Revision as of 01:25, 7 September 2009

Please read this before reporting a bug

To facilitate bug fixing, please list your bug report on the bot's page at Google Code. If you are unable to do this, you can report it below, but it may take longer for the issue to be resolved.

Perennial problems

Updating year for articles on final publication

One other change I noticed in that same edit. It's quite common to cite medical articles when they have been published online but have not been officially assigned year, volume, and pages. For example, Autism therapies formerly contained this citation:

Shimabukuro TT, Grosse SD, Rice C (2007). "Medical expenditures for children with an autism spectrum disorder in a privately insured population". J Autism Dev Disord. doi:10.1007/s10803-007-0424-y. PMID 17690969.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

because the paper was published online in 2007. Eventually the paper was published in the official journal in 2008, and Citation bot updated the citation by adding volume=38 and pages=546, resulting in this partially-improved version:

Shimabukuro TT, Grosse SD, Rice C (2007). "Medical expenditures for children with an autism spectrum disorder in a privately insured population". J Autism Dev Disord. 38: 546. doi:10.1007/s10803-007-0424-y. PMID 17690969.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

To finish the improvement, I had to manually change the year=2007 to year=2008, add issue=3, and add the last page number (552), resulting in the following:

Shimabukuro TT, Grosse SD, Rice C (2008). "Medical expenditures for children with an autism spectrum disorder in a privately insured population". J Autism Dev Disord. 38 (3): 546–52. doi:10.1007/s10803-007-0424-y. PMID 17690969.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

I understand that Citation bot does not have the issue=3 and the last-page 552 information available, so it cannot fix that part of the citation. However, it does have the date available, so it could update year=2007 to year=2008, thus saving me a bit of work. (I have to clean up after the Citation bot a lot, so every bit would help.) Could you please fix the citation bot to add 1 to the year if necessary, when it adds a volume= and pages= info? Thanks. Eubulides (talk) 16:54, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I can do this. The downside is that where the data in the central database is incorrect, there is no way for users to stop the bot inputting the incorrect year each time it visits a page. I'll leave it up to you to decide which will cause editors more inconvenience - it's a tricky one to resolve! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 23:01, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

The common pattern I run into is that I cite a prepublication version of a paper dated 2008, and then the final version comes out in 2009. Typically the prepublication version lacks volume and page number (since it hasn't been decided yet). So how about this heuristic: if the citation lacks volume and page number and its year is lower than the published year and its year does not have a comment, then update the year; otherwise, leave the year alone. This heuristic would handle most of the problems I run into, and should be easy to override (with a comment) in the rare cases that it goes awry. Eubulides (talk) 16:08, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

Undesirable location= and publisher= for Cite book

This edit to Autism added "|publisher= AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIC PRESS INC (DC) |location= United States" to two citations of DSM-IV-TR. In both cases, the publisher= and location= information is undesirable: a "location= United States" is useless for an American organization, and a "|publisher= AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIC PRESS INC (DC)" is simply duplicated (and poorly-capitalized) information for a citation that already says "|author= American Psychiatric Association". The Citation bot used to not make changes like this; can you please fix it so that it continues to not make these changes, or let me know how to shut it off for these citations? In the mean time I cleaned up by hand. Thanks. Eubulides (talk) 04:54, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

I've been thinking about this; can you propose a solution for how the bot can work out when it's inappropriate to add a publisher and location to a citation? If not, the usual trick of adding a <!-- comment --> into any field you want the bot to ignore will work. And I'll make the capitalisation prettier when I get the chance. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 15:38, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, well, I can't think of a good heuristic in general. But one thing does stick out: how about not inserting "|location=" if the ISBN is present? With modern books, the location information is almost invariably useless and even misleading information. Readers don't need to know that the Oxford University Press is in Oxford, and for a major publisher like McGraw-Hill it's pretty much irrelevant whether the book says that it was published in New York or in Chicago. Eubulides (talk) 16:13, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

Omitting location information from citations generally would need to be discussed more widely, perhaps at "Misplaced Pages talk:Citing sources" or the village pump. It is still the practice in many contexts (journal articles and library catalogues, for instance) to provide the location of publishers. Also, some publishers produce different editions of the same book in different locations, so the location information helps to differentiate one country edition from another. — Cheers, JackLee 18:03, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

Is this a bug?

Is this a bug? I don't know why it added that parameter to the citation template... I'm still semi-new to things here. Killiondude (talk) 07:59, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

It's not a bug, it's to bring to editors' attention the fact that some data is included in the template but is not displayed because it lacks a parameter (e.g."title=") before it. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 14:46, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Bot never finishes on "Causes of autism"

When I visit http://toolserver.org/~verisimilus/Bot/DOI_bot/ and enter "Causes of autism", check only the "Thorough mode" box (without committing edits), and hit "Submit Query", the bot seems to give up about halfway through. The last few lines of output look like this. Maybe that citation is putting it into a loop?

Mercury exposure and child development outcomes
Already has a DOI. All details present - no need to query CrossRef. No CrossRef record found.
Determining format of URL...assessing URL Done.
Checking that the DOI is operational...

Eubulides (talk) 19:29, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

I'll look into it; there are still some issues with the toolserver servers which are making debugging difficult at the moment, so it might be a short while. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 22:27, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Thorough mode is ugly - it might be a while before I can fix this. Meanwhile, it works in standard mode. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 03:23, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Outstanding bugs and suggestions

Suggestion (arχiv)

• How about extending the bot to cover {{cite arXiv}}?
• How about extending the bot to search the arχiv database for preprints/author info/publication info when published...?
• Make sure to read this before, else the arχiv might not be too happy

Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 00:08, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

That sounds a good idea. I'd need to find out if they had an 'API' first though - i.e. a way that bots are allowed to access their data. If you can find out if they have a robot access policy that would allow the use you are suggesting, then please let me know and I'll add its implementation to my to do list. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 03:43, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I'm no coder so I don't know exactly what you need, but this seems related.Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 04:53, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Looks promising, thanks. It may be a while until I get round to it but I'll look at implementing it as soon as I can. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 05:14, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

While on the subject, I though I should mention a script I'd written some time ago to semi-automatically normalize arXiv URLs: User talk:Ilmari Karonen/fixarxivlinks.js. Perhaps there are some features there that you might want to include. The linked page on arXiv identifiers for for interacting services may also be useful. —Ilmari Karonen (talk) 12:49, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Looks handy, thanks. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 13:29, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Any update on the subject?Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 07:39, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

 Done Now working. Specify an arXiv and the bot will complete the rest. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 01:53, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Cool. However the Bot overwrites some user input. See where the bot changed the way the author was specified (breaking the style of the page).Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 12:41, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

As I understand it, last-first is preferable to author, for reasons including metadata formatting. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 16:19, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, but the bot isn't supposed to change what users write. Some article are formated in "J.D. Smith" format, instead of "Smith, J.D." for example and the bot is screwing those up. Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 17:10, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Incorrect DOI when different sources have same page number

This edit inserted doi:10.1136/bmj.323.7317.869 for Carapetis et al. 2001 (PMID 11683165), but that's the wrong DOI: that DOI points to Powles 2001 (PMID 11683163). What seems to have happened is that there are four PMIDs (11683163 through 11683166) that all have identical page numbers (PubMed says they're all "BMJ. 2001 Oct 13; 323 (7317): 869"), and the citation bot is confused by this and is mistakenly thinking that the DOI for PMID 11683163 is valid for the other PMIDs. Eubulides (talk) 04:46, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Difficult to treat this false positive: I've manually inserted the correct DOI as a resolution. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 19:42, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, but that edit was not correct, as it reinserted doi:10.1136/bmj.323.7317.869, which (as described above) is the wrong DOI for Carapetis et al. 2001 (PMID 11683165). I worked around the problem by replacing the DOI with a comment saying "citation bot fodder". Is there some way to find out the correct DOI in cases like these? If so, I can insert the correct one by hand. Eubulides (talk) 03:26, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

That's the DOI I found here, which is the page I found when I googled the title quoted in the citation. Perhaps, because the articles are on the same page, they have been given the same DOI? Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 03:36, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Maybe so (and if so, it's clearly an error; see this brief summary of DOI errors (PDF)); but for whatever reason doi:10.1136/bmj.323.7317.869 clearly does not work for Carapetis et al. 2001 (PMID 11683165). The URL you gave, http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/bmj%3b323/7317/869/a, hints that doi:10.1136/bmj.323.7317.869/a or doi:10.1136/bmj.323.7317.869.a might work, but they don't work either. And I can't use the doi_brokendate= parameter of {{Cite journal}}, since it would generate a claim that doi:10.1136/bmj.323.7317.869 is inactive, even though it is not inactive: it's a perfectly valid DOI for Powles 2001 (PMID 11683163). For now I can't think of any better solution than putting a citation-bot fodder comment into the doi= field. Eubulides (talk) 05:54, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Probably worth making sure this comment explains the situation to human editors, and following this up with the publishers. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 14:28, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Suggestion: ISBN

Any reason why the bot doesn't search for ISBNs for {{cite book}}?Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 08:46, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

API thingy whatever an API is.Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics}

The database only permits 100 automated queries per day; once the bot has exceeded this limit it cannot search for more. These queries are prioritised so manually-initiated uses of the bot get first dibs on the queries. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 17:30, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

UPPERCASE change to Titlecase inappropriately

Some journals have all uppercase words, e.g., FEBS Journal. Your otherwise very useful bot changes these to titlecase (Febs in this case). Xasodfuih (talk) 20:05, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

For practical reasons I have to add these exclusions on an individual basis. Let me know if there are any others. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 03:14, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

You can now list exclusions at User:Citation bot/capitalisation exclusions. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 21:12, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Tagging dead links

Could not see anything about this above. Bot is adding dead link tags for links that are not dead: Kind regards, Tom B (talk) 22:28, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

at least for the first one, it might be because the doi (doi:10.1038/news050321-9) is bad, not the url.  —Chris Capoccia ⁄_C

It's more likely because at the instant that the bot tried to access the links, it could not establish a connection to the server. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 15:38, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Another example: diff, non-dead link. cab (talk) 01:31, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Link to Google Books nuked for no apparent reason

CitationBot removed a url= link to Google Books for no apparent reason: Jpatokal (talk) 02:19, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

There was a separate, blank, url= parameter in the template. Where the same parameter is used twice in a template, only the second value is displayed, so the bot removes the first, redundant value. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 12:51, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

The bot should check which is empty and remove that the empty one before removing one with something in it. Also, the bot should probably comment the second parameter away rather than simply remove it from the page (something like <ref>{{cite web| ... }}<!-- Duplicate: |url=http://www.url.com/yo.html --></ref>). Comments?Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 08:23, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

That might be possible. Perhaps it could also add the article to a category of 'articles with dodgy citations' or something. I'll add it to my to-do list... Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 21:22, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Mistaken attribution

In this edit by the bot, {{cite journal |last=Gibson |first=William |year=1991 |month=November |title=] |journal=] }}, a citation for a story published in a science fiction magazine, was bizarrely changed to {{cite journal |last=Gibson |first=William |year=1991 |month=November |title=] |journal=] |author=Chen, Wh; Su, Hp; Chiu, Yh; Tseng, Cc; Chung, Kc |volume=2008 |issue= |pages=4883–6 |pmid=19163811 |doi=10.1109/IEMBS.2008.4650308 }}, which points to doi:10.1109/IEMBS.2008.4650308, an academic paper on "A two-stage approach to positioning and identification of tracheal intubation using LED-based lightwand and acoustic models". This is clearly fucked. Skomorokh 22:25, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

The citation must be matching something else in the CrossRef database. I'm afraid you'll have to escape this citation by hand. I think instructions are on the bot's userpage. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 16:59, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Replacing origyear with year

This bot appears to be replacing origyear with year in cases where the former is present but the latter is not. This is not at all appropriate. If a book is originally published in 1907, as recognised in the citation by origyear, the bot should not introduce the false claim that the work cited was published in 1907, when it could have been published in (for example) 2009. Skomorokh 22:25, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

IMO, if you're referencing a later reprint of a book originally published in 1907, then the bot isn't making a mistake when saying the work has been published in 1907 since it was indeed published in 1907. If you want to specifically cite the reprint, then use both |year=2009 and |origyear=1907. Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 22:53, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

The problem is that until some months ago, origyear always got displayed, whether or not year was present. When the template was revamped and reorganised the behaviour changed so that origyear was treated as a note, and dependent on the presence of year. I've requested that the old behaviour be reinstated, at Template talk:Citation/core#origyear where year missing, but the responsibility was put back on me to act, and it's slightly (I think) beyond the limit of my current technical capability. The best way forward would be that someone who's good at templates should alter it. SamuelTheGhost (talk) 23:06, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

No, Headbomb, this introduces undeniable factual inaccuracies into citations, as the year parameter goes along with all other publication information, i.e publisher, location, isbn. A citation is mistaken when it claims that a 1877 book was published by Autonomedia in California. Skomorokh 23:28, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

There didn't seem to be a consensus reached in December (Template_talk:Cite_book/Archive_7#Origyear) - the bot is responding to the current practise employed at the template. I don't see any problem with the bot's behaviour - if somebody only specifies the original year, then one must assume that the reference is good if it refers to the publication of that year. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 16:58, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Back in December it seems that people just lost interest. It's clear that using the bot is contentious. It seems pretty clear to me that amending the template to always display the origyear, in whatever format, is less risky. People who used the old template in that way were presumably happy with what it displayed at that time. There must have been some implicit or explicit promise of backwards compatibility when the template structure was changed. That promise should be kept. SamuelTheGhost (talk) 19:38, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

I strongly agree. The bot should not be messing with origyear while there are issues still to address. Skomorokh 21:26, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Ah, well if it's hampering backwards compatibility which should get fixed, then the bot should stop switching origyear to year. year however, should always be specified.Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 04:53, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

• I've looked at the bot's code and as far as I can tell, it only removes the 'origyear' parameter if it is exactly the same as the 'year' parameter. Therefore in cases where the bot is replacing 'origyear' with 'year', the bot must be finding that the year specified as 'origyear' is in fact the date of publication of the book referred to. Is anyone aware of examples where this is not what is happening? And presumably this behaviour is correct? Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 16:09, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Unnecessary addition of {{dead link}} when citation template already has "archiveurl" parameter

Hi, your bot added the |format= parameter with a {{dead link}} tag to the following citation template:

The story of the New River, Thames Water, archived from the original ( – ) on 11 February 2008, retrieved 2008-05-01 {{citation}}: External link in |format= (help).

However, I believe this was unnecessary as I had already added the |archiveurl= and |archivedate= parameters. — Cheers, JackLee 03:47, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

 Fixed: the bot will only check for dead links when |archiveurl= is not specified. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 21:23, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Removal of "title" parameter

Hi, this edit may or may not be a bug; an editor placed the publisher field in a hidden comment, which citation bot removed, but at the same time it also removed the title parameter. Steve 09:27, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Deleted one author

The bot deleted one author on line 105. Admittedly it was my mistake for making them both first authors, but deletion is not an elegant solution. Renumbering or commenting would be better.--Yannick (talk) 02:11, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

hyphen to dash

The bot changes a hyphen to a dash in a range of page numbers in references, but it does not do it in inline citations, e.g. in "{{harvcol|Hooper|1970|pp=17-19}}". Bubba73 (talk), 14:51, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

 Fixed; please report any errors in the implementation. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 00:02, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Last name, first name

I just used the bot to add references to Fiji mermaid and noticed it added author= rather than first= |last= with {{cite book}}. Is it possible to work the latter parameters in? Recognizance (talk) 19:46, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Author handling is under development; I have made some promising progress and hope to roll out the results when I get some free time - probably in a month or so. Watch this space! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 22:27, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

First & last should now be more widespread. Keep your eye out for any authors and point them out; I'll fix those as time permits. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 00:18, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Endgame tablebase

I think the bot made an error on Endgame tablebase, but it was due to an incorrect format in the existing text. It correctly removed "unused data" but then it was confused by "pages145-46" (no space) and replaced it with "pages=46". Bubba73 (talk), 01:58, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the report; I'll see if I can improve the algorithm. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 14:26, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Elo rating system

In Elo rating system the bot changed a "citation" to "cite journal" even though it is a book rather than a journal. Bubba73 (talk), 16:20, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

 Fixed The bot now guesses that a citation is a book if it has a 'publisher' parameter but no 'journal'. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 16:52, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

OK, now it changed "citation" to "cite book". This still works but is there any point in changing "citation" to "cite book"? "Citation" works for books, journals, and webpages. Bubba73 (talk), 18:02, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Many editors, and I believe the Manual of Style, prefer articles to use a consistent format for their citations. See Misplaced Pages:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Citation_bot_4#Discussion for more information. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 18:56, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

OK, I'll read that later. But you could interpret "consistent style" both ways: (1) use "citation" whether it is a book, journal, or webpage, (2) use only "cite book", "cite journal" or "cite web", as appropriate. The ones on that page were consistently "citation" and it changed them to "cite book". Bubba73 (talk), 19:03, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

The bot had to decide whether to change the 'citations' to 'cite book', or the 'cite webs' to 'citation'. As there were two references of each format in the article, it randomly selected the former. I will soon be creating a button to allow users to change the format of any article to their preferred template family (in accordance with policy elsewhere). Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 19:18, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

OK. The references used only "citation" but "cite web" was used in the footnotes. Bubba73 (talk), 20:04, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

I don't think it is a good idea for the bot to randomly select a class of citation templates. If it is not clear which class predominates, this should be left to an editor to sort out. — Cheers, JackLee 03:41, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

• I think it was established that it is better for an article to use one type of template than a mixture of two. In the next week or two I will create a tool allowing editors to change the citation format if necessary; however at this point I am aware of no substantiated reports of the bot making an inappropriate decision. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 16:48, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

DOI bot interprets comments in the |doi= parameters to mean that the doi is broken when it's not

See for example. Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 11:53, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Not checking data behind DOIs?

On this automatic (thorough) run, the bot missed this correction, which I subsequently made manually. Is this expected behaviour? LeadSongDog come howl 21:10, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

The bot doesn't correct this class of error, in case the database is incorrect, or an editor has a reason to include additional information (e.g. 'second page') in the title parameter. Thanks for fixing it manually! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 15:59, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Whitespace "bug"

Take a look at this. It's a minor thing, but should be fixed.Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 17:27, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Bad edits at William A. Spinks

Diff. 1) Flagged a link as dead and it is not. 2) Added a Google Scholar search that was invalid, as it had WikiMarkup embedded in it. Search would not have been valid w/o that problem anyway, as the magazine in question is not one that Google has archived. Please refrain from having your bot "fix" this article again. It is going to GA very shortly. — SMcCandlish ‹(-¿-)› 18:14, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Capitalization in titles

The bot seems to incorrectly change capitalization in the title of the paper to title-case. Some articles often have titles with acronyms which need to be capitalized, words like PSPACE and NP-complete. I was using the bot to complete a cite arxiv template, if that helps. --Robin (talk) 17:01, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Is it changing user-inputted capitalisation? It shouldn't do; you can edit the citation by had to correct the case; or you can add a capitalisation exclusion. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 18:58, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by user-inputted capitalization, but I had put in a reference as "cite arxiv|eprint=0907.4737", and run the bot on it to give me the complete citation. The bot returned "cite arxiv|eprint=0907.4737|author1=Rahul Jain|author2=Zhengfeng Ji|author3=Sarvagya Upadhyay|author4=John Watrous|title=Qip = Pspace|class=quant-ph|year=2009", which has an incorrectly capitalized title, since the correct title of the paper is QIP = PSPACE. I'm not sure how I would add an exception for this, since there are lots of complexity classes in CS which have all capitals. But it's not a big deal, so if there's no easy fix, it's easy enough to do by hand. --Robin (talk) 19:33, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

I'll think about it - perhaps there is something I can do, but it'll be tricky to code the algorithm so it'll take me a while to get round to, I'm afraid!

Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 20:27, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Too many authors; should be shortened with et al.

it might be better to not list hundreds of authors like the citation bot did here. i don't know what a good maximum number is, but i think this is clearly too many. there should be some maximum, and then an et al.  —Chris Capoccia ⁄_C 09:41, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm currently training the bot to recognise authors reliably (a non-trivial task), which is a pre-requisite to dealing with this; at the moment, the bot only recognises the list as a single author. It may be a while before I can perfect the author handling, so I'll deal with your comment when I am able. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 15:07, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

how does diberri's tool manage? i know it's not working right now, but there is a checkbox for turning on or off the shortening of the author list and the addition of et al. maybe he parses the authors from PMID which isn't always available for your bot. i appreciate the complexity of author recognition. there are many different ways the author list is presented and there are many different types of names around the world (some surnames have spaces). some authors aren't people but organizations.  —Chris Capoccia ⁄_C 15:54, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

The bot now won't add any more authors than the template can handle. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 00:23, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

author equals comma?

when there is no author, as in PMID 4898725, is there a reason why the bot adds |author=, instead of leaving the citation with no author?  —Chris Capoccia ⁄_C 09:57, 2 September 2009 (UTC)

 Fixed Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 00:26, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Citation bot 3 is removing all author's first initials

When it replaces 'author' with 'last/first, last2/first2', etc., a name like Smith AB is replaced with Smith B. Also, it sometimes combines adjacent author names, ie 'Smith AB, Jones CD' may become 'Smith J.C.', with the periods added. I have been undoing these edits to the ref templates in my watchlist... as I'm pathologically nitpicky. Anyway, just a heads up.-- Rcej (talk) 02:11, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Citation bot added issn

In this edit to Mango, the bot added lots of "issn=" entries. There's no reason to add ISSNs to "cite journal" when we already have a DOI and PMID; it just clutters up the citation. Please don't add ISSNs to such citations. Eubulides (talk) 16:24, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

I think I recall discussing this issue at length at Template talk:Cite journal a number of months ago, and the consensus was that ISSNs were valuable and should be added wherever possible. Feel free to resurrect the discussion if you feel strongly. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 01:04, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Citation bot added first1 and messed up citation

In the same edit to Mango, the bot added first1, first2, etc., resulting in citations like this (insertion underlined):

{{cite journal |author=Ajila CM, Prasada Rao UJ |title=Protection against hydrogen peroxide induced oxidative damage in rat erythrocytes by ''Mangifera indica'' L. peel extract |journal=Food Chem Toxicol. |volume=46 |issue=1 |pages=303–9 |year=2008 |month=Jan |pmid=17919803 |doi=10.1016/j.fct.2007.08.024 |first1=CM |first2=UJ |issn=0278-6915 }}

which render like this:

Ajila CM, Prasada Rao UJ, CM (2008). "Protection against hydrogen peroxide induced oxidative damage in rat erythrocytes by Mangifera indica L. peel extract". Food Chem Toxicol. 46 (1): 303–9. doi:10.1016/j.fct.2007.08.024. ISSN 0278-6915. PMID 17919803. {{cite journal}}: |first2= missing |last2= (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

Note the double "CM". Please don't insert initials when author= is being used. Eubulides (talk) 16:24, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Patched for now; please let me know if it happens again. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 01:25, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Citation bot changed page simply to reorder parameters

In this edit to Mango, the citation bot apparently just interchanged parameters to a citation template, which has no effect. It shouldn't merely reorder parameters. Eubulides (talk) 16:24, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

? investigating. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 01:20, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Citation bot incorrectly identified cite type

(Not reported in Google code). The bot made two changes to Interstate Highway System:

• {{Cite journal |…}} (good) for {{Citation |…| journal=American Scientist |…}}
• {{Cite book |…}} (wrong!) for {{Citation | url=http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/airstrip.asp |…}}

I changed the second one to {{Cite web|…}}. YBG (talk) 22:00, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the fix. It's quite difficult to determine whether a citation should refer to a book or a web page (and as cite book and cite web produce the same output, it only affects editors with an eye on the source code). The current method is very simple and just assumes that things with publishers are probably books - if you can think of a better way that will avoid this miscategorisation, I'd be more than happy to implement it (and very grateful besides (-:). Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 01:14, 7 September 2009 (UTC)