Editors who activate this bot should carefully check the results to make sure that they are as expected. While the bot does the best it can, it cannot anticipate the existing misuse of template parameters or anticipate bad/incomplete metadata from citation databases. See also OABot, which is better at finding free/open access versions of citations. |
This user account is a bot operated by Smith609 (talk). It is used to make repetitive automated or semi-automated edits that would be extremely tedious to do manually, in accordance with the bot policy. The bot is approved and currently active – the relevant request for approval can be seen here. Administrators: if this bot is malfunctioning or causing harm, please block it. |
This bot runs on Wikimedia Toolforge. Administrators: If this bot needs to be blocked due to a malfunction, please remember to disable autoblocks so that other Toolforge bots are not affected. |
Activate | Guide | Bugs/Features | Emergency shutoff |
Activate the bot on a specific page or all articles in a category. | How do you get the best results? Want an activation link on every page you edit? Consult the guide! | Something wrong? Report it! Have an idea? Suggest it! Source code available at GitHub. |
Admins: Follow instructions. Non-admins: Report to WP:ANI. |
This bot was originally designed to add digital object identifiers (DOIs) to references; it now does much more, adding other identifiers (PMIDs, ISBNs), links to open access repositories, and fixing common formatting errors.
The bot obtains citation data from a range of sources including Google Books, Google Books API Family, CrossRef, AdsAbs, arXiv, oaDOI and PubMed. Because scraping data from web pages is unreliable and resource-intensive, these databases are the main source of data; unfortunately the bot is unable to tell when these databases contain errors or incomplete information. Any such error or omission should be reported directly to the data repository maintainer. The bot also corrects citations to match WP:CITALICSRFC and similar. Note that a 503 error means that the bot is overloaded and you should try again later – wait at least an hour.
Open source links are from mostly oaDOI.
A stable version of the bot is always available at https://citations.toolforge.org/
Time commitments preclude regular updates; maintenance is attempted every few months. The source code can be found at https://github.com/ms609/citation-bot.
The bot edit summaries try to strike a balance between providing too little information to be useful and so much information as to exceed the line limits and to just duplicate the edit content itself. Sometimes the edit summary will include items that did not occur in the final edit because multiple actions cancelled each other out. Also, if a URL is removed, then the edit summary might say that other things (such as access-date) were removed because there was no URL, even though there was originally a URL: this is because the bot works in phases.
See also: User:Citation bot/use § ... the bot made a mistake? |
((bots|deny=Citation bot))
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, such as ((cite journal <!-- Citation bot bypass--> |last=Smith |first=John |year=2018 |...))
|last=
/|first=
, or a wrong |doi=
) to a citation), put a comment in place of the appropriate parameter such as |doi = <!-- Citation bot adds wrong DOI-->
Although the content of the comment is not relevant to the Citation Bot, it is best to include some text within the comment so that human editors understand why there is a comment. Also, it makes it clear why, such if the comment was "Citation bot grabs invalid issue number from pubmed", then a human might know that they too should not believe pubmed. Lastly, random empty comments are prone to being deleted by human editors as "extraneous".
It may be possible to fix the underlying problem if you report the error – but there are a few, rare instances (such as false positives and editor preference) where it is impossible to implement an automatic fix.
If the bot is adding seemingly-unrelated data to a citation, it is probably receiving a false positive from the citation databases it consults. Unfortunately, there's no way for the bot to know this, so there are two ways of avoiding it:
The bot replaces hyphens with en dash in page number ranges. On rare occasions when a hyphen is right and an en dash is wrong (hyphen in the page number itself, often because the page number includes the chapter too), manually use the ((hyphen)) template instead of the dash/hyphen character. An alternative is to use the template's |at=
parameter.
The bot draws all parameters specified in Module:Citation/CS1/Whitelist with the format "['parameter_name'] = true", and treats these as valid spellings. The bot maintains its own copy at https://github.com/ms609/citation-bot/blob/master/constants/parameters.php
There have been a number of requests for the bot to be adapted to foreign-language wikipedias. When time permits, I will be happy to work towards this. For me to adapt the bot for a foreign wiki I first need:
If you have both of these available, please let me know and I will set to work on the necessary coding.
See also: User:Citation bot/use |
Automatic or manually Assisted: Automatic
Programming language(s): PHP
Function summary: Maintains and expands citations; ensures standards are complied to.
Edit period(s): Can run in a continuous mode that automatically revisits articles, but currently used on specific articles whenever requested by a user.
Function details:
Wikitext | userbox | where used | ||
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((User wikipedia/Citation bot))
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linked pages |