User talk:Citation bot

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Note that the bot's maintainer and assistants (Thing 1 and Thing 2), can go weeks without logging in to Wikipedia. The code is open source and interested parties are invited to assist with the operation and extension of the bot. Before reporting a bug, please note: Addition of DUPLICATE_xxx= to citation templates by this bot is a feature. When there are two identical parameters in a citation template, the bot renames one to DUPLICATE_xxx=. The bot is pointing out the problem with the template. The solution is to choose one of the two parameters and remove the other one, or to convert it to an appropriate parameter.

Please click here to report an error.

Or, for a faster response from the maintainers, submit a pull request with appropriate code fix on GitHub, if you can write the needed code.

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

 Not a bug since only page numbers and search terms are stable urls AManWithNoPlan (talk) 18:56, 5 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Resubmitting declined 'bugs' does not make them go away any faster. --Izno (talk) 18:16, 24 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

User:Izno are you saying this isn't a bug? I came here to report the same thing, it's clearly wrong. Ivar the Boneful (talk) 00:15, 28 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I am saying that it is not a bug. It is expected and inline with the use of the relevant fields of the templates. SV simply does not like what the templates do in this regard. --Izno (talk) 00:56, 28 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'm also here to report the same thing. I see from the most recent archive there are some long threads debating this with strong feelings about the matter. But a bot should not be making contentious changes. Please stop it from doing this one. Wasted Time R (talk) 11:24, 1 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I just saw one where it turned NBC News from "publisher" to "work". The "work" field should only be used for the name of a publication; the name of the organization that published something does not go there, but does go in the "publisher" field. Our article on NBC News states that it is "the news division of the American broadcast television network NBC." A division is a kind of organization, not a kind of publication. If the link had instead gone to NBC Nightly News, a news program published by this division, it would have been correct to change publisher to work, because work= should only be for publications, publisher= should only be for organizations, and NBC Nightly News is a publication of the organization NBC News. But the bot's change of NBC News to be a work rather than a publisher is flat-out incorrect. Similarly, our article BBC News characterizes it as an organization, not as a publication, so it belongs in the publisher= parameter, not in the work= parameter, and the issue reported by SarahSV is indeed a bug. ("BBC News" can also refer to the TV channel BBC News (TV channel), but it is valid to list it as the publisher and unless the bot has good reason to believe that the channel was the intended meaning then these valid citations should not be automatically changed.) If the bot is incapable of making these distinctions correctly it should not be trying. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:24, 1 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'm just going to point to the previous discussion rather than rehash. Again. SMC is precisely correct. This bot makes the change when there is a URL for the website present and other cases are otherwise unaffected so far as I am aware, which falls into the case of a |website=, which takes italics. The name of the website is BBC News. Likewise NBC News. So no, it's not flat out incorrect, neither is it a bug. --Izno (talk) 22:42, 1 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The name of https://www.bbc.com/news is not BBC News, it's BBC.com. BBC News is an organization, not a website. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 00:23, 2 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Similarly, in the NBC News example I had in mind, the name of https://www.nbcnews.com/ as stated in its "About" link https://www.nbcnews.com/information/nbc-news-info/about-nbc-news-digital-n1232178 is not "NBC News", it is "NBC News Digital". NBC News is the organization that publishes is, but the website has a different name. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:25, 2 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

There may be a web site named "BBC News", but there is also an organization. In the change I am discussing, the parameter had a wikilink pointing to the organization, which was maintained by this change. So the bot changed a parameter naming and linking to an organization, to one that should only be used for published works, but kept the parameter value as being the name and wikilink of the organization. Regardless of whether you can find some twisted way of justifying that as really being the name of a web site that might coincidentally have also been the web site of the reference (rather than the reference going to some other publication from the same organization that is not their web site), putting the name of an organization into a parameter that is supposed to only contain names of publications is a bug. Perhaps you are being misled by a misinterpretation of the many past RFCs, which have all been focused on italicization of works, and on the misbehavior of editors disagreeing with those RFCs, who used publisher as a workaround to force non-italicization. All of that is totally irrelevant to the problem here, which is the misbehavior of a bot and its operator who appear to disagree with the use of publisher-without-work and are force-fitting publishers into being works even when they are not. That misbehavior is a bug and it must stop. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:20, 2 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You're... you're seriously placing the weight on whether there's a wikilink? That's ludicrous. It's approximately equivalent to saying that |publisher=The New York Times shouldn't be |work=The New York Times in context. In the case at hand, |work= is trivially preferable. --Izno (talk) 05:00, 2 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

No. I'm placing weight on what the Wikilink tells us about the nature of the thing it names. In the case of BBC News and NBC News it tells us that it is an organization, not a publication. In the case of The New York Times, it tells us that it is a newspaper, a kind of publication, and that the parent organization has a different name, The New York Times Company. So "The New York Times" should go in the work parameter, not the publisher parameter, and "The New York Times Company" (if for some reason we wanted to put it into a citation, for instance because they published a standalone web site about their corporation rather than in the newspaper that they also publish) would go in the publisher parameter, not the work parameter. It's the same with these other organizations and their products. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:25, 2 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

MOS:ITALICWEBCITE and WP:CITALICSRFC are both relevent and for now I have set new runs to not do that for now. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 02:30, 2 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

They are not relevant. They are about how to format names of websites, for which the correct answer is to use italic. The problem here is different: that the things being moved into work are not actually names of websites, they are names of publishers of websites. —David Eppstein (talk) 02:36, 2 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

AManWithNoPlan, "work" here means the title of a creative work, such as a newspaper, book, or website. See Title (publishing). Titles are often italicized. BBC News is not a creative work. It's a department or division of the BBC. It's a publisher. The names of publishers are not italicized. SarahSV ^(talk) 04:12, 2 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The RFC discussion on this topic may be of interest. --Whywhenwhohow (talk) 04:25, 2 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Whywhenwhohow, you are headed into WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT territory with this repetition of this false claim that an RFC on the formatting of website names is relevant for a discussion on the mischaracterization of organization names as being names of works. If you think publishers of standalone titles that are not listed as being part of a larger work should be italicized, we can have that discussion, although I disagree. But listing them as works in order to italicize them is exactly as bad as listing publications (works) as being publishers in order to de-italicize them. —David Eppstein (talk) 04:34, 2 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]