User talk:Citation bot

OAuth will not work for much longer[edit]

Status: new bug
Reported by: Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 06:58, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

What happens: New OAuth tokens (preferably ones without edit permisions) needed with domain name change
We can't proceed until: Bot account needs to request new tokens and they need added to toolserver account configuration

URL redirect is buying us time. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 13:07, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

URL expander down - anyone have any idea why??[edit]

Ever since the DNS change. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 11:20, 17 June 2020 (UTC)

https://translation-server.toolforge.org/ gives 503 error code AManWithNoPlan (talk) 21:35, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

Does citation bot have a feature to add a |title= when one is missing ie. determine a reasonable title for a given URL? -- GreenC 15:27, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

That feature is dead since the great migration. Thus the translation server call for help above. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 15:40, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

I don't know about it, is it this: https://github.com/zotero/translation-server ? I checked /data/project/translation-server on TF and there is a crontab error file growing (updated today) but unable to read it. June 20 was last anyone logged into the shell. -- GreenC 18:44, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

Yes thats it. I think we need someone with TF superpowers to read it and maybe fix it. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 19:09, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

Discussion @ Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Toolforge -- GreenC 00:45, 24 August 2020 (UTC)

Pings and emails to Smith unanswered. If there no response in a few days, will ask admins on the IRC to adopt the tool, or possibly someone would volunteer jig a restart. -- GreenC 02:09, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

Heard back from Smith and working on an access solution.. -- GreenC 13:45, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

I have initiated the abandoned tool adoption procedure User_talk:Smith609#translation-server_adoption which requires a 14 day wait period - this is so we can add additional maintainers to try to reboot the tool. -- GreenC 14:26, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Smith added members of this group for 'become translation-server' access. -- GreenC 22:02, 30 August 2020 (UTC)

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T261300 asked for help. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 11:45, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

Changes link to front cover to link to actual book[edit]

Status: new bug
Reported by: Corker1 (talk) 15:06, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

What happens: Change [1]

to. [2]

What should happen: Change [3]

to [4]

Relevant diffs/links: [5]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Unless you are linking to the actual image on the front cover, I think that new link better reflect the reference. And, with the new google books, the old link no longer works that way anyway. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 16:28, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Secondly, the bot actually fixes the links so that they work with the new google books, and they no longer depend upon javascript, and finally it removes user specific parts. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 16:30, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Lastly, pointing to the front cover might also use up the persons page limit. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 17:06, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

I always link to the images on the front covers or title pages of books on Google Books where Google permits this. That page often contains the book's complete title, as well as the actual names of the author(s), editor(s), publisher and publisher's location(s). The main Google Books page does not always report these completely or accurately. The bot needs to retain this important option.

The bot also removes links to snippets of text in Google books when it deletes parts of URL's that follow the symbol "&". When the bot does this, readers can no longer verify information that editors have cited. Readers also cannot determine the context in which the cited information appeared in the book. Corker1 (talk) 21:57, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

There is no such thing as a reliable google book link. And, links often include multiple search parts and that means that different people will see different things when they click the link, which is bad. The bot reduces this, although a person should got through and remove all search terms for links to pages, and all pages for links to search terms. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 13:06, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

I agree with AManWithNoPlan. Furthermore if you need to cite specific pages, the last thing you want is a bot changing the link to some pretty frontispiece. To take a specific example, the Statutes at Large has many many pages and we really should not ask readers tp plough through it looking for a reference that we as editors have already found. (For detailed examples, see Calendar (New Style) Act 1750. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 13:19, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

Removes link to publisher from work title[edit]

Status: new bug
Reported by: Corker1 (talk) 17:49, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

What happens: Changes from [journal=The American Museum, or Universal Magazine] to [journal=The American Museum, or Universal Magazine]
What should happen: No change
Relevant diffs/links: [6]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

The first step here is to actually use the parameters meant for the information. date and volume goes in |date= and |volume=, not |journal= Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:14, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

Whitespace wikilink cleanup[edit]

Status: new bug
Reported by: Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:04, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

What should happen: [7]
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

How common of a problem is this? AManWithNoPlan (talk) 01:13, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

BBC News et al (again)[edit]

Status: new bug
Reported by: Yngvadottir (talk) 03:48, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

What happens: Bot changes BBC News from a publisher to a work, causing it to be italicised. This is not correct. BBC News is a division of a broadcasting company and is no more a "work" than ABC News, any radio or TV station identified by call letters, or companies such as News Corp.
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Yngvadottir: Thanks! See next bug report as well, same problem with ABC News, CBS News, NBC News. —Anomalocaris (talk) 10:10, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

Status: new bug
Reported by: Anomalocaris (talk) 10:07, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

What happens: You are changing |publisher= to |work= for a variety of business organizations that are actually publishers, not websites or newspapers or magazines or works. According to ABC News, BBC News, CBS News, NBC News, Reuters these are all businesses! They are not websites! They are not magazines! They are not TV or radio programs! Note: You seem to be correctly leaving Fox News as a |publisher=. Thank you for that.
What should happen: You should be flipping these the other way, changing |work= or any of its aliases to |publisher= for ABC News, BBC News, CBS News, NBC News. When the news item is on Reuters' website, it's |publisher=Reuters, otherwise it's |agency=Reuters. I'm not sure if "you" (the bot) are sophisticated enough to deal with this.
Relevant diffs/links: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Video_game_controversies&diff=994781078&oldid=994417339
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Also posted at User talk:AManWithNoPlan#Please stop using Citation bot to flip news corporations from publisher to work. Feel free to delete this posting if it doesn't belong here. —Anomalocaris (talk) 11:12, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

This change is supported by Help:CS1 and ultimately WP:Citing sources as we are citing the body of work, not the publisher. --Izno (talk) 14:44, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous. Look at the output: BBC News. That is not a website, it's the news division of the corporation, the employer of the reporters. Particular stories also appear under the heading "BBC Future", for example. You speak of a body of work, but italics indicate a publication; I would italicize a particular program(me) on the BBC or any other broadcaster (such as Today or All Things Considered, both news shows I have cited as "work="). They do not indicate a company or a division of a company; this makes Wikipedia look stupid (or like advertising). And @AManWithNoPlan: these objections make the bot run contentious, this should be discussed centrally before you resume what at least two of us have now objected to as degrading the encyclop(a)edia using automated tools. Yngvadottir (talk) 17:06, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

Indeed, this is implementing Trappist the monk's nonsensical view that something hosted at springer.com is part of a body of work called Springer, rather than reflect the fact that it's something published by Springer. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:10, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

Springer being a work is odd to say the least. Drawing the distinction between "BBC" vs "BBC News" vs "BBC HARDTalk" seems to be a contentious issue. Where does the publisher start and the work begin. I have had the list of "works" on the bot reduces now. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 17:37, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

I am not Trappist. Please do not ascribe his views to anyone but him. His view does match mine, and multiple others in the community. BBC News is a work composed of multiple segments (which may be lesser or greater works themselves ofc.) Especially, lesser works available at bbc.com/news are such of the website BBC.com. (I suppose an alternative might be to italize BBC or BBC.com with BBC News appearing as the publisher, but I suppose you and most others would find that more confusing rather than less. I think I include myself among those who would be confused by such a practice.)

Springer is indeed a fallacy. Almost always they are republishing a paper published in another work elsewhere. Works originally published at springer.com (of which I imagine there are few but non-zero quantities) or as part of one of their journals with their name should indeed receive some work of interest with the Springer name.

As for whether Wikipedia is made to look stupid, please take that opinion clearly your own elsewhere. I doubt anyone other than Wikipedians care, though I'm sure you could convince colleagues or friends of your own opinion without hearing from others with an opposing and currently consensus view of the matter.

Regarding "actual" works like All Things Considered, I agree those also are works (though of lesser size than the body of work named NPR). I am happy to agree such should be present as the work where applicable and trivially known. This bot is not that smart (but I guess could be if the likes of NPR make sane URLs). --Izno (talk) 18:16, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

Fundamentally though, your position is inconsistent with printed news works. You see no issue with italicizing The New York Times, but as soon as the work becomes broadcast or digital, now it's an issue? No, I reject that inconsistency. --Izno (talk) 18:49, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

Regarding Reuters and other agencies, those are works themselves when published by the entity called Reuters (or similar other agency). They should be reflected in the work field accordingly in such cases. --Izno (talk) 18:19, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

Nzd: You raised this issue before also.

The distinction between publishers and publications is ancient, and the existence of the Internet and websites does not change anything. Harvard University is an organization or business, and if it issues a press release, we would use {{Cite press release}} with |publisher=Harvard University — even if the press release is found at harvard.edu. The Harvard Gazette is a former newspaper and now just a website from Harvard, and for anything there, we would use {{Cite news}} with |newspaper=The Harvard Gazette. CBS News was founded September 18, 1927, long before the Internet. It is an organization, and the fact that its official website at cbsnews.com has a very similar name does not change anything. What's on cbsnews.com is presumptively published by CBS News, just as what's on harvard.edu is presumptively published by Harvard University.

Until this is settled, I beseech AManWithNoPlan to stop using Citation bot to make mass changes of the publishers in question: ABC News, BBC News, CBS News, NBC News, and Reuters. Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 21:56, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

I think separating out the underlying question of what italicization behavior we want here may be helpful. Once we've settled that, we can then figure out how to get the internal data structured in a way that produces that behavior. There's enough of a question here that I agree mass editing should stop until we figure it out. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 10:29, 27 December 2020 (UTC)
In the case of BBC News, the publisher is the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation): BBC News is the work in our parlance. I suspect ABC is the same. So (a) putting BBC News in italics is consistent and reasonable and (b) at the risk of looking a bit silly by having both, it is conceivable that the bot could extract a publisher= in these cases and set it to be BBC. In the case of Reuters, the publisher is Reuters and the work is reuters.com. But I admit that the model starts to break down at e.g. Harvard, because undeniably the publisher is Harvard University but to say that harvard.edu is the work does stretch credulity. I suppose what I am saying is that the bot shouldn't change all instances of publisher= to work= but it could flag up anomalies for attention. And maybe it could bifurcate the major sources like ABC, BBC and CBC? Which all goes to underline Sdkb's point that we need a consensus on what italicisation we want: my starting point would be to ask if there is a house style in major journals like Nature that we should emulate? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 10:58, 27 December 2020 (UTC)
Indeed today the bot limits its activities on this point to major news sources like those in this thread (I don't know about CBC offhand). --Izno (talk) 19:24, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

John Maynard Friedman: Who is "we" when you speak of "our parlance"? Can you please provide a source for your "we" considering BBC News to be a work? —Anomalocaris (talk) 11:17, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

The Royal we, evidently, since it seems that you don't concur. Perhaps others will agree or disagree with my impression my usage is this is received wisdom among editors? but again your mileage may vary. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 15:49, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

Hearst, Vice Media, Axel Springer are publishers (or media companies if you prefer). San Francisco Chronicle, Die Welt, Vice are works. The BBC is a media company that has multiple divisions (like BBC News and BBC Radio), each of which produces multiple works (like BBC News Online and Today). --NaBUru38 (talk) 12:09, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

We've been over this many times before, and the answer is always the same. See WP:CITALICSRFC in particular. I'll just copy-paste what I said at an essentially duplicate thread at WT:CS1#Italics 2: It's not an either/or, "use the one I like better" matter. The |work= is always required (|website= and |newspaper=, etc., are aliases of it); Wikipedia only cites published works (see WP:V and WP:CITE); it does not cite companies, persons, or other entities, only works by them. The |publisher= should be added, as additional source-identification information, only if significantly different from the title of the work (do |work=The New York Times not |work=The New York Times|publisher=The New York Times Company). If the name of the website is ABC News then that is in fact the title of the work, despite that also being part of the name of publisher. (It's also harmless to do |work=ABCNews.Go.com, though that's a bit sloppy.) The actual publisher is ABC News Internet Ventures, a division of ABC News Network, a division of American Broadcasting Company, a division of Walt Disney Television, a division of the Walt Disney Company (most or all of which also have corporate postfixes like "Inc." in their full names). None of these names need appear in a citation, because they are either redundant with the |work= at the lower levels, or too lost in financial-holdings arrangements, at the upper levels, to be meaningful to the reader in relation to a citation. (In most contexts, anyway. In a WP article about Disney or one of its other properties, it might in fact be pertinent to indicate that Disney is the ultimate publisher, either with that parameter or with a free-form note, so the reader has a clear indication of the source's lack of complete independence from the subject.) — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 17:48, 1 January 2021 (UTC)
To centralize discussion and avoid further WP:TALKFORK problems, I note that there's an older thread about this at Help talk:Citation Style 1#Italics 2, an basically a duplicate of this one at the bot operator's talk page. In the latter, Anomalocaris has said a bunch of outlandish stuff:
You are using Citation bot to change |publisher= to |work= for a variety of business organizations that are actually publishers, not websites or newspapers or magazines or works. According to ABC News, BBC News, CBS News, NBC News, and Reuters these are all businesses! They are not websites! They are not magazines! They are not TV or radio programs! Note: You seem to be correctly leaving Fox News as a |publisher=. Thank you for that.
You should be flipping these the other way, changing |work= or any of its aliases to |publisher= for ABC News, BBC News, CBS News, NBC News. When the news item is on Reuters' website, it's |publisher=Reuters, otherwise it's |agency=Reuters.
Also, you are using Citation bot to change certain newspapers/websites correctly from |publisher= to |work=, but in some cases leaving them in an incorrect form, such as [[New York Times]] or New York Times.com instead of [[The New York Times]]. Also, |agency=''(Boston Globe)'' was corrected to |agency=(Boston Globe), but should be further corrected to |agency=The Boston Globe, with "The" and without parentheses.
This is just flat-out mistaken in almost every respect. Anomalocaris, you are engaging in a simplistic false dichotomy, an incorrect belief that if a company's name is (in part) "ABC News" that this means that can't also be the name of the publication. It simply is not true. "ABC News, BBC News, CBS News, NBC News, and Reuters ... are not websites!" is not a correct statement: The title of https://abcnews.go.com is ABC News; the title of https://www.bbc.com/news and its corresponding video channel on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/bbcnews are both BBC News; the title of https://www.cbsnews.com is CBS News; the title of https://www.nbcnews.com is NBC News; the title of https://www.reuters.com is Reuters. The names of the respective publishers (minus corporate designations like Inc., Ltd, and LLP) are: ABC News Internet Ventures, British Broadcasting Company (conventionally just given as "BBC"), CBS Interactive (division of CBS Entertainment Group, division of ViacomCBS), National Broadcasting Company (conventionally just "NBC", division of NBCUniversal), and Reuters (division of Thomson Reuters). So, the only one of these in which the immediate publisher's name actually coincides with the publication name is Reuters and Reuters. In all of these cases all that is needed is |work=, because the publisher names are so similar to the work names as to be redundant.
Next, the purpose of |agency= is being completely misunderstood here. It is only for newswires, and only when they are acting as such in the context of this specific citation. Reuters and Associated Press and Agence France-Presse are often agencies for other publications, but they also publish material under their own names, so whether one of these is an agency in a particular citation depends on the details of that citation; it is not a blanket matter. While it's correct that |agency=(Boston Globe) is misformatted, |agency=The Boston Globe is also wrong, because that is a newspaper (|work=The Boston Globe, not a content-syndicating news agency. If you've got a situation where the original publisher was The Boston Globe but you found the content somewhere else, e.g. a newspaper archives site, then the way to WP:SAYWHEREYOUGOTIT is |work=The Boston Globe|via=NameOfArchiveSite. Please, just actually read the citation template documentation and Help:CS1, and do what it says instead of trying to come up with ways to avoid doing what it says. (Same applies, really, to all policy, guideline, process, and documentation matters).
If this bot started changing |work= to |publisher= as Anomalocaris suggests, then I and several others would move to shut the bot down as doing difficult-to-fix, mass-level harm to citation data. PS: Yes, Springer is a publisher; if we had to cite their website (e.g. for WP:ABOUTSELF basics about the company), that's probably best done as |work=Springer.com. It's not something we would normally cite otherwise, since it is not a news source, journal, or other such publication in the more usual sense. If the bot is blanket-changing all publishers to works that would obviously be a mistake, but in any of the cases highlighted above (ABC News, BBC News, etc.), such a change is correct. If there are cases of |work=ABC News|publisher=ABC News, those should be reduced to |work=ABC News (especially since the publisher name is not actually "ABC News" to begin with). Another side point that's been covered before: When any website is cited by WP, it is cited as a published work (by definition), not as a shop or server or corporate entity or whatever else the same name might refer to outside of a citation-to-published-work context, where it gets italicized, even if it would not be italicized in running text as a service or company or whatever.
— SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:14, 1 January 2021 (UTC)
- The |work= is always required (|website= is an alias of it), this is plain false. Work is not always required, as many things are not published as part of larger works. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:00, 1 January 2021 (UTC)
  - Let's not be silly. Work is always required when it is applicable; nothing could possibly ever be required in cases in which it cannot even apply. This discussion is about swapping work for publisher when work is applicable. When the |work= parameter (or one of it aliases) does not apply, then |title= is the work. So, yes, the work is always required, just not necessarily in the form of the parameter by that name. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 19:14, 1 January 2021 (UTC)
    - Again, no. If you cite the arXiv:1302.1201 preprint, it is not part of a larger work, nor is "A Brief History of Curvature" the title of the 'work'. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:01, 1 January 2021 (UTC)
      Although I totally agree with your general point that work= is not required and that publisher= with no work= is a perfectly valid combination of parameters, that particular example would be better cited as Caldwell, Robert R.; Gubser, Steven S. (March 2013). "Brief history of curvature". Physical Review D. 87 (6). 063523. arXiv:1302.1201. doi:10.1103/physrevd.87.063523. (I am omitting its publisher, the American Physical Society, because that's usual not helpful for publications in well-known journals.) —David Eppstein (talk) 20:14, 1 January 2021 (UTC)
      - Also, no, the title of https://abcnews.go.com is not ABC News. It is abcnews.go.com, published by ABC News, owned by someone that's bibliographically irrelevant. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 20:03, 1 January 2021 (UTC)
        That's the domain name, not the title. The title is clearly given at the page, both visually and (along with a typical marketing tagline) in the <title>...</title> element, and it is ABC News. It is true that in general Wikipedians really don't care if you use |work=ABCNews.Go.com instead of |work=ABC News, that's completely immaterial to this discussion. The confusion you are having is that ABC News is also the name of the news division of American Broadcasting Company (a division in turn of Walt Disney Television, a division of Walt Disney Company). Exact or close-enough correspondence between the work and publisher name is pretty common, and it simply doesn't matter. It is not a magically special case. In such cases, we omit the publisher as redundant, because what we are citing is the work; we are not citing an entity (we only provide the publishing entity as additional information to help correctly identify the source). An argument could be made in this case to do |work=ABC News|publisher=American Broadcasting Company (or |work=ABCNews.Go.com|publisher=American Broadcasting Company, if you really really wanna), since American Broadcasting Company is an actual legal entity, while it's not clear that ABC News, the division, remains one at all (it may well simply be a property/trademark at this point). — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:53, 3 January 2021 (UTC)
Which task # authorizes changing |publisher= to |work= or vice versa? Levivich ^harass/_hound 19:29, 1 January 2021 (UTC)
At this point, I suggest directing followup discussion to Help talk:Citation Style 1#Italics 2, as these matters really do not pertain to a particular bot at all. If we have yet another RfC on this, that page is probably also where it will be held. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼 20:53, 3 January 2021 (UTC)

More corrections that could be made[edit]

Status: new bug
Reported by: Anomalocaris (talk) 10:21, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

What happens: Certain newspapers/websites are correctly moved from |publisher= to |work= but left in an incorrect form, such as [[New York Times]] or New York Times.com instead of [[The New York Times]]. Also, |agency=''(Boston Globe)'' was corrected to |agency=(Boston Globe), but should be further corrected to |agency=The Boston Globe, with "The" and without parentheses.
Relevant diffs/links: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Kelley_(ice_hockey)&diff=996234559&oldid=984533339 and https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_F._Kennedy_Jr._plane_crash&diff=996234246&oldid=996048677
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Also posted at User talk:AManWithNoPlan#Please stop using Citation bot to flip news corporations from publisher to work. Feel free to delete this posting if it doesn't belong here. —Anomalocaris (talk) 11:13, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

Please provide specific diffs where italics or parentheses or similar were not removed. --Izno (talk) 14:45, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

Now entered in bot bug template —Anomalocaris (talk) 21:19, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

[8] is not an error. [9] is an error but all the citations in the area look like garbage. --Izno (talk) 23:10, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

|work=New York Times.com most definitely is an error: there is no such website, newspaper, agency, organization, or other entity. The fact that Izno thinks that other citations near the one that includes |agency=(Boston Globe) look like garbage has no bearing on the need for such markup to be corrected to |agency=The Boston Globe. Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 23:22, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

The second citation's in page data is "Boston Globe". So, requiring the "The" is a matter of taste. As I said, the citations are garbage.

As for |work=New York Times.com most definitely is an error: there is no such website, newspaper, agency, organization, or other entity, we routinely have |work=New York Times. You may think that is suboptimal, but it also is not an error. The .com after the end is a natural extension.

Please don't ping me again on this page. You could also lose the snide attitude on the point. You can disagree that it is not in fact a GIGO situation as you wish without deciding that my opinion is particularly special (or the opposite, disinteresting or irrelevant). --Izno (talk) 23:27, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

Izno (without a link, as requested): It is wrong to just slap .com willy-nilly. The website of The New York Times is at nytimes.com. The website of the Republican National Committee is at gop.com; we would never use anything anything like "Republican National Committee.com", following your model. It is Wikipedia style to name newspapers as they name themselves, viz, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times. The word "The" is often omitted when the name of the newspaper is used before another noun to modify it, e.g. "in a New York Times editorial from January 1, 1900". But it's not supposed to be omitted in a reference. This is not a matter of taste. I am sorry if you found any of this snide. It might be fair to say that the tone is snide, but if so, it was unintentional. You can't read my mind, so it it is not fair to say that I have a snide attitude. Kindly keep my attitude out of this discussion, and let's stick to the facts. I have no opinion on whether or not citations near the one involving a story credited to (The) Boston Globe are garbage. I haven't inspected them. Their quality has no bearing on the correctness of the Boston Globe citation. (Here I'm using Boston Globe to modify "citation", so it's best to omit the definite article. Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 00:46, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

The The is a matter of taste. Having half the newspapers |journal=The New York Times while the other half as |newspaper=Los Angeles Times is pretty silly. Normalizing to all The ... , or all ~~The~~ ... is perfectly acceptable. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:14, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

Headbomb: (1) Even though |journal= is a synonym for |work= it's probably best to avoid using it except in {{Cite journal}}, which is, of course, reserved for peer-reviewed academic journals. (2) It is wrong to include the word "The" in publications that don't use them. There is no such newspaper as The Los Angeles Times. When I am editing articles for other reasons, I generally correct any missing The in The New York Times and other papers, and remove spurious the The in Los Angeles Times and other papers. There are other editors who do likewise. It's not a matter of taste. Cheers! —Anomalocaris (talk) 05:59, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

It is. You like the The in The New York Times. That doesn't mean your view is the only legitimate one. There are several style guides, such as MLA, that require to omit the leading 'The'. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:07, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

I happen to agree that it would be good to normalize these names of these works where they appear in a citation, I just don't think it's an error when the 'The' is omitted. Suboptimal, but not an error. --Izno (talk) 19:32, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

I agree with Headbomb that many style guides call for omitting the word "The" from some (but not all) publications that start with the word "The". (Publications such as The Nation or The Hindu just won't work without the "The".) However, I don't believe any style guide allows inserting "The" into the name of a publication that doesn't already have it. For example, I don't think you'll find a style guide that allows The Los Angeles Times. I thought Wikipedia had something calling for publications to be called by their real names, but I can't find it now, so maybe it doesn't exist. Anyway, I didn't come here to debate the word "The". I came to raise an eyebrow over running a bot to make changes to numerous Wikipedia articles tweaking citation parameters for little benefit while missing much larger errors in those same parameters. —Anomalocaris (talk) 11:11, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

If you have a way to handle 'larger' errors algorithmically, by all means, suggest such an algorithm. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:41, 28 December 2020 (UTC)

Here is a much worse example: in the edit 17:43, 25 December 2020 of List of journalists killed in India, within {{Cite web}}, the pathological markup

was carefully modified to

fixing the non-issue of numbering the unnumbered |last= and |first=, while ignoring the real issue that all of these parameters are completely wrong. It should be

|author=India Today Web Desk |date=December 1, 2020

and the |author= parameter might arguably better be |agency= or omitted altogether. —Anomalocaris (talk) 02:53, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

That's an entirely different issue caused by people putting garbage information in the parameters. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:15, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

Headbomb: My point is that there is something very strange that AManWithNoPlan finds it worthwhile to run a bot to make a meticulous change from valid markup to other valid markup, with no display difference and no error reduction, while the parameter names are changed to valid synonyms, the parameter values are completely bogus. It would be much more beneficial to Wikipedia to unbollix the citation. —Anomalocaris (talk) 05:59, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

The bot is not that smart in this context. I have seen similar with many of the Indian websites, I suspect as a result of a bad Zotero translator or in fact no Zotero translator being used in Citoid. The bot could reasonably be changed to make these citations better but not best anyway since there is inevitably some information not captured (best still would be for someone to make a Zotero translator for the Indian websites so that we don't have to deal with the garbage!).

As for last/last1, I think that's a good change regardless of any other changes (though I believe it is also considered to be one of the cosmetic edits that the bot will only make with another non-cosmetic edit, so it isn't the point of the particular change). --Izno (talk) 19:32, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

Which task # are these tasks under? Levivich ^harass/_hound 16:17, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

Renamed publication-place to location[edit]

Status: new bug
Reported by: Whywhenwhohow (talk) 21:16, 26 December 2020 (UTC)

What happens: Renamed publication-place to location
Relevant diffs/links: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tozinameran&diff=996477196&oldid=996476654
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Documentation excerpt

place: For news stories with a dateline, that is, the location where the story was written. In earlier versions of the template this was the publication place, and for compatibility, will be treated as the publication place if the publication-place parameter is absent; see that parameter for further information. Alias: location

publication-place: Geographical place of publication; generally not wikilinked; omit when the name of the work includes the publication place; examples: The Boston Globe, The Times of India. Displays after the title. If only one of publication-place, place, or location is defined, it will be treated as the publication place and will show after the title; if publication-place and place or location are defined, then place or location is shown before the title prefixed with "written at" and publication-place is shown after the title.

This one is going to be a pig to fix. In all the other {{cite}}s, "location" is the place of publication and we may assume that many (most?) instances of its use are intended to have that meaning. But equally, for stories from "war-torn X" or "famine-stricken Y", it must be probable that the wiki-editor would have used location=X and location=Y in this case without spotting the implicit error. It seems to me that to introduce "publication-location=" is definitely the wrong solution because it is inconsistent with the other cite templates. Maybe "dateline=" for where the story was filed? [though it is rather an Americanism, I don't know how international it is?] --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 11:15, 27 December 2020 (UTC)

Actually, |location= is the parameter to specify the written-at-place whereas |publication-place= is the correct parameter to specify the publication place. This applies to all CS1/CS2 templates.

If an editor explicitly used |publication-place= s/he actually meant to specify the publication place whereas if we find |location= in a citation, this is the dedicated parameter to specify the written-at-place but for quirky reasons burried in the historical development of the citation templates (trying to masquerade the underlying problem), the visible output of the templates differs only if both parameters are given. Ideally, we would have a semantically more meaningful parameter name for the written-at-place parameter as well (I suggested something like |write-place=, |writing-place= or |written-place=), but it won't be possible to automatically convert |location= to that new parameter because of the misleading use in historical citations. So every citation will have to be changed manually. However, given that it is difficult to fix, the bot should stop replacing the correct parameter |publication-place= by the potentially incorrect parameter |location=, as it removes vital information, weakens the quality of a citation and its machine-readability, and adds citations to the pool of those that need to be manually fixed eventually.

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 23:28, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

This has been recently discussed on this talk page, please review the archive. (I need to get around to the proposal to deprecate the one parameter over in Help talk:CS1.) --Izno (talk) 19:33, 27 December 2020 (UTC)
Is it feasible to temporarily leave location alone, change all or the citation templates to support |publication-date= and |publication-place=, then revise the bot to parse all of the parameters before making changes? Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 02:30, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
Among many other places, this has been discussed here:

User_talk:Citation_bot/Archive_19#Erroneous_move_of_publication-place_to_location User_talk:Citation_bot/Archive_24#publication-place_vs_location. |publication-place= (for the publication place) is NOT an alias of |location= (for the written-to-place), so please stop replacing |publication-place= by |location=. It is potentially invalidating citations. Or do we have to block the bot for this? --Matthiaspaul (talk) 23:28, 30 December 2020 (UTC)

- Except that it is an alias. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:32, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

This is simply not true. |publicationplace= is an alias of |publication-place=, like |location= is an alias of |place=, but these two groups of parameters are not aliases of each other, and they shouldn't because they are for two different properties of a source.

For historical reasons the two parameters issue the same display output unless both parameters are being given at the same time, but this is not the same as being aliases (in fact, it would be impossible to give both parameters at the same time if they were aliases - the template implementation does not allow this for alias parameters). So, please have a look at the source code before you spread such falsehoods, as this causes confusion among editors and even leads to inappropriate bot tasks such as this one, weakening correct information in citations and invalidating reliable machine-readability. That's harmful.

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 21:30, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Re: Quote-marked titles[edit]

@AManWithNoPlan: Our thread has been archived but I'd like to bring this up again. You said that the issue I described was not a bug. I do understand that someone purposefully implemented this removal, but I still think that it should be de-implemented. I've seen the bot do the described change multiple times since the last discussion, most recently here. The quote-title format is not uncommon and I do not believe that there are more titles that misuse the quote marks than there are actually quoted titles. Your proposed workaround of tagging every single such title seems like more unnecessary maintenance work. In the rare cases of quote marks actually being misused, they can still be fixed by hand, no workaround required. IceWelder [✉] 22:09, 5 January 2021 (UTC)

Some clarity on this would be greatly appreciated. IceWelder [✉] 22:40, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

I thought I fixed it. Turned out was in two places in the code. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 23:07, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Thanks! IceWelder [✉] 10:50, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

Adding a year breaks a {{sfn}} link[edit]

Status: new bug
Reported by: Aymatth2 (talk) 18:42, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

What happens: The bot (correctly) used Google Books to add a year to a citation, changing it to:

* {{citation |last=Franklin|first=Alfred|title=Histoire de la bibliotheque mazarine|year=1969|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=uZst3Cw62qIC&pg=PA249|accessdate=6 November 2019|publisher=Slatkine |id=GGKEY:ZXAXTFKG8NF}}

which renders:

Franklin, Alfred (1969), Histoire de la bibliotheque mazarine, Slatkine, GGKEY:ZXAXTFKG8NF, retrieved 6 November 2019

However, the result was that an {{sfn}} link like {{sfn|Franklin|p=249}} no longer worked: ^[1]

^ Franklin, p. 249.

Preferrably the bot would have also changed the {{sfn}} link to {{sfn|Franklin|1969|p=249}}, which would work: ^[1]

^ Franklin 1969, p. 249.

Aymatth2 (talk) 18:37, 6 January 2021 (UTC)

Relevant diffs/links: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Philippe-Fran%C3%A7ois_Bart&type=revision&diff=995923535&oldid=956521658
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Changing "agency"[edit]

Status: new bug
Reported by: Tenebrae (talk) 21:37, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

In the template "cite news," the field "agency=" is for news agencies such as Reuters, Associated Press and UPI. The bot changed "agency=" to "website=" for a Reuters cite, which is incorrect: [10]. --Tenebrae (talk) 21:37, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

The bot's edit was correct. See agency documentation.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 22:28, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Nonce already used 1/17/2021[edit]

Status: new bug
Reported by: Abductive (reasoning) 05:53, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

What happens: I keep getting a "Nonce already used" error message, such as: !API call failed: The authorization headers in your request are not valid: Nonce already used: 1ff9ed985e5606960cae0e173a525eb4 !Unhandled write error.
We can't proceed until: Feedback from maintainers

Not really sure what that suddenly started. Looks like something on wikipedia changed. I got in on another bot too. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 18:11, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

[FOOTNOTEFranklin249-1] Franklin, p. 249.

[FOOTNOTEFranklin1969249-2] Franklin 1969, p. 249.

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