User talk:Citation bot
Add topicAs of 2026, the active maintainer of Citation bot (merges pull requests on GitHub and does deployments to Toolforge) is AManWithNoPlan. The Citation bot GitHub is: https://github.com/ms609/citation-bot.
Note that the bot's creator (Smith609), maintainer (AManWithNoPlan) and assistant (Redalert2fan) 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. A 503 error means that the bot is overloaded and you should try again later – wait at least 15 minutes and then complain here.
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.
Feature requests
[edit]- Implement support to expand from https://doi.org/10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U192476 to
{{Who's Who}}
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Friern_Hospital&diff=prev&oldid=1167644213 - Implement support to convert cite web to {{BioRef}} and {{GBIF}}
- Use https://www.crossref.org/blog/news-crossref-and-retraction-watch/
- journal/publisher that only differ by 'and' and '&' should be treated as identical https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Congenital_cartilaginous_rest_of_the_neck&diff=prev&oldid=1199200383
- Free archive.org links such as curl -sH "Accept: application/json" "https://scholar.archive.org/search?q=doi:10.1080/14786449908621245" | jq -r .results[0].fulltext.access_url
URL removed
[edit]- Status
- new bug
- Reported by
- Mika1h (talk) 10:57, 30 October 2024 (UTC)
- What happens
- Bot replaces cite web with cite book, it removes the URL completely
- What should happen
- Nothing, the ref cited a Library Journal review that's listed on the Amazon site for the book, now it cites just the book, there's no link to click to see the review.
- Relevant diffs/links
- https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Shatnerverse&diff=prev&oldid=1254239468
- We can't proceed until
- Feedback from maintainers
- Identical to § Changing every citation of a publisher's webpage to Cite book above. While the choice of formatting may be questioned (can't the Library Journal review be located somewhere less objectionable than Amazon?) the behaviour here is the same underlying misfeature of altering any webpage citation where a book's bibliographic information is presented, as if the citation was meant to be to content of the book rather than e.g. a publisher's blurb or library listing. I think there are more discussions of this in the talkpage archives here; I used to favour this feature, but I'm no longer so sure it's a net positive. Folly Mox (talk) 11:36, 30 October 2024 (UTC)
- Apart from User talk:Citation bot/Archive 32 § Web->Book: I don't think that it was right in this case... (May 2022) linked in the thread above, there was some conversation at User talk:Citation bot/Archive 39 § Introduces ref error when citing Penguin publisher website (May 2024). There could be others. I have to go to work. Folly Mox (talk) 13:01, 30 October 2024 (UTC)
Assessment 24 September 2026: Still reproduces. Redalert2fan (talk) 08:58, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
author/first --> last/first
[ last/first">edit]Same for author2/first2 --> last2/first2. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 16:21, 15 November 2024 (UTC)
- Assessment 24 September 2026: Not implemented yet. Redalert2fan (talk) 08:59, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
Amazon link bug
[edit]Even when used as a reliable source for basic information for a work such as release date et al, Amazon pages tend to be erroneously converted (Special:Diff/1263465110, Special:Diff/1265696226) into the ref for the associated work. ミラP@Miraclepine 16:34, 28 December 2024 (UTC)
- Assessment 24 September 2026: Still reproduces. Redalert2fan (talk) 08:59, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
Converts conference citation to journal citation and changes title case
[edit]- Status
- new bug
- Reported by
- —David Eppstein (talk) 09:01, 9 January 2025 (UTC)
- What happens
- Special:Diff/1268341479
- What should happen
- In this specific case, the conversion to a more recent and more complete version of the paper happens to be acceptable. The bot got lucky. But in other cases, there might have been a reason to continue citing the conference version of a paper, even one with the same arxiv preprint number as a later journal version, and this conversion would be unsafe. The change from sentence case to title case, for a journal paper, is an unwanted style change, inconsistent with the use of sentence case for other journal papers referenced in this article.
- We can't proceed until
- Feedback from maintainers
- Assessment 24 September 2026: Still reproduces. Redalert2fan (talk) 08:59, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
Half-assed conversion of cite web to cite journal
[edit]- Status
- new bug
- Reported by
- —David Eppstein (talk) 17:53, 23 January 2025 (UTC)
- What happens
- Special:Diff/1271282424
- What should happen
- Either properly convert it to a publication type for a periodical (although calling the periodical, ORMS Today, a journal, is a stretch; it is a newsletter or magazine), or leave it alone; don't leave it in a broken half-converted state.
- We can't proceed until
- Feedback from maintainers
- Patch1: PR 5651. This will block ORMS Today changes specifically for now. Not leaving similar conversions (if correct) in a broken or half-converted state will require more work and be included in a next patch --Redalert2fan (talk) 20:03, 14 July 2026 (UTC)
- Assessment 24 September 2026: Still reproduces. Redalert2fan (talk) 09:04, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
Series: Current Topics in Behavioral Neuroscience / Curr. Top. Behav. Neurosci. / Curr Top Behav Neurosci
[edit]Not quite fixed, still need to do follow up cleanup, e.g. . Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 16:28, 18 February 2025 (UTC)
- that's will take some time. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 02:09, 28 February 2025 (UTC)
- Assessment 24 September 2026: Still not fixed. Redalert2fan (talk) 09:16, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
Italic tags
[edit]Assessment 24 September 2026: Consider as feature request, not implemented yet. Redalert2fan (talk) 09:25, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
url, chapter-url parameters
[edit]- Status
- new bug
- Reported by
- Kowal2701 (talk) 21:38, 2 September 2025 (UTC)
- What happens
- changed the "url" parameter of a ref ({{cite book}}) to "chapter-url", when the url was for the whole book
- What should happen
- nothing!
- Relevant diffs/links
- https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Draft:Sakalava_empire&diff=prev&oldid=1309227702
- Replication instructions
- The ones it got wrong were all Internet Archive links
- We can't proceed until
- Feedback from maintainers
Assessment 24 September 2026: Still reproduces. Redalert2fan (talk) 09:35, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
Incorrect ISBN
[edit]- Status
- new bug
- Reported by
- GreenC 07:36, 12 November 2025 (UTC)
- What happens
- Special:Diff/1231476865/1321722265 .. incorrect ISBN. The correct isbn ends in "6" the one added ends in "0". They are hardcover vs. paperback. The page numbers might not align, the citation won't verify. It's better to have "no ISBN" vs. "incorrect ISBN", wait for future tools that can retrieve the ISBN correctly. An incorrect ISBN introduces ambiguity, it's no longer clear which edition is being cited. The existence of a URL doesn't resolve the ambiguity, because maybe the URL was added after the ISBN. Other tools add URLs to match a (wrong) ISBN, etc..
- We can't proceed until
- Feedback from maintainers
Assessment 24 September 2026: Still reproduces. Redalert2fan (talk) 09:46, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
Bot caused an ISBN/Date incompatibility error
[edit]Prior to 2025-09-26 the article "Paracelsus" had a "cite book" reference that had parameters "|orig-year=1894" and "|publication-date=1976", but no "|date=" parameter.
On 2025-09-26 07:25 UTC Citation bot modified "|orig-year=1894" to "|year=1894". This caused an ISBN/Date incompatibility error. It should have modified the "|publication-date=1976" parameter. ~2025-33904-40 (talk) 16:40, 30 November 2025 (UTC)
- Diff. The second citation. –Novem Linguae (talk) 17:47, 30 November 2025 (UTC)
- Assessment 24 September 2026: Still reproduces. Redalert2fan (talk) 10:10, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
Gradual half-conversion of reference from conference version to Frankenstein half-conference half-journal version
[edit]- Status
- new bug
- Reported by
- —David Eppstein (talk) 18:14, 30 January 2026 (UTC)
- What happens
- In 2020 Citation bot added a journal-version doi to a reference to a conference paper Special:Diff/954417644. Now today it is taking that incorrect doi as license to add more journal-version metadata to the reference (Special:Diff/1335696299) despite the contribution= and title= and year= still being the conference version and the journal= from the journal version still not being included.
- What should happen
- The bot should notice the contribution= and title= mismatch and leave cleaning up its past mess to humans. The actual preferred outcome in this particular case would be to cite the journal version (and to remove the bogus arxiv bibcode) but Citation bot is not smart enough to distinguish this from cases where the conference version is intended. Also User:Abductive should have noticed the bad edit credited to them and not made it, again.
- We can't proceed until
- Feedback from maintainers
- Not that the edits are individually noticeable as bad, but the whole point of the exercise here is to catch the bot's mistakes—and fix them to make a better bot. Humans should not have to clean up the bot's mess, nor a human's mess if the bot can do it. Abductive (reasoning) 21:13, 30 January 2026 (UTC)
- You trigger the bot, you're responsible to check its edits. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:18, 1 February 2026 (UTC)
- Assessment 24 September 2026: Still reproduces. Redalert2fan (talk) 10:45, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
- You trigger the bot, you're responsible to check its edits. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:18, 1 February 2026 (UTC)
Removes mathematics formatting from reference title
[edit]- Status
- new bug
- Reported by
- —David Eppstein (talk) 21:37, 31 January 2026 (UTC)
- What happens
- In Special:Diff/1335903462 it changed a title from "
The length of an <math>s</math>-increasing sequence of <math>r</math>-tuples
" (with LaTeX-mathematics formatting) to "The length of an ''s'' -increasing sequence of ''r'' -tuples
" (with bare-html italics for the mathematics, not even {{math}}). - What should happen
- Not that. In this case the result is merely bad and ugly formatting, but for some other titles the use of LaTeX mathematics in the title is an absolute necessity; they cannot be formatted correctly in any other way. For example: Benjamin, Arthur T.; Orrison, M. E. (2002), "Two quick combinatorial proofs of " (PDF), College Mathematics Journal, 33 (5): 406–408, doi:10.2307/1559017, JSTOR 1559017
- We can't proceed until
- Feedback from maintainers
- There is code for handling "normal" math which may change current titles. There is special code that actually enforces correct "LaTeX" formatting when adding new titles, I added that some time ago. That new code is explicitly not allowed to edit current LaTeX formatted math even if the current form is wrong, it will throw a warning to the user to check the formatting even though it can succesfully fix it. Running this citation by itself does not give any math related warnings.
- The issue here is that the bot fetches data (using the crossref API) which gives the title as "
The length of an ''s'' -increasing sequence of ''r'' -tuples
" and overwrites the current title - you can verify it if you empty the title parameter and run the bot, it adds the incorrect version. So the bot does not see that the title is similair enough for it to not change it, it thinks the original title and the one it is trying to add are completely different and picks the new one. So there was actualy no math "handling" done on this citation. The title recognition logic needs to be updated.- If the bot thinks the current title and the fetched title are completely different, there is a high likelihood of one or both being problematic in a way that the bot cannot resolve. It should refuse to edit and raise an alert for human attention. It should certainly not guess that it is right and whoever put that title there in the first place was somehow mistaken in doing so. This is especially true for titles containing mathematics formatting for which it is very likely that the online metadata formats the mathematics badly and that the Wikipedia editor who added the citation has corrected the formatting already. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:08, 31 January 2026 (UTC)
- I actually think for this instance it does not need to give a warning, it should just not have made the edit at all. Correction for this bug is to not overwrite titles using
<math>. - And to re-iterate this is not a function of handling of math formatting, the bot can recognise actually poorly formatted mathml mathematics and convert it to correct LaTeX. It does this when adding new titles (no title present), and it warns users for existing poor formatting that should be converted. Titles received from API using incorrect mathml will be recognised so if a user already corrected them to LaTex they will already not be overwritten. Redalert2fan (talk) 22:46, 31 January 2026 (UTC)
- Further investigation: diff When the citation already contains the journal it keeps the title. Redalert2fan (talk) 23:14, 31 January 2026 (UTC)
- Assessment 24 September 2026: Still reproduces. Redalert2fan (talk) 10:52, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
- Update: reproduced and root-caused. The
<math>title is discarded during arXiv expansion (the existing title is moved aside so publisher metadata can flow in, and the math version is only restored if no replacement title arrives — but CrossRef always supplies one). The replacement's HTML italics then convert to'', with a stray space added by a later tidy stage Redalert2fan (talk) 15:35, 11 October 2026 (UTC)
- Update: reproduced and root-caused. The
- Assessment 24 September 2026: Still reproduces. Redalert2fan (talk) 10:52, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
- Further investigation: diff When the citation already contains the journal it keeps the title. Redalert2fan (talk) 23:14, 31 January 2026 (UTC)
- I actually think for this instance it does not need to give a warning, it should just not have made the edit at all. Correction for this bug is to not overwrite titles using
- If the bot thinks the current title and the fetched title are completely different, there is a high likelihood of one or both being problematic in a way that the bot cannot resolve. It should refuse to edit and raise an alert for human attention. It should certainly not guess that it is right and whoever put that title there in the first place was somehow mistaken in doing so. This is especially true for titles containing mathematics formatting for which it is very likely that the online metadata formats the mathematics badly and that the Wikipedia editor who added the citation has corrected the formatting already. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:08, 31 January 2026 (UTC)
bot creates malformed |vauthors= parameter
[edit]- Status
- new bug
- Reported by
- Trappist the monk (talk) 14:24, 6 April 2026 (UTC)
- What happens
- bot duplicated journal name in
|vauthors=. Apparently The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health names itself as author for editorials. I'm not sure that it is necessary to name the journal as author in citations when we already name the journal in the required|journal=parameter. If it is deemed to be necessary and if the bot is going to populate|vauthors=with the journal name, the rules for|vauthors=must be obeyed. If it must be, then for this example, the author-name must be written:|vauthor=((The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health))so that cs1|2 does not emit a Vancouver style error message. - Relevant diffs/links
- diff
- We can't proceed until
- Feedback from maintainers
- Assessment 24 September 2026: Still reproduces. Redalert2fan (talk) 11:08, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
Spurious issue for Annual Reviews...
[edit]Possibly related to the recent issues fix. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 04:47, 30 April 2026 (UTC)
- I don't think its related to that, since that fix only strips stuff or moves when it matches the exact combination of the text + year. --Redalert2fan (talk) 08:27, 30 April 2026 (UTC)
- Assessment 24 September 2026: Still reproduces. Pubmed gives: Annu Rev Cell Dev Biol. 2024 Oct;40(1):143-168. Further investigation needed unless correct.Redalert2fan (talk) 11:17, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
Caps: de La Plata
[edit]Caps: И → и
[edit]Unless it's the last character. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 11:32, 27 June 2026 (UTC)
Caps: у
[edit]Unless it's the last character. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 12:00, 11 July 2026 (UTC)
Bad handling of duplicated chapter/title title
[edit]Assessment 24 September 2026: Still reproduces. Redalert2fan (talk) 11:22, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
Incorrectly changes page P#:x–P#:y into x–A#Y
[edit]See Special:Diff/1368649553. Probably the right thing to do is move the article number entirely out of the pages into its own parameter, but this change is a disimprovement. Probably it is happening because the article-number was formatted as P10, short for paper # 10. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:06, 10 August 2026 (UTC)
- Another: Special:Diff/1368661324. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:15, 10 August 2026 (UTC)
- Assessment 24 September 2026: Still reproduces. Redalert2fan (talk) 11:24, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
Garbles mathematics formula in title
[edit]Special:Diff/1368650401. Don't do that. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:08, 10 August 2026 (UTC)
- Assessment 24 September 2026: Still reproduces. If journal is already present title does not get garbled. Further investigation needed. Redalert2fan (talk) 11:29, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
Same journal and series?
[edit]In the first change here, the bot adds the same name as the "journal" parameter that is already included in "series". Memoirs is a kind of funny edge-case that could be either classified as a book series or as a journal, but the bot should not be overriding human editors in that preference and it definitely shouldn't be doing this. --JBL (talk) 00:33, 11 August 2026 (UTC)
- This totally changes the meaning of the series= parameter. For a book citation (what it was), it is the name of the series in which the book was published. For a journal citation (what the bot converted this into), it is instead usually a number, the number of a series of journal volumes often given when the journal restarts its volume numbering. The documentation states "For journal series, series= should be limited to Original/New Series, First/Second/Third/... Series or similar."
- The landing page for the doi calls it a book in a series, and it has an isbn as a book (not listed in the current citation; ISBN 978-0-8218-4490-8) but MathSciNet provides metadata describing it as an article in a journal (with an isbn). I agree that which to call it is an editorial choice that the bot should not usurp, especially not in a way that makes an erroneous use of the series parameter. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:47, 11 August 2026 (UTC)
- This is solved by using the full name (Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society), rather than the abbreviated/ambiguous name (Memoirs of the AMS) btw. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 05:41, 11 August 2026 (UTC)
- In what way do those two versions of the same name refer to two different things? Is there some other AMS than the American Mathematical Society that also has a Memoirs of the...? —David Eppstein (talk) 20:45, 17 August 2026 (UTC)
- It's not an issue of human ambiguity, in that there are others AMS's with Memoirs. It's an issue of accuracy, the title literally being Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society. And if you use the correct title, you don't run into the issue. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:46, 17 August 2026 (UTC)
- In what way do those two versions of the same name refer to two different things? Is there some other AMS than the American Mathematical Society that also has a Memoirs of the...? —David Eppstein (talk) 20:45, 17 August 2026 (UTC)
Cleanup article=#####
[edit]Replace with article-number if not already present. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:43, 17 September 2026 (UTC)
- The page where the diffs are from is deleted, do you have some other examples? Redalert2fan (talk) 14:07, 26 September 2026 (UTC)
- Ryan, Joseph F.; Mazza, Maureen E.; Pang, Kevin; Matus, David Q.; Baxevanis, Andreas D.; Martindale, Mark Q.; Finnerty, John R. (2007). "Pre-Bilaterian Origins of the Hox Cluster and the Hox Code: Evidence from the Sea Anemone, Nematostella vectensis". PLOS ONE. 2 (1). Bibcode:2007PLoSO...2..153R. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000153. PMC 1779807. PMID 17252055.
{{cite journal}}:|article=ignored (help)
and
- Ryan, Joseph F.; Mazza, Maureen E.; Pang, Kevin; Matus, David Q.; Baxevanis, Andreas D.; Martindale, Mark Q.; Finnerty, John R. (2007). "Pre-Bilaterian Origins of the Hox Cluster and the Hox Code: Evidence from the Sea Anemone, Nematostella vectensis". PLOS ONE. 2 (1) e153. Bibcode:2007PLoSO...2..153R. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000153. PMC 1779807. PMID 17252055.
{{cite journal}}:|article=ignored (help)
Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:37, 26 September 2026 (UTC)
- Which should be cleaned like this. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:39, 26 September 2026 (UTC)
- Thanks, that should be not too difficult to implement. Redalert2fan (talk) 14:44, 26 September 2026 (UTC)
10.1146 is free from 2023+
[edit]Per User talk:MaryMO (AR)#Annual Reviews
Much like you already tag 10.1155 as free from 2007+. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 16:19, 1 October 2026 (UTC)
- I actually changed that code not too long ago so we can be more specific if needed. I will look in to the officially-vetted answer. Redalert2fan (talk) 19:15, 1 October 2026 (UTC)
- Needs improved code over the already new code, so will need more work. Redalert2fan (talk) 21:27, 6 October 2026 (UTC)
- Tagging free since year x is easy to implement, the only thing is that a journal should meets its institutional subscription revenue threshold for a given year to become "free" according the reply. That has been true between 2023-2026, but how will we guard against a situation that lets say next year they don't make the threshold. Technically some titles could make it and some not.
- I can either leave it open ended, with a risk that should the treshold not be met in the next year we start tagging things as free that are not free. Or I limit it to 2026 for now, and someone needs to update the year every year in the code to advance the tagging, possibly title specifc.
- And I've asked for some clarification on that 9 year rolling window to be sure. Redalert2fan (talk) 15:03, 15 October 2026 (UTC)
- @Headbomb So I can probably tag the "2020 with five titles: Cancer Biology, Environment and Resources, Nuclear and Particle Science, Political Science, and Public Health. Three more joined in 2021: Virology, Genomics and Human Genetics, and Biomedical Engineering." starting from those years + as requested all of them from 2023 and after.
- The ones from the rolling window I'm going to have to leave out unless they fall under the above.
- Just looking for a reply on my previous message as well. Redalert2fan (talk) 18:25, 15 October 2026 (UTC)
- "but how will we guard against a situation that lets say next year they don't make the threshold"
- By keeping up with the Joneses. You can code defensively, and restrict to 2023-2026, or "openly" and code for 2023+. The difference is if things change in 2027, you don't need to do anything, while if things don't change in 2027 (fairly likely IMO), you'll need to update the bot.
- Doesn't really make a difference to me either way honestly. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:17, 15 October 2026 (UTC)
- Needs improved code over the already new code, so will need more work. Redalert2fan (talk) 21:27, 6 October 2026 (UTC)
Four new CS1 errors in a single diff
[edit]Special:Diff/1378823420 introduced four CS1 periodical-ignored errors. I'm not disputing the change of citation type but if a bot edit would create new error tags then the bot should abort the edit and let a human clean it up. It's an easy sanity check to make that I've been demanding for years. Why hasn't it happened? —David Eppstein (talk) 06:53, 9 October 2026 (UTC)
- In principle that sounds straightforward, but in practice it isn't. I mean if it was, obviously it would have been implemented at the earliest opportunity. I'm sorry to say but repeating the request does also not necessarily accelerate its implementation. Especially for this project, since development time is extremely limited.
- But since a justification has been requested: Citation bot doesn't have a way to determine whether an edit will introduce (or resolve) CS1 maintenance categories before saving. Determining whether an edit will introduce or remove CS1 maintenance errors is not a simple pre-edit check. Those errors are generated by MediaWiki and the CS1 modules after the page is re-parsed. It would require reproducing or querying the post-edit parser output for every proposed edit.
- So while such a generic "abort if new CS1 errors would be introduced" sanity check may be possible in principle, it is definitely not a simple sanity check that can just be added. A simplification; the bot does not "see" like a human does.
- Anyone willing to actually dedicate their free time to develop this bot is more than welcome to propose an implementation via the bot's GitHub repository. The maintainer can then review the proposed implementation in the usual way. Redalert2fan (talk) 21:39, 9 October 2026 (UTC)
- It doesn't seem at all unreasonable to have the bot check to see if changing a template type to the one it prefers will cause existing parameters to become unsupported by the new template type.Changing {{cite journal}} to {{cite book}} in these instances where the
|journal=parameter is present: this breaks the citations and is essentially cosmetic. It's not an improvement and the bot shouldn't do this. ~2026-56096-41 (talk) 16:19, 20 October 2026 (UTC)
- It doesn't seem at all unreasonable to have the bot check to see if changing a template type to the one it prefers will cause existing parameters to become unsupported by the new template type.Changing {{cite journal}} to {{cite book}} in these instances where the
- " if a bot edit would create new error tags then the bot should abort the edit and let a human clean it up."
- That's poor reason to not make an edit. The bot is flagging an issue that was previously unflagged. That is a good thing.
- The issue here is that this is an instance where running the bot again fixes those errors , and a manual TNT is required for another one . I believe the bot should be able to get to that last state in one go, rather than three, without any human intervention. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:10, 14 October 2026 (UTC)
Bot possibly unavailable due to security risks
[edit]Hello all,
Citation bot might experience partial or full outage(s) due to critical security vulnerabilities in PHP, the code the bot is written in and many wikimedia processes also use. This until a patch is deployed. Redalert2fan (talk) 08:56, 21 October 2026 (UTC)