Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 20:50, 10 September 2009

Reporting a bug? Please file a report (login required) or see the bugs page. For urgent matters, please leave notes directly on the operator's talk page so the bot can be paused as soon as possible.

Eats up en-dashes

In this change the bot changed – HTML entities to plain hyphens. I consider this a bug, since the Manual of Style calls for the use of en-dashes in number ranges. Jyotirmoyb (talk) 10:35, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

It actually converted them to en dashes. Please see the discussion below. Smith609 Talk 11:15, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

Related to the eating up of en dashes... did the bot actually do anything in this change? Kehrbykid (talk) 22:25, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Which templates?

Does DOI bot handle {{citation}}, or only the {{cite}} series? —David Eppstein (talk) 15:15, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

It's restricted to {{Cite journal}} at the moment, as these are the most likely to have DOIs - allowing the bot to edit other templates would open up a whole new world in potential of little bugs. Maybe I'll broaden its scope to include these someday... Smith609 Talk 15:51, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

I think {{citation}}s that include a journal= field are just about equally likely to have DOIs. Other cites, and non-journal citations, are iffier, I agree. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:22, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Update: It now handles {Citation} and {cite book} too. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 04:38, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Abstract

Is it really reasonable to label something an "abstract" when the linked page has the full document linked in PDF and/or GIF form? WilyD 12:50, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out. Now fixed.

Is it really fixed? DOI bot has gone through all my marked articles with (abstract). See, for example, mired and D65. Just because a subscription is required it does not mean that the full article is not provided. Are you going to fix this or do we have to go through the backlog manually? --Adoniscik 12:27, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

I think the "abstract" summary is accurate. The page the URLs on these pages link to is the abstract, or a summary of the article. If the editor had intended to supply a link to the full text, they would have saved their reader a click and linked directly to the full text, which the bot would mark "subscription required" if necessary. Most academic readers will know how to procure a full text article from an abstract link, or through their own library via DOIs. An abstract link gives the causal reader an impression of what is on the other end of the link; it doesn't say "abstract only" and imply that no other information is available. Perhaps "free abstract" would be a better wording?

I have disabled this feature for the time being until the matter is resolved; feel free to argue back! Smith609 Talk 12:51, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Not at all. I linked to the abstract page as a matter of policy for two reasons:

1. There is no way to go back from the PDF to the abstract page. The abstract page, however, does link to the PDF. Frequently it also provides invaluable information not readily available from the PDF, such as a permalink. The permalink generally does not resolve to the PDF.
2. I connect to subscriber sites through a proxy server affiliated with my educational institution. The redirection is not entirely transparent and hinders my ability to save the PDF to the hard disk (which is my preferred course of action) rather than attempting to open it in the browser. However, if I first attempt to access the abstract page, I go through the redirection process and then can readily right click and save the PDF on the redirected page. If I attempt to right click and save the PDF without first going through the redirected abstract page, I merely save the HTML page where I have to enter my user credentials for my educational institution.

I do appreciate that your bot fixes the en dash in the page numbers! --Adoniscik 15:33, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

If you've linked to the abstract page, then surely the bot should mark the link as a link to an abstract page? Smith609 Talk 16:08, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Only if the abstract is all that is available. That is what I understand when I see the "(abstract)" remark. Maybe a better wording is indeed advisable. I can live with (free abstract), but I think it is just clutter. I would probably say nothing at all. Adoniscik 16:22, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

How about "abstract page"...? Smith609 Talk 16:43, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Barnstar

		The Minor Barnstar
		For the great job of improving citations. utcursch | talk 16:11, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

Please restrict your bot to DOI's

I'm grateful for the handful of DOI's that your bot came up with. Nonetheless, I am going to revert your bot's changes to problem of Apollonius, an article I have been working on for months, for the following reason. I deliberately write & n d a s h ; instead of – to help me proofread the article. Forgive me for saying so, but it doesn't seem wise to make invisible formatting changes that also interfere with a human editor's ability to maintain the article. My suggestion would be to turn off that feature of your bot. Otherwise, well done! :) Willow (talk) 21:58, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Done: The bot will no longer replace –. Thanks for your feedback, and sorry for the inconvenience! Smith609 Talk 07:19, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, Smith! :) I plan on using your bot a lot in the future; thank you a lot for that as well! Willow (talk) 11:20, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

I see that em-dashes are fair game, still. As they should be. Again, thanks for DOI bot; although I've been running around cleaning up after its changes on my watchlist (mostly either replacing or removing deadlinks), I find what it does very valuable. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:15, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Broken format with two templates in the id field

this change broke the reference formatting. A line id = {{arxiv | archive = math.DG | id = 0309408}} {{MathSciNet | id = 2178969}} was incorrectly changed to id = 2178969}}, losing information and spuriously adding an extra pair of braces that messed up the url on the following line. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:58, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I've taken the bot offline until I fix it. Smith609 Talk 21:02, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Probably the same basic problem: id=doi diff broke the template. JackSchmidt (talk) 17:12, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

approved for this?

I was looking over my watchlist and I noticed this change. I then checked out the two bot approval links on the bot's page. I may have missed it, but it doesn't look like your bot was approved to make changes like this.--Rockfang (talk) 16:09, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

The bot is approved to "correct common mistakes". Many edits such as this one were made during the bot's trial period and did not elicit comment. I hope it's not causing you any inconvenience? If your watchlist is becoming cluttered by bot edits, the "hide bot edits" link may come in handy. Smith609 Talk 06:12, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Cool. I just wanted to make sure it was approved. I reread the bot approval requests and found it. Thanks for the info.--Rockfang (talk) 06:36, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Parsing page numbers

I noticed in this edit that the bot picked out part of the pages parameter (|pages=223), but not the whole (|pages=223–235). Perhaps it is because Blackwell Synergy (gasp) use en dashes for their page range, and not the more common and less correct hyphen-minus? Who knows. Thought I'd let you know. +mt 18:35, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately the database that the bot consults very rarely contains "end page" data. I feel that scraping it from the website itself is an unjustifiable use of time and resources - so unfortunately you'll have to be content with the start only. Thanks for pointing it out, and sorry I can't do anything about it! Smith609 Talk 21:13, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

Quite alright, I'll just keep my eye out for it. Thanks for the info. +mt 17:26, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Page numbers

This bot is replacing the dash for pages numbers with the endash. While this appears to be correct style, this is not an approved function for the bot. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:21, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Did you see the discussion on similar changes two sections up? —David Eppstein (talk) 20:06, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I saw that claim, but that function is not listed on the user page for this bot, nor could I find the discussion approiving it for that function. When "correcting common mistakes" was explained in the bot approval, stylistic mistakes were not discussed. What was discussed were correction such as replacing id= with pmid= when appropriate, or correcting Journal= to journal=. These corrections are invisible, and this is not the same as making stylistic changes in editing. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:35, 9 June 2008 (UTC)

This is becoming petty.

I've created a very specificially worded request for bot approval for this task. You are invited to contribute to the discussion. Smith609 Talk 07:31, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Time Delay

Hello,

I missed reverting some vandalism due to a bot edit to Aluminium diff. Can the bot be configured not to make an edit within x minutes of an IP user, or user with less than x edits? Whilst it wasn't long before someone read and reverted the vandals edits diff, for a less major article than Aluminium and less blatant vandalism, the vandalism could have gone undetected for a while. Something along these lines would be good, as I ignored the bot edit on my watchlist. User A1 (talk) 11:47, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

New DOI templates

Greetings. Was this bot supposed to make all these new templates here? Thanks. --Thetrick (talk) 15:23, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

It was intentional, but it won't make any more. It's a long story... Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 16:01, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

It keeps making them. See for example Template:Cite pmid/16230032 created recently.Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 12:55, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Whoops, I'd left an 'exit' command in the code from my debugging! Unfortunately testing requires either deleting pages which the bot creates in error (and it takes a while for admins to get round to this) or creating spurious pages for the sake of it, which isn't a great use of WP resources. Hopefully things will work now - I'll see if I can think of another way of testing! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 19:20, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Redundant author

I undid this change, in which it added an author to a citation template that already had the authors better specified. The change was harmless but pointless. —David Eppstein (talk) 14:57, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks – easily fixed. Yet another small but irritating difference between the {{citation}} and {{cite journal}} templates! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 15:25, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

It's necessary to have the last names of multiple authors separated out more thoroughly than {{cite journal}} allows, in order to link correctly with the {{harv}} series of templates. Thanks for the fix. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:12, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

Perhaps the solution is to modify Cite journal for consistency's sake. Or do away entirely with Cite journal, as I may propose when I next feel disruptive! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 16:19, 21 June 2008 (UTC)

DOI broken

Does DOI bot append this flag to all cite journal templates with doi listed but unspecified? See . --Rifleman 82 (talk) 05:08, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Not any more! It had been confused because there was a "spare" pipe, which got "stuck in the works" and made it think the DOI parameter was set. Easily fixed, though! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 09:07, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

DOI bot overeager?

DOI bot is completely deleting the "access date" on the templates in a couple of articles, can this be avoided? Montanabw 05:15, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

It deletes access dates where there is nothing that can have been accessed. An accessdate should only be specified in relation to a URL, since journals do not change with time. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 09:21, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

URL vs. DOI

In the Bird nest article, the DOI bot added a link to a commercial abstract when a valid URL to the free full article was already specified. Should it be doing that? MeegsC | Talk 23:01, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes - a DOI is a permanent link to an article, whereas URLs - especially to free versions - are prone to link rot. Obviously the URL link is far more useful at present, but if and when it breaks the DOI will come into its own. A DOI is also useful to people using some citation manager tools. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 08:56, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. MeegsC | Talk 18:43, 25 June 2008 (UTC)

Egyptian fraction

This is the second time DOI bot has edited Egyptian fraction. The new DOI that it adds to the Breusch paper is wrong (it goes to another paper by the same author in the same volume of the same journal) and I don't know what it thinks it's doing to the web citation but it's not even close to right and it's the second time it's tried it. Is there some way of preventing it from making these changes again or am I going to have to keep undoing them whenever the bot keeps hitting that article? —David Eppstein (talk) 17:17, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

It looks like this is one of the rare cases of false positives. Adding a hidden comment to the citation should fix it: copy in something along the lines of <!-- This comment stops DOI bot adding erroneous DOIs--> in each instance and the bot should ignore the citation. Sorry about the inconvenience, hopefully this will be the last time you're troubled by the bot! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 18:17, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Like this? —David Eppstein (talk) 18:59, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Almost. I've made the modification and run the bot on the page; it (correctly) makes no edit. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 21:56, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Damn useful little bot

Thanks. --Blechnic (talk) 22:34, 13 July 2008 (UTC)

author field

When I use the DOI bot to populate {{cite journal}} templates, the author field only gets the name of the first author. How can this be changed. JFW | T@lk 10:36, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately it can't; the bot cannot reliably identify further authors unless they are identified in the databases it checks. It's not easy to find authors automatically - for instance, a bot would struggle to discriminate between "Cambridge, England" and "England, Phil". Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 11:17, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm working on this now... Watch this space. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 14:34, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Not working properly

http://en.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Amygdalin&diff=next&oldid=231622766

-- Fyslee / talk 06:11, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

 Fixed 22:49, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

What happened here?

Hello - I've used your superbot often, but it seems to have had a breakdown here: . All three changes are wrong. Any ideas why? Regards—G716 <·_C> 04:19, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

The first OCLC is correct for the ISBN that was specified in the citation; the ISBN doesn't match the book quoted.

The second two are false positives from an ISBN search; I'll fix this presently. Thanks for bringing them to my attention.

Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 12:54, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your help and the lightning fast response—G716 <·_C> 14:54, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

There was also an error in the source wikitext, omitting a | work=Statisticians in History parameter in the cite web.

ISBN Status parameters

Your recent changes to Hong Took Tong Chinese Dramatic Company, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, Blair Anderson Wark etc. are adding an |ISBN Status= parameter to templates like {{cite book}}, {{cite journal}}, and {{citation}}. There is no such parameter on these templates. You should take a look at your bot code and fix it up. RossPatterson (talk) 16:04, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

I undid several of these changes, but the more I look at it, the more I think you've got a runaway-bot problem. I'm not going to try to clean any more up by hand. RossPatterson (talk) 16:09, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

Now fixed - sorry that it affected so many pages, I hadn't counted on other users leaving it running. The parameter is not intended to be displayed in the output, but to highlight to editors that an ISBN may be invalid. The false positive rate should now be back to near zero. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 16:58, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

False positive on National Academy Press books

This edit by Citation bot added "ISBN status= May be invalid - please double check" for ISBN 0-309-09008-3. That's a valid ISBN number, as can be seen from . Another incorrect annotation was added for ISBN 0-309-53275-2. Can you please fix the bot to not introduce these incorrect annotations? Thanks. Eubulides (talk) 17:11, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

To avoid repetition, please see the bugs page. Link is at the top of this page. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 17:41, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

when will the bot be usable again?

Nergaal (talk) 23:16, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

ASAP: Now that it's fixed and unblocked it should be ready to go. However I do want to make doubly sure that it's working, so it'll have to wait until I have a free 20 minutes, which will hopefully emerge at the weekend. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 03:16, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

It's now available for manual use only; please check its output carefully when you run it. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 13:54, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Citing sources

Please keep the citation bot away for projects such as Misplaced Pages:Citing sources. Indeed, it would probably best to restrict it to article space only. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 17:54, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

It only acts on article space unless a user activates it on another page. You should take the issue up with Askthemanwhoowns1. Martin (Smith609 – Talk)

OCLC

Hello. Today I saw for the first time that the bot adds an OCLC (diff), but perhaps it has always done this. What is the rationale behind this? The OCLC was added to a book that already has an ISBN, and you can search WorldCat via the ISBN search page, so I am wondering what extra benefit the OCLC gives. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 21:56, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

I've never used an OCLC myself; I assumed that since it has a parameter in the template it is useful to at least some readers. Is this not the case? If not, the bot can easily go round removing OCLCs wherever an ISBN exists. It'd probably be best to ensure there's a consensus before getting the bot to remove information though. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 04:26, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I have no idea. One possibility is that the OCLC is useful in case the book does not have an ISBN. But that's pure speculation on my part. I can't find any discussion at Template talk:Citation on this field, so let me ask there. By the way, thanks for running the bot. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 11:42, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

OCLC is also useful when finding different editions that may be more conveniently accessible than the one used as ref.LeadSongDog (talk) 18:51, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Mixing-up some sources

Was this intentional? If not, a quick review of this talk page shows that it is not the first time the bot has made this mistake. Plasticup /C 10:59, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I thought this had been fixed. Sorry. I'll look into it. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 12:36, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

It might be prudent to suspend the bot until the issue is identified and fixed. When you do make some changes you may want to test your corrections on the articles which originally generated the false-positives, like Meteorological history of Hurricane Gordon (1994). Plasticup /C 14:44, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Is the bot not suspened? It should still be able to run "on request" when supervised; if you find it is still running automatically please let me know. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 16:28, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

DOI from URL for ACS and RSC publications

Hey there

To read the DOIs for American Chemical Society publications, for example:

• http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/jacsat/1991/113/i01/f-pdf/f_ja00001a054.pdf?sessid=6006l3

Publisher doi is 10.1021

Look at "ja00001a054"

DOI should be 10.1021/ja00001a054

(ja refers to J. Am. Chem. Soc.; cr refers to Chemical Reviews, etc.).

For Royal Society of Chemistry, e.g.:

• http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/DT/article.asp?doi=b804604m

prefix the DOI with 10.1039/

so, 10.1039/b804604m

Hope this helps! --Rifleman 82 (talk) 16:23, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. Are there any instances where the bot fails to retrieve a DOI from citations of this format? If so, could you provide some examples so I can see what improvements are possible? Thanks, Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 23:04, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Hi there

I haven't tried, but I was looking at your bot's user page, and that you said only two publishers have DOIs in the URL. I thought I might fill you in? ;) --Rifleman 82 (talk) 05:25, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Sites that I've seen with DOIs in the URL are only BIOONE and Blackwell publishing. The former of these encodes the title in an invisible span.

Do the <meta> tags contain a dc.Identifier or citation_doi? If so, check the dc.title or citation_title matches the title we want.

Is there a DOI in the page, anywhere? Are there lots of DOIs? Do any occur in association with the title? If there are any <br>, <p>, <li> or <td> tags between the title and a DOI, the DOI could refer to a different reference, and we'll have to ignore it.

Is there a unique DOI?

Does the DOI appear in the first 5000 characters of the document? If so, it is probably part of the document description. Any later, and it's more likely to be a reference.

Bot output page not working

I get a screenfull of error when the bot runs, although the bot seems to work correctly and write the output to the article. The text of the error messages follows. It has been doing this for days.--Srleffler (talk) 00:30, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

Switchboard Error
This is the FastCGI switchboard, and I handle FastCGI requests (like yours) on this server.
I'm afraid I was unable to handle your request. When I tried, the following error occurred:
    * couldn't read record from child: Connection reset by peer
Please try your request again in a few minutes. If it still doesn't work, you should
contact the server administrator and inform them of the problem.
Regards,
The FastCGI Switchboard.
PS: when reporting this error, please include the following information:
    * REMOTE_ADDR: 68.45.70.142
    * SCRIPT_FILENAME: /var/www/cgi/php
    * SCRIPT_NAME: /cgi/php
    * PATH_TRANSLATED: /home/verisimilus/public_html/Bot/DOI_bot/doibot.php

This continues (many repeats, over many days). Can we do anything about it?Fconaway (talk) 06:03, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

 Fixed - at last - I hope?! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 20:28, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Bot error

See this. This is rather worrying given the number of edits this bot is making.... Any idea how many false positives there are now? --MZMcBride (talk) 03:59, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I've never encountered a URL in the pages field before, and I must have checked thousands of edits over the last few months, so I'm confident that this is an uncommon occurrence. It's not possible to code in for every unanticipated scenario. I'll manually change the affected page so it uses the fields of the template in a way more consistent with the documentation. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 04:22, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

On the Sirius article, the citation bot modified a google books URL. It changed this to this. Fortunately it seems to work okay in either case, at least for this book.—RJH (talk) 21:24, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out; I'll fix it ASAP. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 21:48, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

 Fixed, I hope. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 04:37, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Another error

See this edit. It converted ISBN number inside Google books url. Renata (talk) 23:45, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

 Fixed. Thanks for the heads up. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 04:36, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Another similar error, the bot seems to edit URLs that happen to contain the substring "...ID=...": . — Miym (talk) 10:03, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

 Fixed 16:27, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

inconsistencies in the "page" field?

greetings ... i'm admiring the work the bot did on the Ian Stewart (musician) article but wonder why the "page" field wound up with inconsistencies in the format: the first ref now says "pp X" (which is incorrect for a one-page ref) while the rest say "pg XX". if it's something i can clean up myself i don't mind doing that, but it would be good to understand what causes it. thanks Sssoul (talk) 09:27, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

update: i'm a little more caffeinated now, and i note with dismay that the Anita Pallenberg article now has "pp X" for the first ref and "p XX-XX" for subsequent refs. that's of course the opposite to what it should say: p is for single pages, pp for page ranges. i hope the bot can learn to do this properly! Sssoul (talk) 10:23, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

I can confirm that the bot is consistently causing references to single pages to display as "pp. xx" rather than "p. xx". This is because it is not changing "pages=" in the template to "page=" where only a single page is specified. I have spent much of this morning cleaning up after it, so could you please fix this? Phil Bridger (talk) 12:43, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

Please don't spend any more time fixing manually; I'll set the bot to clean automatically when editors manually specified page= instead of pages=. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 16:18, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

... um: thanks, but when the template said "pages=" as a default, i didn't always bother to change it, since i had to enter "=p. X" or "=pp. XX-XX" by hand anyway. i gather you can't teach the bot to notice/respect whether it's a single-page/multi-page ref, so maybe it would be easier all the way around if it used "pg." for both - as in "=pg. X" or "=pg. XX-XX". that wouldn't be my first preference, but at least it wouldn't be wrong. thanks for thinking about it. Sssoul (talk) 16:41, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

The bot will now guess which is the correct parameter to use. I'd be grateful if you helped me to keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't misbehave! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 17:42, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

thanks! i'm glad your bot is so educable, and i'll try to keep an eye out for its further escapades. Sssoul (talk) 18:15, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

This seems to be working fine now. Thanks! Phil Bridger (talk) 12:32, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Page number bug

It seems that a lot of edits your bot is making elate to the number of pages in a book, not a specific page. I think these numbers are generated when importing data via Zotero. For example, that's how I added books to Keith Vinicombe. You can recognise such data by the presence of double colons. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 13:02, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

An interpretation case for page numbers

In this edit, your bot turned "|pages=278 pages" into "|page=278 pages" (instead of simply "|page=278"). No big deal for me, but I though I'd let you know of this instance. +mt 20:13, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Plate numbers

In articles citing books with a separate plate section, the search-and-replace of "page=p" is removing the "p" from "plate", as seen here. Hopefully it shouldn't come up too often, but one to be aware of. – iridescent 21:43, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Oscar Pistorius: Bot malfunctioning

Your bot is malfunctioning:

• It edited "Oscar Pistorius" by changing "{{citation|title=Oscar Pistorius|url=http://www.ossur.com/?PageID=3364|publisher=]|accessdate=2008-03-22}}" into the incorrect "{{citation|title=Oscar Pistorius|url=http://www.ossur.com/?PageID=3364|publisher=]|accessdate=2008-03-22|year=2008|month=Sep|author=Camporesi, S|volume=34|issue=9|pages=639|issn=0306-6800|pmid=18757629|doi=10.1136/jme.2008.026674|journal=Journal of medical ethics}}".
• It added the entirely redundant parameter "pages" to {{citation}} templates that already had the parameter "page", for instance, "{{citation|last=Camporesi|first=Silvia|title=Oscar Pistorius, Enhancement and Post-humans|journal=Journal of Medical Ethics|date=14 July 2008|volume=34|page=639|doi=10.1136/jme.2008.026674|pages=639}}".

Please shut off the bot until these problems have been resolved. Thanks. — Cheers, JackLee 10:05, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

This function of the bot has been restricted to "manual mode only" until I fix the issues. It will continue in its other duty of fixing duplicate pp. parameters. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 14:33, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. Good luck with the fine-tuning. — Cheers, JackLee 15:09, 15 December 2008 (UTC)

Another parameter to check

I found an omission in the bot's changes - it leaves the word "Edition" in place even though the cite templates now add "ed." after whatever is in this parameter (so you get things like "1st Edition ed."). See this diff Thanks for the bot, Ruhrfisch _><>° 01:11, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Pages

Regarding this edit, while I understand the logic behind it, this particular edit did not quite make an improvement. The citation, having been written using the old format, actually shows the total number of pages in the book (which is what the "pages" parameter was for), yet the bot changed it to "page", indicating that this particular reference comes from page 394, which, of course, is not true, as page 394 would be the very last page of the book (and is completely empty). This is one instance I was able to catch, but I guess there are many, many more. What gives?—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 16:48, December 16, 2008 (UTC)

Actually, the documentation to {{Cite book}} states that the "page" and "pages" parameters "are for listing the pages relevant to the citation, not the total number of pages in the book" . — Cheers, JackLee 17:13, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, I could have sworn that when the cite template was added, its documentation specifically emphasized the pages parameter the other way (number of pages, not the page on which the citation is on). Can't find anything in the template doc's history to support it, though. Must indeed be my bad. Thanks.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 17:32, December 16, 2008 (UTC)

Roman page range

This edit yields the text “p. xxxii–xxxiv”, which should be “pp xxxii–xxxiv”. —Michael Z. 2008-12-17 21:36 z

Also, the bot added the "nopp" parameter in this edit where the page number was in Roman numerals, but I feel that there is nothing wrong with the citation template indicating "p. xxvi". — Cheers, JackLee 10:10, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Original_six_frigates_of_the_United States_Navy

Hello, just dropping by to inform you about some errors made by your bot at Original_six_frigates_of_the_United States_Navy. Thanks. --Legion (talk) 20:55, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Actually, the ISBN parameter is preferred to the id parameter. See the template documentation. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 17:17, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Paula Creamer

Hi there, your bot has made an edit in one of the references on the Paula Creamer page and now the cited Golf Digest article has volume data and doi which point to an obituary in some kind of a medical scientific journal. Wmigda (talk) 19:43, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out. The error was at CrossRef's database, not with the bot; to stop this happening again I've changed the citation type so it falls below the bot's radar. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 01:56, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Citations in Radiometric dating

The bot does not always pick up the coauthors and final page number, not sure why. Babakathy (talk) 15:20, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

These things aren't always present in the primary database the bot consults. Try running the bot in thorough mode to improve its chances. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 16:15, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Template:Cite pmid/19240221

Could you please take a look at Misplaced Pages:Templates for deletion/Log/2009 March 9#Template:Cite pmid/19240221? The bot seems to have created a redirect (Template:Cite pmid/19240221) to a non-existent page (Template:Cite doi/10.1073.2Fpnas.0812570106). Thanks, –Black Falcon 05:00, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

In fact, the bot appears to have created this page at least 4 times, and it has been deleted 4 times. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 18:24, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

I've created the missing page manually and will investigate why the bot didn't when I get the opportunity. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 20:33, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

 Fixed, I think: typo in source code. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 16:14, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Posting at WP:BON

I've posted two questions regarding this bot at WP:BON#A separate template for each cited source?. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 13:42, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

is this a bug?

I am totally unfamiliar with bots, but this edit turned a good ref. into a silly one, with the publication date give twice. Regards, Huldra (talk) 23:33, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, I guess you could call that a bug of sorts - thanks for reporting it! I'm fixing it now. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 12:47, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Not a bug, but ...

Am I the only one who thinks that putting {{dead link}} into the "format" field makes the citation look kinda ugly, having superscripts parenthesised with normal parentheses: ( – ). Also adding "scholar search" links for news articles doesn't actually help for link recovery. Maybe a link to an Internet Archive search would be more useful in some cases, depending on what fields are in the citation (e.g. journal/issn, vs. periodical). Cheers, cab (talk) 07:25, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it's pretty ugly! Maybe this will encourage editors to fix the dead links...

On a serious note, it would be very easy for me to change this tag - feel free to suggest alternative wikicode and I'll use that. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 12:38, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

cite doi slash

The bot seems to be confused about slashes in DOIs.

Starting from this: {{cite doi|10.1016/j.jebo.2006.05.017}}

The template is looking for this: Template:Cite doi/10.1016.2Fj.jebo.2006.05.017

But the bot (at least when prodded via "jump the queue") creates this instead: Template:Cite doi/10.1016/j.jebo.2006.05.017

Result:

• doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2006.05.017
  This citation will be automatically completed in the next few minutes. You can jump the queue or expand by hand

Rl (talk) 15:28, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

 Fixed Thanks for the heads up. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 15:43, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Thx. There are more of these pages that should probably be deleted. Both variants of pages were created back in February: . I don't see the pattern. Was it the "jump the queue link"? Rl (talk) 16:25, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

The link was the problem. I am actually in the process of applying for adminship; if I get access to administrative tools I'll delete the errant pages myself rather than making work for someone else. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 16:55, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

You got it. Congratulations.

Btw, I searched for other potential problems with the cite doi template.

• You may want to have your bot add/modify the templates to highlight problems it finds. For instance, DOIs that contain special characters .
• Also, I'm a bit concerned about broken DOIs; there's not a lot of redundancy in a DOI if DOI resolution fails. See, for instance, the reference to Monk et al. (1996) in .

Rl (talk) 08:29, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks (-:

It's a good idea for the bot to highlight links to broken/incorrectly copied DOIs - I'll think about the best way to implement this. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 20:53, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Cite arXiv to Cite journal convertion

Many {{cite arXiv}} could be converted to {{cite journal}} For example, this page http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0605258v1 gives the journal into with this was published Nature 442, 54-58 (2006). Why not change it to a cite journal (with |id={{arXiv|0605258v1}})?Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 20:25, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

That sounds like a great idea. I'm not entirely familiar with the ArXiV system; could you give me a set of rules which I could turn into bot code? I would need to know the situations where converting to cite journal is appropriate, because presumably there are many scenarios where it isn't (or cite ArXiV wouldn't exist). Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 01:32, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

As far as I'm aware, when you can find the journal the article has been published into, it's appropriate to change {{cite arXiv}} to {{cite journal}}, otherwise they should remain {{cite arXiv}} (I'm not very familiar with {{citation}}, but I suspect there wouldn't be any additional problem than those mentionned for {{cite journal}}). As long as you adapt the parameters |eprint=foobar |class=barfoo |version=v123456 from {{cite arXiv}} to into an |id={{arXiv|foobarv123456}} in {{cite journal}}, there should be no problem. |class= and |version= are optional parameters; there is no need to modify the logic used when |version= is not used, as {{arXiv|foobar}} will produce the correct output; however if class is not present, the brackets should not be present (i.e, it should look like |id={{arXiv|foobarv123456}} rather than |id={{arXiv|foobarv123456}} ). All other fields from {{cite arXiv}} (i.e., author, title, etc...) overlap with those of {{cite journal}}.

For example {{cite arXiv |author=Tom Leinster |eprint=0707.0835 |class=math.CT |title=The Euler characteristic of a category as the sum of a divergent series |year=2007 }} produces the following:
Tom Leinster (2007). "The Euler characteristic of a category as the sum of a divergent series". arXiv:0707.0835 .

This can be duplicated using cite journal with {{cite journal |author=Tom Leinster |id={{arXiv|0707.0835v1}} |title=The Euler characteristic of a category as the sum of a divergent series |year=2007 }} which produces the following (not incorporating other changes by DOI bot, such as add doi, journal, volume, page, etc...):
Tom Leinster (2007). "The Euler characteristic of a category as the sum of a divergent series". arXiv:0707.0835v1 . {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)

Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 02:26, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

I would still recommend a trial period (50 or so edits) on random articles from Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Cite_arXiv just to make sure that I didn't miss something, or that I'm not aware of some subtleties.Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 02:35, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your suggestions - this should be easy enough to code. I've copied the discussion to Misplaced Pages:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Citation_bot_5 for formal approval. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 20:57, 29 March 2009 (UTC)

Algorithm tweak.

I noticed that the bot misses dois (and the rest of what goes along with them) when inputs like |journal=Phys. Rev. |volume=B23 are used instead of |journal=Phys. Rev. B|volume=23. See the difference it makes when you fix those .

IMO, the algorithm should be tweaked to search for the original input first Phys. Rev. B23. If it fails, then search for Phys. Rev. B 23. If it finds something with that new search, then change Phys. Rev. B23 to Phys. Rev. B 23, otherwise leave the journal/volume info alone. Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 08:05, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

That's really useful feedback, thanks. I'll implement that at the weekend. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 19:03, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Bacillus thuringiensis

Hi, Your bot removed a lot of text from the above article: I can't see why it did but thought you should know in case its doing it elsewhere! Smartse (talk) 20:05, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Bot placed in 'manual edits only' mode, pending investigation. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 23:33, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

One of the citation templates was not closed, so the removed text was not displaying in the article; the bot thought it was all part of the first citation template. I've followed this up on your user page. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 15:44, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

April 4th block

per Misplaced Pages:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#Can_an_availiable_admin_block_a_bot.3F Mfield (Oi!) 04:44, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

Unsuccessful

I've used {{cite doi}} successfully several times over the last week or so (thanks!), but today I can't get it to work at all on the ref I just added to John Wishart (statistician) after trying several different ways. Any idea what's up? Qwfp (talk) 19:37, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

The bot was blocked (see above); it's now back in action. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 15:38, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

Commercial links

Can something be done about adding DOIs that link to commercial sites that sell the article? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.180.250.211 (talk) 17:24, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

When you say "can something be done" do you mean preventing such links from being made? There is no prohibition against linking to commercial sites. In WP:EL, under "Links normally to be avoided", see the big bold exception at the very start of the section: Except for a link to an official page of the article's subject. A DOI is the official page to a reference, usually a scholarly paper on the article's subject. Misplaced Pages is an encyclopedia of everything, not just an encyclopedia of free stuff on the web. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:09, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

If the article is also available for free (but the DOI resolves to a non-free site), specify the url parameter to {{citation}} (sometimes Citation Bot will even do this for you). One special case: if the article is on PubMed Central, specify pmc instead of url (and the template will take care of the rest). Again, Citation Bot will sometimes detect this (but I'm not sure the databases it queries always contain enough information to find a PubMed Central entry even if one exists). Kingdon (talk) 01:07, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

But please, (1) only link to a free copy if there is reason to believe that it is a legitimate free copy (e.g. it's on the author's web site or was placed by its author on a public preprint server); we shouldn't be linking to copyright violations; and (2) even if you link to a free copy, also include the DOI, because frequently the two versions will differ and the publisher's one will be the one with more of the corrections. (Also, including the DOI helps automated tools such as Citation bot match up citations to articles.) —David Eppstein (talk) 02:00, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Title change

In this diff, the bot changed the name of a journal from "Now and Then" ( correct capitalization) to "Now and then" (incorrect). Other changes were fine and helpful. Just wanted to let you know, Ruhrfisch _><>° 12:23, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

It just did it again here Ruhrfisch _><>° 03:14, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

 Fixed again - properly this time, I hope! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 22:10, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Attributing a papal bull to a journal of gynaecology

In this edit the bot very curiously attributed a papal bull or apostolic constitution to a journal of obstetrics and gynaecology! I have reverted the edit and changed from the original citation template to the "cite web" template, which I think is the proper one.

The other change that the bot made in that edit was occasioned by the incomplete transcription of the address (the final m of .htm was missing). The bot not surprisingly treated it as a dead link. It picked a very abstruse link with which to replace it. I have restored and corrected the previous link. Lima (talk) 12:59, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Wonky edit (text removal)

Here. Seems to have been a one-off occurrence, but still needs checking out. Fvasconcellos (t·c) 00:32, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

There must have been a freak loss of data on the server - I'm unable to replicate the problem. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, though. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 16:17, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Australian census data gets misinterpreted as journal article

Australian Census data, which was already in a {{citation}} template, got marked as coming from the "Journal of urban health : bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine" and the bot marked it with a bunch of data from a completely unrelated article, "A Century of Census Tracts": . Thanks, cab (talk) 09:09, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Also the corporate website of Japan Steel Works was said to be an article from the September 1998 edition of Public Health Reports . Cheers, cab (talk) 12:38, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Some things

In {{cite arxiv}}, some people are using the |journal= parameter (often to indicate that a paper has been submitted/accepted by a journal). This is wrong, so Citation bot should comment that parameter out. Also, sometimes |journal=arxiv is used in various citation templates, when that's the case, and when possible, Citation bot should switch to a {{cite arxiv}} template. Also, the Bot should stop overriding human input for authors.Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 05:17, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Under the new bot request, if the journal parameter is not empty, the template will be changed to cite journal. If the journal parameter is left blank, it doesn't cause any harm.

You've mentioned the journal=arxiv tweak elsewhere, so I won't reply to it here.

The bot's tasks include 'fixing editor errors' and 'adding missing information'. The cases you refer to fall within these categories. Feel free to head to template talk:cite journal (or citation) if you want to establish consensus to prefer incomplete citations. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 14:15, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

your bot messed up the citations on Qamun

Ok, this edit by your bot seriously messed up the rest of the page. Regards, Huldra (talk) 15:30, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

Eek. I'll have to improve its comment-handling. Thanks for pointing this out! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 22:57, 20 April 2009 (UTC)

 Fixed Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 14:32, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

St Mary's Church, Nether Alderley

The bot corrupted a reference in this article by adding irrelevant info, some of it in Polish! Peter I. Vardy (talk) 13:23, 21 April 2009 (UTC)

Reporting a bug? Please go to the bugs page. For urgent matters, please leave notes directly on the operator's talk page so the bot can be paused as soon as possible.

Bot removed valid data

The bot just finsied and removed valid data.

• Removed - issue = 7
• Changed pages = 358-365 to pages = 358
• Removed second author
• Removed url to the document text - url = http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/Benton/reprints/2003TREEPTr.pdf

Q Science (talk) 18:29, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

That's very strange - could you tell me how you activated the bot on that page? Thanks, Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 20:42, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

I didn't activate it. I noticed this because it was in my watch list because I manually entered the data a few days ago (because the bot would not run). I guess that a request for execution might have been pending for that long. Q Science (talk) 05:12, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

Another cite template has just been destroyed - Template:Cite doi/10.1016.2Fj.ces.2005.10.017 Q Science (talk) 18:34, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

How bizarre. I'll investigate when I get the opportunity. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 19:31, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

As this problem seems quite widespread, I'm stopping the bot from making automatic edits until it is resolved. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 19:34, 28 April 2009 (UTC)

I think this is fixed. Please advise me otherwise. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 22:06, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Bad edit

This edit broke the formatting of one of the citations, due to removing the closing inner }} from a {{MR}} template. —David Eppstein (talk) 15:35, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

May 2009

Removed year and origyear parameters for no good reason - bug? Stephen Kirrage 14:30, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

It's now been fixed (see bugs page) - many apologies for letting this go unchecked overnight! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 14:46, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Missing field translation in cite web => citation conversion_citation_conversion-2009-05-19T23:12:00.000Z">

See this diff. The work= field works in {{cite web}} but not in {{citation}}, so either the conversion should be skipped for this case or the field should be translated to something else (publisher maybe?). —David Eppstein (talk) 23:12, 19 May 2009 (UTC)_citation_conversion"> _citation_conversion">

Citation now supports the 'work' parameter. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 14:31, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Also, please do not refactor people's comments on talk pages. This function should be confined to article namespace. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:58, 20 May 2009 (UTC)_citation_conversion"> _citation_conversion">

Apologies, this was not intended - see below. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 14:31, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Great, thanks for looking at both of these. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:37, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Running in Template talk space

See this edit. Bot seems to be running in Template talk space. Further, it is editing inside of nowiki tags. This can't be right.LeadSongDog come howl 03:08, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

You're right, it should only edit in mainspace - I have no idea how other pages got into its 'to do' list. I've stopped the bot from running in automatic mode until I figure this out. Apologies, Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 14:22, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Seemingly contradictory behaviour

Hello. In Navier–Stokes equations‎ and Dispersion (water waves)‎ the bot changed "cite web" and "cite journal" into "citation" templates, while in Airy wave theory‎ the opposite was done: changing "citation" templates into "cite book" and "cite journal". -- Crowsnest (talk) 20:35, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

It uses whichever template family is prevalent on the page. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 21:24, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. Is there no preferred family? I most often use the "citation" template nowadays, since I only have to remember the fields and behaviour of one template. -- Crowsnest (talk) 21:56, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

There's no universal preference - the only difference in output is one of punctuation, but you'd be surprised how emotional some editors can get in defending their preferred format! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 22:46, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Same problem in Law enforcement in Westchester County, I am citing a webpage, NOT a book... RayYung (talk) 23:56, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Looks like a false positive to me - see instructions on bot page for instructions. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 02:42, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Contraction (grammar)

The 'author' added here is not helpful and needed to be manually reverted. Please don't allow it to happen again. Cheers Bjenks (talk) 04:10, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Bishop Auckland, May 14 2009

Citation bot appears to have gone a little crazy here? Some of the stuff it added to citations are wrong Pit-yacker (talk) 14:53, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

See User:Citation_bot#False_positives. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 16:31, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Converting citation to cite journal and cite book?

I notice (here) that the bot now converts {{citation}} to {{cite book}} and {{cite journal}}. What motivated this change?--Srleffler (talk) 04:54, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

See Misplaced Pages:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Citation_bot_4. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 15:36, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Should doi templates be protected?

An interesting issue was recently presented on Global warming

"careful using "Cite doi", it transcludes data from an unprotected page in addition to providing a edit button for anons, watching all those pages can be a pain"

Since vandalism is a serious problem with many pages, perhaps all doi templates should be protected from anonymous editing. The other alternative is to modify the "watch" logic so that if a template is used on a page I am watching, then I will automatically get a notification any time the template is changed. (Maybe that should be done anyway.) Q Science (talk) 00:00, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

There is additional discussion at Global Warming Talk Q Science (talk) 16:19, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Bibcodes

In many templates, there are urls of the form "http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007ApJ...654..373E". These should be converted to bibcodes (|bibcode=2007ApJ...654..373E).

For example

• Ezjak, L.M.; et al. (2007). "Terrestrial Consequences of Spectral and Temporal Variability in Ionizing Photon Events". Astrophysical Journal. 654 (1): 373. doi:10.1086/509106. {{cite journal}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help)

to

• Ezjak, L.M.; et al. (2007). "Terrestrial Consequences of Spectral and Temporal Variability in Ionizing Photon Events". Astrophysical Journal. 654 (1): 373. Bibcode:2007ApJ...654..373E. doi:10.1086/509106. {{cite journal}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help)

Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 17:42, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

How can the bot recognise a BibCode - is it safe to assume that anything after adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/ , and nothing else, should be converted to a BibCode parameter, and the url parameter removed? Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 23:21, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, just retrieve it from the url. Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 21:32, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Also, there might be retrievable information from the bibcode page (doi & arxiv preprint). It might be a cheap and efficient way to add doi/arxiv links. Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 03:47, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Expand and standardize templates in manual mode

In my gnoming work, I often have to expand refs and standardize how they look in the edit window just so I can see if there are missing parameters, inconsistencies in formatting, and so on. If would be incredibly useful if citation BOT could do the dirty work (on a per-request basis, not by default). For cite journal, it should place them as (* means if present):

Blahblah blah blah blugh.<ref>
{{cite journal
 |author= *|authorlink=
---------
OR
 *|last= *|first= *|authorlink=
 *|last2= *|first2= *|authorlink2=
 *|last3= *|first3= *|authorlink3=
 *|last4= *|first4= *|authorlink4=
and so on
---------
 *|coauthors=
 |year= *|month= *|day=    (or |date=)
 |title=
 *|language=
 *|trans_title=
 *|url=
 *|format=
 |journal=
 *|series=
 |volume= |issue= |page=
 *|publisher=
 *|location=
 *|bibcode=
 *|doi=
 *|id=
 *|isbn=
 *|issn=
 *|pmid=
 *|pmd=
 *|oclc=
 *|accessdate=
 *|laysummary=
 *|laysource=
 *|laydate=
 *|quote=
----
Other parameters (if found) place here, one per line
}}</ref> Blahblahblah blug blah.

Blahblah blah blah blugh.<ref>
{{cite web
 |author= *|authorlink=
---------
OR
 *|last= *|first= *|authorlink=
 *|last2= *|first2= *|authorlink2=
 *|last3= *|first3= *|authorlink3=
 *|last4= *|first4= *|authorlink4=
and so on
---------
 *|coauthors=
 |date=         (or |year= *|month= *|day=)
 |title=
 *|language=
 *|trans_title=
 |url=
 *|format=
 *|page= (or |pages=)
 *|work=
 *|publisher=
 *|location=
 *|bibcode=
 *|doi=
 *|id=
 *|isbn=
 *|issn=
 *|oclc=
 *|pmd=
 *|pmid=
 |accessdate=
 *|archiveurl=
 *|quote=
----
Other parameters (if found) place here, one per line
}}</ref> Blahblahblah blug blah.

Blahblah blah blah blugh.<ref>
{{cite book
 |author= *|authorlink=
---------
OR
 *|last= *|first= *|authorlink=
 *|last2= *|first2= *|authorlink2=
 *|last3= *|first3= *|authorlink3=
 *|last4= *|first4= *|authorlink4=
and so on
---------
 *|coauthors=
 *|separator=
 *|lastauthoramp=
 |year= *|month= *|day=    (or |date=)
 *|origyear=
 *|editor= *|editor-link=
 *|editor2= *|editor2-link=
 *|editor3= *|editor3-link=
 *|editor4= *|editor4-link=
---------
OR
 *|editor-last= *|editor-first= *|editor-link=
 *|editor2-last= *|editor2-first= *|editor2-link=
 *|editor3-last= *|editor3-first= *|editor3-link=
 *|editor4-last= *|editor4-first= *|editor4-link=
and so on
---------
*|chapter=
*|trans_chapter
*|chapterurl=
 |title=
 *|language=
 *|trans_title=
 *|url=
 *|format=
 *|edition=
 *|series=
 *|volume= *|issue= |page= (or |pages=)
 *|nopp=
 |publisher=
 *|location=
 *|bibcode=
 *|doi=
 *|id=
 |isbn=
 *|issn=
 *|pmid=
 *|pmd=
 *|oclc=
 *|accessdate=
 *|laysummary=
 *|laysource=
 *|laydate=
 *|quote=
 *|ref
 *|postscript=
----
Other parameters (if found) place here, one per line
}}</ref> Blahblahblah blug blah.

And similar for cite book, cite web, and so on... Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 18:07, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

This should be quite easy, although I'd like to be sure that there is a consensus for this move before I do the coding. (I'm not sure whether this would class as a seperate task, and thus require approval at WP:BRFA.) Could you provide the desired order for the other templates, too? Thanks, Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 14:29, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

Well that's why I said in manual mode (there would have to be a checkbox which is off by default and a warning that this should be only used when subsequent work on citations is intended). I'll provide the desired order for others citation templates (tell me if I missed any). Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 14:44, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

I'd suggest that the sequence used should agree with the sequence in the respective /doc so that, when a new blank instance is copy/pasted from the /doc to an article's wikitext it remains the same. LeadSongDog come howl 15:35, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

It would be nice, but the documentations do not list the most logical way of ordering things. I'm aligning parameters with presentation as best I can, while documentation usually present them in order of importance.Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 15:39, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm trialling this in the Cite Doi namespace - keep your eyes out for errors there; if it succeeds I'll investigate enabling this for either manual or automatic mode. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 23:19, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Journal parameters cleanup

You can look through (Misplaced Pages:WikiProject_Academic_Journals/Journals_cited_by_Wikipedia alphabetical) and see patterns. For example, many journal parameters start with a ' for no reason, others are italicized twice (templates place entries in italics automatically, no need to tell it twice), and so on (AWB typo team also contacted). Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 01:17, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

AWB typo team appear to have fixed the bulk of them already... I think I'll leave it in their capable hands. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 23:17, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Non useful edits ("updating citations")

It seems the bot removes information from the templates. See: and . My impression was that the bot would never remove material? --Kim D. Petersen (talk) 20:45, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

It puked!

Just a little...heh. CB2 added its routing stuff (or whatever) in this edit to a ref template. Anyway, nothing major... just thought you'd like to know. --Rcej (talk) 08:41, 13 July 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointer; I can't replicate the bug. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 23:15, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Pages

Hi. Your bot came through with an edit to add a pages field, using the number of the issue. Can't help you there. -SusanLesch (talk) 00:17, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Feature request

I love this bot. I wonder how hard it would be to fix the en-dashes in page ranges of the {{Harv}}, {{Harvnb}} and{{Harvtxt}}? In other words fix Smith 2009, pp. 5–6 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFSmith2009 (help) so it becomes Smith 2009, pp. 5–6 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFSmith2009 (help)? I'm guessing this is a pretty easy enhancement, since it already does this for the citation templates. ---- CharlesGillingham (talk) 10:36, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

DOI really broken?

Hi Martin,

This seems to be marking a valid DOI as broken. Any idea why? It is copy-pasted from the actual journal page, and dx.doi.org redirects it correctly.

Hesperian 00:31, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

The bot doesn't mark it now - the page must have been unavailable when it tried last. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 15:38, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

See this pass.LeadSongDog come howl 17:01, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Strange - didn't happen when I tried it. How are you launching the bot? Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 17:07, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

I didn't, it ran 59 minutes after Casliber's last edit.LeadSongDog come howl 17:28, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Output is as follows:

 Processing page 'User:Hesperian/Sandbox' — edit—history 
* Fire temperatures and follicle-opening requirements in 10 Banksia species
  Already has a DOI. 
All details present - no need to query CrossRef. 
No CrossRef record found.
Seaching DOI for PMID
Checking that the DOI is operational... It isn't.Citation assessed in 0 secs.
Added: doi_brokendate. 
Writing to User:Hesperian/Sandbox history
Page took 4 secs to process.

Hesperian 23:28, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

Suggestion - if the bot log showed the doi that was being tested it would be more informative, avoiding the need for a "what went wrong?" phase in followup.LeadSongDog come howl 03:46, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

 Done Good idea (-: Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 23:14, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

What happened here?

? Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 23:54, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Hmm. Not sure - I tweaked a couple of things and can't reproduce the error. Let me know if you notice it happening again elsewhere. I'm using a recommended external tool to generate the existing Wikicode of the talk page, and the only thing I can think of is that that failed for some reason. If the problem persists, I'll investigate more deeply - but hopefully it's now fixed.. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 03:14, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

DOI toolbox

I noticed that CitationBOT fails to run (when prompted by the .js toolbox) in pages that have endashes and emdashes in their name. Prompting the BOT from the toolserver works just fine, but not when you do it from the toolbox. Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics}

Eugh, character encodings. Trying to fix those is the fastest route to a headache... I can't access the toolserver databases at the moment, to work out how page titles are stored there, so won't be able to make any headway on this for now. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 03:40, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Citation bot 2 created a sub page in templatespace for some reason

Template:Cite doi/10.1158.2F1541-7786 ? whats this about? –xeno 12:40, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Some bot malfunction led to the transcluding article being copypasted into the template. Fixed the symptom by replacing the transclusion at BRAF (gene) marked the template with {{db-copypaste}}LeadSongDog come howl 14:17, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks, deleted. –xeno 14:23, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Martin, it appears that truncated doi formerly resolved to a preprint article that was removed from PMC at the request of the principal publisher. This may have had something to do with triggering the malfunction. See vs. to further cloud the matter. It appears the correct doi for the preprint was doi:10.1158/1541-7786.MCR-07-2001 which now resolves to . Hope this helps find out what triggered the bot error.LeadSongDog come howl 15:51, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Hm, puzzling. I'll investigate when I get the opportunity. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 21:22, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Redirects to DOI don't work

Hi, there: I'm not sure what happened here and here, but the DOI redirects don't look right: see the leftmost (first) column in this section. Can you fix this? I'm not sure what ought to be done. Thanks! Whatever404 (talk) 14:09, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

What happened is that PubMed listed a bad doi, also shown at EBSCO. I've provided direct cites in lieu at the article. Perhaps the bot could check that the doi resolves before linking to it?LeadSongDog come howl 16:09, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Is it possible to solve the problem "at the source"? Is there a way to fix a bad DOI? Whatever404 (talk) 16:57, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

You can follow the DOI link; if the DOI doesn't work it will direct you to a 'report bad DOI' page. However, it may take the publishers some time to correct the information. I would recommend manually creating the citation at the cited DOI, rather than within the article; that way you won't have to wait for the publisher to correct their records. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 22:15, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Bot will not complete citation

Please see "Jump the queue" link and article section in which it is displayed. Why has this PMID citation not been completed? All other cites newly added were completed. Thanks! Whatever404 (talk) 19:45, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Looks fine to me. Perhaps the PMID database was temporarily inaccessible when you tried. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 22:12, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

DOI bot issues

Is "DOI bot" different from "Citation bot"? I added a citation with "cite PMID", it redirected to a "cite DOI", but the citation does not include the PMID link. Shouldn't the PMID link also be provided? Please let me know where to direct this. Whatever404 (talk) 14:12, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, Citation bot is the re-named DOI bot. Thanks for spotting this; I'll update the bot when I next have the opportunity. In the meantime, you can add the PMID by hand if you wish. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 14:42, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

 Fixed This issue will be addressed with the next patch. Thanks for the report! Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 21:30, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

Please make CitationBot stop adding months and ISSNs

There's no consensus for that, and it clutters citations for no good reason. See the discussion on Template talk:Cite journal. Thanks. Headbomb {_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 21:17, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Previous problem still not fixed

Hello, I regard this problem as a major bug that has been ongoing for many months now. It is where the bot adds URLs which are not the full text but to an article on NIH covering a keyword in the title of a paper. See this example and my corrections. I am worried that many articles are being harmed by this bug throughout wikipedia.--Literaturegeek | T@1k? 20:50, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

• Pages with incomplete DOI references