff=prev&oldid=1307257118
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

TNT volume/issue/pages=Online first/Onlinefirst

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:42, 22 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What should happen: [19]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Associated Press

Status: new bug
Reported by: SNUGGUMS (talk / edits) 01:29, 24 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Despite how "News" isn't actually part of the title for Associated Press, it for unclear reasons was wrongfully added next to that anyway, and that also shouldn't implement italics for a news agency's name.
Relevant diffs/links: diff
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Vol. cleanup

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:35, 25 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What should happen: [20]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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

Figure out jstor based on URLs

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:56, 25 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What should happen: [21]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Fix weird hyphens

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:11, 27 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What should happen: [22]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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]

Properly TNT volume/issue for IUA Circular

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 08:00, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: [23]
What should happen: [24] note the last change
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

url, chapter-url parameters

Status: new bug
Reported by: Kowal2701 (talk) 21:38, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: changed the "url" parameter of a ref ({{cite book}}) to "chapter-url", when the url was for the whole book
What should happen: nothing!
Relevant diffs/links: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Sakalava_empire&diff=prev&oldid=1309227702
Replication instructions: The ones it got wrong were all Internet Archive links
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Bot edit did nothing but add one space character

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

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

More Things to TNT

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:15, 12 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What should happen: Pubmed.ncbi.NLM.nih.gov, Pubmed, National Institutes of Health, PMC, National Library of Medicine
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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

More academic.oup.com handling

Status: new bug
Reported by: Jonatan Svensson Glad (talk) 14:17, 21 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Could the bot learn to do these edits?
What should happen: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Josve05a/sandbox/academic&diff=prev&oldid=1312585119
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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]

Advances in Enzymology and Related Subjects of Biochemistry not a journal

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:18, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: [25]
What should happen: [26]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

@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]

Integrate Monkbot 21

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

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

Wrong URL

Status: new bug
Reported by: --JBL (talk) 20:20, 24 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: adds the link https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/24870279 as a URL to citations of an unrelated book with which it shares a title [27] [28]
What should happen: not that
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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

Incorrect ISBN

Status: new bug
Reported by: GreenC 07:36, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Special:Diff/1231476865/1321722265 .. incorrect ISBN. The correct isbn ends in "6" the one added ends in "0". They are hardcover vs. paperback. The page numbers might not align, the citation won't verify. It's better to have "no ISBN" vs. "incorrect ISBN", wait for future tools that can retrieve the ISBN correctly. An incorrect ISBN introduces ambiguity, it's no longer clear which edition is being cited. The existence of a URL doesn't resolve the ambiguity, because maybe the URL was added after the ISBN. Other tools add URLs to match a (wrong) ISBN, etc..
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Mangles cite web to cite book conversion by failing to change parameter names

Status: in discussion
Reported by: —David Eppstein (talk) 08:33, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Mangles cite web to cite book conversion by failing to convert title/work to chapter/title
What should happen: In {{cite web}} templates, the specific location being cited is |title= in a larger work often cited as |work=/|website=. In {{cite book}} templates, this pair of parameters is disallowed. Instead, the different levels of material are |chapter=/|contribution=, |title=, and |series=. If the bot is converting a cite web to a cite book and can figure out which of the cite web |title=/|work= parameters corresponds to the cite book |chapter=/|title=/|series= parameters, it should change the parameter names. If it cannot figure it out, it should not perform the conversion, because leaving a |work= parameter in place creates an error and loses the information about what was in the parameter. The bot should never create errors and lose information.
Relevant diffs/links: An example is in the conversion of the template for the book What Is Data Science? in Special:Diff/1323850993. The basic idea of converting the template from cite web to cite book is correct. But the bot fails to do the conversion properly and borks the citation. It would be better for it not to have tried than to have tried and failed so badly.
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Tracked in github.com
Issue #4829
Resolved

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]

A different flavor of "title and work → chapter and title" issue

Status: new bug
Reported by: Jay8g [V•T•E] 06:35, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: [29]
Replication instructions: This bug was fixed for cases where citations are being converted to {{cite book}}, but apparently not when it already uses {{cite book}}. The bot is changing the parameters from title and work to chapter and work, instead of chapter and title, leaving the existing error from using work in cite book and adding a new error for not having a title set.
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Bot caused an ISBN/Date incompatibility error

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]

Bot limited to only single page request

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.

Tracked in github.com
Issue #4954

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

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

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

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

As some might have noticed, AManWithNoPlan has raised the limit to 50 pages. Redalert2fan (talk) 12:10, 16 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Bad title: Goodreads (related to title/work to chapter/title conversion)

Status: new bug
Reported by: Jay8g [V•T•E] 01:32, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: [30]
What should happen: Either leave the {{cite web}} as is, or properly convert to {{cite book}} (leave the existing title and simply remove work=Goodreads)
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Unsure if error

Status: new bug
Reported by: Abductive (reasoning) 03:51, 8 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Bot treated nearly identical citations to CABI Digital Library in the same article, Hakea, differently. For one, it removed information, but added the same sort of information to another. It left one as cite web but changed one to cite journal.
What should happen: Should be consistent
Relevant diffs/links: diff
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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]

Fake issue number and useless identifier numbers

Status: new bug
Reported by: —David Eppstein (talk) 00:33, 9 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Adds an issue number that was never given in the original publication [31] and identifiers that do not provide any reader-usable information beyond the metadata of the publication already in the reference (WP:ELNO #1)
What should happen: Not that
Relevant diffs/links: Special:Diff/1326425964
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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]

|contribution-url= vs |chapter-url=

Status: new bug
Reported by: Abductive (reasoning) 20:49, 10 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Bot "broke citation templates"
Relevant diffs/links: diff
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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]

doi-broken may be fixable

Status: feature request
Reported by: Johnjbarton (talk) 19:28, 13 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Bot adds parameter doi-broken
What should happen: Bot should attempt to correct parameter doi
Relevant diffs/links: Here is the bot adding the doi-broken https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Limonene&diff=prev&oldid=1258410753 to article Limonene

The DOI at that time was doi=10.1179/014788894794710913 a value added by AWB https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Limonene&diff=prev&oldid=515117170 The correct DOI is doi= 10.1179/his.1994.17.2.143 Since the Bot has code to construct DOI, if the value is incorrect it seems like an attempt to correct it would be helpful. In the case of Limonene, I deleted the doi parameter and ran the Citation bot. The correct DOI was added back. So a work around would be to delete all of the DOIs in all citations with doi-broken, then run citation bot twice, once to attempt fixes and once to reset the doi-broken on fails.

We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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:

bad wikipedia value. Personal experience this is the most common.
bad DOI database value added by publisher
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]

Don't add title when chapter and encyclopedia are already set (cite encyclopedia)

Status: new bug
Reported by: Jay8g [V•T•E] 04:01, 17 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: [32] -- it's pretty much always going to be redundant to one or the other of those parameters
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Cite web reference with DOI is converted to Cite journal

Status: new bug
Reported by: Srleffler (talk) 04:37, 5 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Incorrect conversion of cite web into cite journal
What should happen: Nothing
Relevant diffs/links: [33]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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

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

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

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

Website citation turned into incorrect journal citation; superflous title added to another

Status: notabug
Reported by: RW Dutton (talk) 14:25, 6 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Incorrect edits to two different CS1 references, as shown in the link. The title added to the PACMPL citation just reiterates the journal name, volume number and issue name, all already in the citation, as a title. The changes to the second reference are more serious. Firstly, please note that this second citation is explicitly a citation of the ACM's official HOPL IV website, and explicitly does not cite the PACMPL issue in which the HOPL IV papers were published: the previous citation covers the PACMPL issue. Worse, Citation bot doesn't just incorrectly change the reference to the HOPL IV site into a reference to the PACMPL issue, but uses the page reference and, worse, the author credit of the first paper in the PACMPL issue, and adds an incorrect and broken DOI.
What should happen: Citation bot should make no changes to these references; or at least not the ones it has been making. If there is unhappiness about the missing-title error in the PACMPL citation the correct solution is to fix the bug in the CS1 template which requires a superflous title here. In any case Citation bot should certainly not be mangling the reference to the ACM's HOPL IV website.
Relevant diffs/links: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_Programming_Languages_(conference)&curid=5396226&diff=1331438975&oldid=1331096411
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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

I don't have a stong feeling about the use of citations vs. links or other aspects of style on History of Programming Languages (conference): I just opted to conform with the style it had before I got there, as I mostly just wanted to add some important missing material, not rework the page. If anyone wants to do such a rework I'm unlikely to object (though I do seem to recall reading that the current consensus tends to favour moving things out of bare hyperlinks into references more than the reverse?) The page certainly needs plenty of work, including the addition of full lists of HOPL I-IV papers with links and/or citations.

But in any case this is not relevant to the bug reported here. The HOPL IV page on the ACM's HOPL website simply is not the HOPL IV issue of PACAMPL or even the webpage for the HOPL IV issue of PACAMPL. They're different things with different citations, and Citation bot obviously should not conflate one with the other.

On the issue of {{cite journal}} Title entries, the problem is that for the most part, individual (whole) issues of academic journals just do not have titles; and a description put together from other bits of citation info is not a title and so can't be offered as one. Now if there were explicitly a consensus that an unstructured text citation can be put in the place of a non-existent title in Title, that would be one thing. But what sign is there of such a consensus? Neither Template:Cite_journal#Title nor Help:Citation_Style_1#Titles_and_chapters even contemplate it.

(All that being said, the specific issue of PACMPL which was cited does have an issue name rather than just an issue number, and that is arguably an issue title or close enough to one, so I have made that the Title in the citation. However this does not resolve the general Citation bot bug reported here: most journal issues do not have names, and in any case the issue name is not the text which got put into Title.) RW Dutton (talk) 18:42, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Closing. Redalert2fan (talk) 11:29, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Please don't close this discussion yet. I do apologise for my slow response, but I've been largely away from WP for a while. RW Dutton (talk) 14:44, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Okay. Redalert2fan (talk) 15:27, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for this.RW Dutton (talk) 18:44, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Bogus series

Status: new bug
Reported by: —David Eppstein (talk) 19:03, 22 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Adds |series= that is not actually a book series, to a reference to a translation of a book. The added text is actually the original untranslated book title and the name of the language it has been translated into.
Relevant diffs/links: Special:Diff/1334297429
Replication instructions: To replicate, be User:Abductive and as usual fail to perform any oversight over the bad edits of the bot.
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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

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

bot adds `|chapter=` when template already has `|contribution=`

Status: new bug
Reported by: Trappist the monk (talk) 01:07, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: bot added |chapter= to {{citation}} templates that use |contribution= and |contribution-url=. |contribution= is an alias of |chapter=; cs1|2 cannot support both simultaneously so the bot should never add an alias of an already present parameter. The complete map of cs1|2 parameter aliases is at line 289 et seq in Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration. The bot was apparently inconsistent in that it did not add |chapter= to all {{citation}} templates that use |contribution=.
Relevant diffs/links: Diff
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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

Feature request: change at=pp... to pages=

Status: new bug
Reported by: —David Eppstein (talk) 08:50, 25 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Special:Diff/1334723790
What should happen: It would have been helpful for the bot to have changed |at=pp. 251-254 to |pages=251–254 (also in the same reference the author's first and last names are swapped but that may be harder to detect).
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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

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

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

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

cite biorxiv cosmetic edit

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:43, 26 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: [34]
What should happen: If only the capitalization is changed, don't make the edit
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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

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

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

Only removing a single empty parameter

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

Adding display-authors= to references on articles that have display-author templates

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

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

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

Uses CS1 templates in articles tagged as using CS2

Status: new bug
Reported by: —David Eppstein (talk) 01:45, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: In Special:Diff/1335547300, the bot changed a bare-url reference to a templated reference (good, so far as it goes). But the article was tagged with {{CS1 config|mode=cs2}} so the bot should have used {{citation}}. Instead, it incorrectly used {{cite web}}.
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gradual half-conversion of reference from conference version to Frankenstein half-conference half-journal version

Status: new bug
Reported by: —David Eppstein (talk) 18:14, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: In 2020 Citation bot added a journal-version doi to a reference to a conference paper Special:Diff/954417644. Now today it is taking that incorrect doi as license to add more journal-version metadata to the reference (Special:Diff/1335696299) despite the contribution= and title= and year= still being the conference version and the journal= from the journal version still not being included.
What should happen: The bot should notice the contribution= and title= mismatch and leave cleaning up its past mess to humans. The actual preferred outcome in this particular case would be to cite the journal version (and to remove the bogus arxiv bibcode) but Citation bot is not smart enough to distinguish this from cases where the conference version is intended. Also User:Abductive should have noticed the bad edit credited to them and not made it, again.
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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

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

Adds book review metadata to citation to book

Status: new bug
Reported by: —David Eppstein (talk) 23:38, 30 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Special:Diff/1335741000
What should happen: Not that. The added metadata is for a book review, not for the book being cited. This sort of thing has been reported and reported as fixed long ago. Why is it still happening? This is a severe enough regression that I am seriously considering blocking the bot. And what do you know: Suggested by User:Abductive, but not checked by them. What a surprise.
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Added url= should be contribution-url=

Status: new bug
Reported by: —David Eppstein (talk) 21:16, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: In Special:Diff/1335896006, the added url is for a paper in an edited volume. But it is added as url= (causing it to be linked to the title of the volume), when it should have been added as contribution-url= (linked to the title of the paper). Secondarily, in this particular case, it would have been better to use hdl=, as the handle goes to the same place as the url.
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Removes mathematics formatting from reference title

Status: new bug
Reported by: —David Eppstein (talk) 21:37, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: In Special:Diff/1335903462 it changed a title from "The length of an <math>s</math>-increasing sequence of <math>r</math>-tuples" (with LaTeX-mathematics formatting) to "The length of an ''s'' -increasing sequence of ''r'' -tuples" (with bare-html italics for the mathematics, not even {{math}}).
What should happen: Not that. In this case the result is merely bad and ugly formatting, but for some other titles the use of LaTeX mathematics in the title is an absolute necessity; they cannot be formatted correctly in any other way. For example: Benjamin, Arthur T.; Orrison, M. E. (2002), "Two quick combinatorial proofs of $\textstyle \sum k^{3}={n+1 \choose 2}^{2}$ " (PDF), College Mathematics Journal, 33 (5): 406–408, doi:10.2307/1559017, JSTOR 1559017
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad split of Dutch name

Status: new bug
Reported by: —David Eppstein (talk) 21:58, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Special:Diff/1335906273 adds an author "Heus, Anne-Lot de". Obviously, that should be "De Heus, Anne-Lot". (Incidentally, this is yet another example of a useless redundant work= added to a citation with a publisher= saying the same thing better. And I wonder where the bot got its data from as the link is dead and the 404 page does not contain that author name.)
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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

>Consult APIs to expand templates

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

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

+Adding work: ARC CBBC

+Adding last1: Heus

+Adding first1: Anne-Lot de

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even as a native speaker of Dutch it is kind of strange, but correct indeed. So nothing to fix for that part. Will check the metadata issue. Redalert2fan (talk) 11:21, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

issue and volume can't both be #163

Status: new bug
Reported by: Abductive (reasoning) 22:04, 31 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: Bot added issue=163 where there was already volume=163 to History of the metre
Relevant diffs/links: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_metre&diff=next&oldid=1329009885
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

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

URLs ending in .ch### are chapter-urls

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 08:42, 5 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What should happen: [35]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

The exact pattern can be tweaked...

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

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

Caps: eFood, eJHaem

Sangeetha, V. J.; Dutta, Sayantani; Moses, J. A.; Anandharamakrishnan, C. (2022), "Zinc nutrition and human health: Overview and implications", eFood, 3 (5) e17, doi:10.1002/efd2.17
Berthou, Christian; Iliou, Jean Paul; Barba, Denis (2022), "Iron, neuro-bioavailability and depression", eJHaem, 3 (1): 263–275, doi:10.1002/jha2.321, PMC 9175715, PMID 35846210

Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:50, 19 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I need the incorrect spelling as well for both. Redalert2fan (talk) 12:57, 21 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Any that isn't eFood and eJHaem? Like Efood, EFOOD, EFood, or EJHAEM, EJHaem, Ejhaem, ... Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:13, 21 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The code is set up so that a specific incorrect capitalization from a list, case sensitive, gets replaced with the corrected capitalization. That is instead of a case of insensitive recognition. Could probably be done smarter, but it is not.

So to keep the list shorter as far as I see, only the specific incorrect capitalization made by the bot is added, instead of all possible incorrect capitalizations. Redalert2fan (talk) 16:39, 21 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Antibiotics and Chemotherapy is a journal, not a book series

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:45, 12 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: [36]
What should happen: [37]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Was added to specifically be a series back in 2019, see User_talk:Citation_bot/Archive_19#Better_series_handling:_Antibiotics_and_Chemotherapy. Not sure if that was your intention back then but the pull request that was implemented added Antibiotics and Chemotherapy to JOURNAL_IS_BOOK_SERIES forcing it to be a book series. I can remove it from there and it should be processed a a journal again. Let me know how to proceed. Redalert2fan (talk) 17:44, 21 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Redalert2fan: I see.... the difference is that A&C with the DOI 10.1159/... is a book series from Karger, while A&C with the DOI 10.24411/... or 10.37489/... is the Russian journal. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:20, 21 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Is one version a lot more common than the other? In the current configuration the bot doesn't have code to handle this. Redalert2fan (talk) 09:38, 26 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The series (10.1159/.) is much more commonly encountered. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 10:18, 26 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I'll have to think about implementing some special code to handle this one then Redalert2fan (talk) 21:59, 27 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]

adds |chapter= to a {{citation}} template that already has |journal=

Status: new bug
Reported by: Trappist the monk (talk) 22:36, 5 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: adds |chapter= to a {{citation}} template that already has |journal=. This could be construed as GIGO because the cited source is a conference proceeding so should not be using |journal=. Regardless, {{citation}} rejects |chapter= and any of its aliases (|contribution=, |entry=, |article=, |section=) when |journal= or any of its aliases (|magazine=, |newspaper=, |periodical=, |website=, |work=) is present and has an assigned value. The rejection occurs because {{citation}} uses the presence of a periodical parameter (|journal= and aliases) to determine how the citation will render. It has been ever thus. Wasn't this supposed to have been fixed in the latest round of fixes?
Relevant diffs/links: diff
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Not actually by the previous round, but the round before that. Evidently {{citation}} with |journal= still has some gaps left. With this expand report it should be easier to fix, thanks. --Redalert2fan (talk) 10:48, 28 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

bot creates malformed |vauthors= parameter

Status: new bug
Reported by: Trappist the monk (talk) 14:24, 6 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: bot duplicated journal name in |vauthors=. Apparently The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health names itself as author for editorials. I'm not sure that it is necessary to name the journal as author in citations when we already name the journal in the required |journal= parameter. If it is deemed to be necessary and if the bot is going to populate |vauthors= with the journal name, the rules for |vauthors= must be obeyed. If it must be, then for this example, the author-name must be written: |vauthor=((The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health)) so that cs1|2 does not emit a Vancouver style error message.
Relevant diffs/links: diff
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

improper replacement of unsupported parameter

Status: new bug
Reported by: Trappist the monk (talk) 19:23, 9 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: bot replaced unsupported parameter |open-access=yes with |osti-access=yes. cs1|2 does not recognize |open-access=. cs1|2 does not recognize yes as a valid value for |osti-access=. cs1|2 requires |osti-access= to have the matching parameter |osti=.
What should happen: bot should not replace unknown parameters with valid parameters that more-or-less look similar to the invalid parameter when all of the requirements for the new parameter (and its value) cannot be met. In this case, the bot should have deleted |open-access=yes.
Relevant diffs/links: diff
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

What is supported is |doi-access=free, or a similar thing like |bibcode-access=free, |osti-access=free, ... Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:53, 9 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Adds ORCID URL with invalid character, but even without that character, it seems like a useless URL

Status: new bug
Reported by: — Chris Capoccia 💬 21:48, 12 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: completing doi:10.1257/aer.20180338 adds ORCID URL for John Van Reenen author page, but appended with an illegal character. While he is one of the authors, the page does not include anything about the title at all, so the whole URL is useless and should not be added.
Relevant diffs/links: diff
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Cleanup `|volume=Volume xxx`

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:41, 15 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What should happen: [38]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Cleanup `|pages=pp xx`

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:46, 15 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What should happen: [39]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Hello! Your contributions are terrific, Citation Bot!

I really like your contributions, so here's some microchips, motor oil and a barnstar!

Zahrazamedahmedi has given you microchips! Microchips promote WikiLove (📖💞) and hopefully this one has made your day more efficient. It is the food best preferred by bots. 🤖 Spread the WikiLove by giving someone else microchips, whether it be someone you have had robot wars with in the past or a good friend.

Spread the goodness of microchips by adding {{subst:Microchips for you}} to someone's talk page with a friendly message!

Zahrazamedahmedi has given you motor oil! Motor oil promotes WikiLove (📖💞) and hopefully this one has made your day more efficient. It is the drink best preferred by bots. 🤖 Spread the WikiLove by giving someone else motor oil, whether it be someone you have had robot wars with in the past or a good friend.

Spread the goodness of motor oil by adding {{subst:Motor oil for you}} to someone's talk page with a friendly message!

		The Citation Barnstar
		Thanks for fixing citations, Citation Bot! Good Job! Zahrazamedahmedi (talk) 14:28, 16 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Title with line break

The bot only entered "Lax monad". See also WP:TH#Title_with_line_break.--SilverMatsu (talk) 01:06, 17 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/... is a chapter url

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:27, 20 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What should happen: [40]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Progress in Molecular Biology and Translational Science is a series

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:14, 22 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What should happen: [41]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

The diff you posted shows it being changed to a series. What is the exact issue being reported? If its a cite journal as original before the change the web interface outputs: "!Citation should probably not have journal = Progress in Molecular Biology and Translational Science as well as chapter / ISBN 978-0-12-415813-9" suggesting the user to change it themselves. And if journal= is not filled in the bot correctly changes it as can be seen here: diff. --Redalert2fan (talk) 11:25, 29 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The diff is after me manually TNTing the citation.

;Original
*{{Cite journal |last=Croom |first=Edward |date=2012 |title=Metabolism of xenobiotics of human environments |journal=Progress in Molecular Biology and Translational Science |volume=112 |pages=31–88 |doi=10.1016/B978-0-12-415813-9.00003-9 |issn=1878-0814 |pmid=22974737 |isbn=978-0-12-415813-9 }}
;TNT'd
*{{Cite journal |last=Croom |first=Edward |date=2012 |volume=112 |pages=31–88 |doi=10.1016/B978-0-12-415813-9.00003-9 |issn=1878-0814 |pmid=22974737 |isbn=978-0-12-415813-9 }}
;After running the bot
*{{Cite book |last=Croom |first=Edward |title=Toxicology and Human Environments |chapter=Metabolism of Xenobiotics of Human Environments |series=Progress in Molecular Biology and Translational Science |date=2012 |volume=112 |pages=31–88 |doi=10.1016/B978-0-12-415813-9.00003-9 |issn=1878-0814 |pmid=22974737 |isbn=978-0-12-415813-9 }}

The bot should be able do the convertion automatically, without the need to manually TNT bunk parameters. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 11:30, 29 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Usualy if there is a warning in the web interface there is a reason it is not performed automatically. Basically the warning is a trigger for the user to verify it themselves instead. I see you used the gadget so you don't get those warnings but in essence you completed what the bot suggested.

I wouldn't consider this as a bug since the bot did not add the incorrect journal=Progress in Molecular Biology and Translational Science, it was already present.

I don't know the reason why this change is not done automatically, but probably as a precaution, or somebody objected to it before. Redalert2fan (talk) 11:41, 29 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Further: the bot is already able to do it code wise, but gives the warning instead. Redalert2fan (talk) 11:44, 29 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The bot already does this conversion for other series, e.g. Methods in Molecular Biology, Advances in Pharmacology, Inorganic Syntheses, Advances in Enzymology, Studies in Bilingualism... Why treat this one with special gloves? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:30, 29 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

This one is not treated specially as far as I know, are you sure the other ones work without the manual TNT? Redalert2fan (talk) 16:15, 29 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe not all in all situations, but see e.g. [42]. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:18, 29 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Inconsistent behavior from the bot without an easy explanation, how exciting! sarcasm mode off: yep, this will be requiring another round of deeper investigation... Redalert2fan (talk) 20:29, 29 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Caps: dan

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 06:26, 23 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What should happen: [43]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

This is the Malay word for "and". Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 06:26, 23 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Broken bepress URL

Status: new bug
Reported by: — Chris Capoccia 💬 23:30, 23 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: expanding doi:10.1542/peds.2007-2361 adds broken URL instead of adding |doi-access=free
Relevant diffs/links: diff
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Expanding DOI adds URL for unrelated thesis

Status: new bug
Reported by: — Chris Capoccia 💬 14:05, 24 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: expansion of doi:10.1109/CVPR.2016.90 adds URL for unrelated thesis
Relevant diffs/links: diff
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Spurious issue for Annual Reviews...

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:47, 30 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: [44]
What should happen: [45]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Possibly related to the recent issues fix. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:47, 30 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think its related to that, since that fix only strips stuff or moves when it matches the exact combination of the text + year. --Redalert2fan (talk) 08:27, 30 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

cookieAbsent

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:05, 30 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What should happen: [46], [47]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Basically, TNT the whole citation, keep the doi, and expand. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:05, 30 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

This affects ~450 articles. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:16, 30 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Faulty or spam DOI

Status: new bug
Reported by: Theosch (talk) 12:34, 6 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

This bot repeatedly introduces a faulty or spam DOI link here: ^[1]

References

^ Evtimov, Ivan; Ivanov, Rosen; Staneva, Gergana; Kadikyanov, Georgi (2017), "A Study on electric bicycle energy efficiency", Transport Problems, 10 (3): 131–140, doi:10.21307/tp-2015-041

Please provide a diff of the bot doing this. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:57, 6 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Incorrectly shortens DOI value

Status: new bug
Reported by: GoingBatty (talk) 16:52, 16 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]
What happens: On Community health centers in the United States, the bot incorrectly shortens DOI value in reference #75
What should happen: correct DOI value or do nothing
Replication instructions: Go to Community health centers in the United States, click "Edit source" and then scroll to the bottom and click the "Citations" button.
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

@GoingBatty: Are you sure? It appears that ref #75 (permalink) was added to the article by Editor Juerta at this edit. That ref is obviously broken (extraneous tail text). In the time between Editor Juerta's edit and your recent edit (as I write this, the current revision), Citation bot did not edit the article. Do you have a diff to support your claim?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 18:03, 16 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Trappist the monk: I did not save the edit, as I didn't want to break the article. But I just made this edit, which I promptly reverted. GoingBatty (talk) 18:49, 16 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Include template:doi and template:doi-inline in the free doi logic

E.g. [48]. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 08:05, 17 May 2026 (UTC)[reply]

[Etimov-1] Evtimov, Ivan; Ivanov, Rosen; Staneva, Gergana; Kadikyanov, Georgi (2017), "A Study on electric bicycle energy efficiency", Transport Problems, 10 (3): 131–140, doi:10.21307/tp-2015-041

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