User talk:Dalba

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1

Date issue

Hi Dalba I wrote about this before... Australian articles (and possibly New Zealand and anywhere where the sun rises earlier than a certain point?) seem to pick up the date a day earlier than the article is dated. I have also noticed recently that when I'm editing in the morning here downunder, the access-date comes up as the earlier date too. Examples on Desperate Measures (2013 Australian TV series). Editing this morning (9 Feb here), it was generating access-date as 8 Feb. It has now clocked over to the 9th. Not terribly serious but thought I may as well report it. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 00:11, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Hi, Laterthanyouthink. Citer uses Toolforge's server time-zone for access dates which is set to UTC+0. It is possible to change this for each user and adjust according to their computer timezone, but computer clocks are sometimes wrong too for various reasons. I don't think a UTC+0 date is wrong here and as far as I know it is not against Wikipedia's manual of style. Also hiding the user's computer timezone could be considered a feature from a privacy point of view. All of that being said I might consider adjusting the access-dates for user's local time if more users request for it. Thanks for letting me know. Dalba 13:41, 10 February 2023 (UTC)

Ah, I see. Thanks for the explanation. I'll leave it up to you to do as you think best, or leave as is. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 06:15, 11 February 2023 (UTC)

JSTOR

This tool is so brilliant it can convert this: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20557185 into this:

• Bitel, Lisa (1987). "Sex, Sin, and Celibacy in Early Christian Ireland". Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium (Department of Celtic Languages & Literatures, Harvard University) 7: 65–95. ISSN 1545-0155. JSTOR 20557185. Retrieved 2023-03-15. 

It's annoying that JSTOR doesn't provide the DOI, but so be it.

Thank you for your efforts. 76.14.122.5 04:53, 15 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the heartwarming feedback! :) Dalba 06:49, 16 March 2023 (UTC)

publication-place=[Place of publication not identified]

Would it be possible to automatically remove "publication-place=[Place of publication not identified]" from the results? That parameter value pops up fairly often. Here's an example:

Wilde, Geoff; Braham, Michael (1995). Sandgrounders : the complete league history of Southport Football Club. [Place of publication not identified]: Carnegie. ISBN 1-874181-14-4. OCLC 650188009.  76.14.122.5 03:21, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

Done Dalba 16:09, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! 76.14.122.5 21:32, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

Citer stopped working

Hi Dalba, today I can't your superb CITER to work it gives the message "502 Bad Gateway", some solution? Mcapdevila (talk) 14:40, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Hi Mcapdevila! Should be fixed now. Thanks for letting me know. Dalba 15:12, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Yes working fine now, thanks a lot, in my name an others from ca.wiki, for the hundreds of references achieved 93.176.134.117 21:35, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Same error for ISBNs only

I'm not able to use citer now for ISBNs. Are others having the same problem? Is this related to citoid temporarily not dropping ISBN support? –SJ talk  17:49, 16 May 2023 (UTC)

Hi SJ, yes, it was related to citoid issue. I have now incorporated a fix to use Google books as an alternative source for ISBNs. It might not be as comprehensive as Citoid/worldcat, but is better than nothing. Also, it might be subject to rate limits of Google APIs and might start to fail if users send too many consecutive requests... It is working for now. Let me know if you see any issues. Dalba 04:48, 17 May 2023 (UTC)

Suggestion for improvement

Awesome citer! I love it. I have been using it on the Destruction of the Kakhovka Dam article. The only glitch I’ve noticed is that when I cite a source such as this:

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-13-2023

it comes back with a ref that results in a “DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN” error. I then just substitute the correct address in "url=" and the correct title: RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 13, 2023.

Suggestion for improvement: you add the year to the end of the ref name but I’ve found that this results in duplicate ref names when the same person authors more than one article in that year. I’ve begun to replace the year with the date of the article, so that

<ref name="Melkozerova 2023"> becomes <ref name="Melkozerova 060923">

If you could do this when creating the ref that would eliminate this issue. Again, I just love the citer. It saves me so much work! Swood100 (talk) 21:33, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you!

The reason for the wrong URL in https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-13-2023 was the following open graph meta tag in the source of the webpage:

<meta property="og:url" content="http://dev-isw.bivings.com/" />

Citer uses this because sometimes the given URL contains some private information. "og:url" is usually safer with regard to privacy.

In this case, og:url is obviously wrong. I've updated citer to not use it when it points to a domain name.

It's hard to come up with a meaningful ref name. Adding full date works in some cases, but for others lacking a date or having the same date it may fail. For now, I changed the name generation mechanism to a semi-random string. This is against the recommendation of en:WP:REFNAME which states that "Names should have semantic value". I may revert this change if I get negative feedback from users. Dalba 15:46, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

I just noticed one other item. When using the CITER for this page:

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/kakhovka-dam-disaster-responsibility-and-consequences

it came back with a reference containing "date=2023-06-07" whereas the page itself lists a date of "June 14, 2023" and Google in its search results says "6 hours ago". Best regards. Swood100 (talk) 22:14, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

This one is difficult to fix. The page does not provide any meta tags describing its date, so citer fallbacks to to finding the first found date in source code which belongs to an image... I'll look deeper into it if there are more reports like this.Dalba 15:46, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

I have come across a number of foreign websites working on this Ukraine article. When putting this one through the CITER:

https://zn.ua/ukr/war/ochilnik-khersonskoji-ova-serednij-riven-pidtoplennja-na-ranok-5-6-metra-evakujovano-majzhe-2-tisjachi-ljudej-.html

it produced a ref that generated some errors:  : Text "Mirror Weekly" ignored (help); Text "Дзеркало тижня" ignored (help) When I just removed those two paramaters from the ref everything was fine. Swood100 (talk) 23:03, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

Fixed The website title contains one or more | characters which is also a parameter delimiter in wiki templates... Citer will now ignore everything after the first pipe character. Dalba 15:46, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Terrific! Works like a charm! If people complain that "Names should have semantic value", you might just use the ref name that you originally generated and append the semi-random string to that. Thanks again for all your hard work. Much appreciated!! Swood100 (talk) 16:03, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

I second this comment. It would be good to have the ref names use both the previous author/date combination as well as the random string, e.g.

<ref name="Kausch 2023 i8iia">{{cite web | last=Kausch | first=Katie | title=El Toro reopening at Six Flags Great Adventure after 10-month closure | website=nj | date=June 16, 2023 | url=https://www.nj.com/ocean/2023/06/el-toro-reopening-at-six-flags-great-adventure-after-10-month-closure.html | access-date=June 17, 2023 | page=}}

. This tool has been very useful to me over the years; thanks for keeping it running all this time. Epicgenius (talk) 23:29, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

Done Dalba 20:26, 18 June 2023 (UTC)

Outstanding!!! Many thanks! Swood100 (talk) 20:34, 18 June 2023 (UTC)

Hi again. I found another oddball website:

https://minagro.gov.ua/news/znishchennya-rosiyanami-kahovskoyi-ges-zavdalo-znachnih-zbitkiv-silskomu-gospodarstvu-ukrayini

This produces a <ref> that includes “language=ua”, which produces:

Script warning: One or more   templates have maintenance messages; messages may be hidden (help).

The problem is that it should be “language=uk” — “ua” is not one of the allowed codes on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Citation_Style_documentation/language/doc

“ua” does show up as the right code for Ukraine here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes

Can’t explain it. No hurry. This is the only time I’ve come across this. Thanks again! Swood100 (talk) 23:29, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Looking at the source for that page it has lang="ua" on the first line, so maybe they just used an old-fashioned set of codes. Swood100 (talk) 23:38, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

In my original message I misstated the allowed codes. Apparently it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes that is expected but this page uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes Swood100 (talk) 15:56, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for investigating the issue. Fixed Dalba 03:58, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

Awesome tool! Swood100 (talk) 20:40, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Hello again! Just think of me as your tester, reporting the unexpected.

• This one produces a ref generating: Script warning: One or more   templates have errors; messages may be hidden (help).

https://babel.ua/en/news/94854-russia-submitted-a-statement-against-ukraine-to-the-international-criminal-court-kyiv-is-accused-of-destroying-the-kakhovka-hpp

The resulting ref has some unlabeled parameters:

| website=Бабель | Розповідаємо про політику, культуру і суспільство в Україні. Останні новини детально і неупереджено | date=2023-06-08 |

• Twitter refs always generate this error:  : Missing or empty |title= (help)

Maybe everything after “twitter.com/” and before the next “/” should become the title, so:

https://twitter.com/general_ben/status/1672243986038226946?cxt=HHwWhIC82fPCgLUuAAAA

would generate: title=general_ben

If that runs into difficulties how about just: title=twitter

At least then it wouldn't generate an error.

• This one produces a url different from the one it was given:

https://vk.com/wall-201841296_3412?lang=en

generated a different url:

{{cite web | title=Wall posts | website=VK | url=https://vk.com/video-201841296_456239220 | language=la | access-date=2023-06-24}}

The url generated is the url of the video. Missing is the screen with some text shown by the original url. Also, both urls say lang=’en’ but the ref produced says language=la, which doesn't generate an error but rather a curious "(in Latin)" in the listing.

Of course, it's no problem for me to just manually fix the resulting refs but I'm reporting them as a conscientious and dutiful tester should. Best regards! Swood100 (talk) 16:01, 24 June 2023 (UTC)

Hi! Thanks for reporting the issues!

• babel.ua: Fixed
• Twitter: Twitter does not provide any metadata or even a title for the URL in the HTML of the document. Getting the actual title of the page requires processing the JavaScript inside the page which Citer does not support. I could implement some module as you suggested just for twitter, but the result is still not satisfying. I don't think it is worth it.
• vk.com: url: The website is misusing open graph meta tags:

  <meta property="og:url" content="https://vk.com/video-201841296_456239220"/>
  

  I could just ignore og:url on all websites, but I think this will worsen the result for many other websites that are using the tag correctly.

• vk.com: language: Citer's bug. Fixed!

Dalba 13:17, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! I don't know how I got along without this! Swood100 (talk) 00:41, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

Great tool. Consider, when identifiers are available, use the identifier for the value of the name attribute in the ref tag. If a PMID is present, that would be the first choice, if a DOI is present that would be the second choice. There may be other identifiers, but I do not know them. The rational is that wiki contributors may use varying citation tools, but if everyone uses a similar naming convention, there is less chance of chaos from a source being cited in multiple ways on a wiki page. Badgettrg (talk) 03:39, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Thank you and thanks for the suggestion! I'm fine with that change, but some users find it less meaningful and against en:WP:REFNAME which states "Names should have semantic value, so that they can be more easily distinguished from each other by human editors who are looking at the wikitext. This means that ref names like "Nguyen 2010" are preferred to names like ":31337".". I may change the algorithm in the future if more users request it, but I'm going to keep it as is for now. Dalba 12:02, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

502 Bad Gateway

• OK, here's an odd one. This is link that takes the user to item #16 on the target page:

https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/600-2023-%D0%BF#n17:~:text=16.%20%D0%A0%D0%BE%D0%B7%D0%BC%D1%96%D1%80%20%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%B0%D1%86%D1%96%D1%97%20%D0%B7%D0%B0%20%D0%B7%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%89%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B9%20%D0%BE%D0%B1%E2%80%99%D1%94%D0%BA%D1%82%20%D0%BD%D0%B5%D1%80%D1%83%D1%85%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE%20%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BD%D0%B0%20%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B7%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%85%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%83%D1%94%D1%82%D1%8C%D1%81%D1%8F%20%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BC%D1%96%D1%81%D1%96%D1%94%D1%8E%20%D0%B7%D0%B0%20%D1%84%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BC%D1%83%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%8E%3A

When I enter that into the citer I get:

502 Bad Gateway

However, when taken to #16 on the target page, the address bar shows:

https://zakon.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/600-2023-%D0%BF#n17

If that is entered into the citer then it produces a normal <ref> to that page which, however, does not take the user to #16. At a minimum, I would guess that you would want to generate and display an error message containing more information than "502 Bad Gateway." Best regards. Swood100 (talk) 20:31, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

It was indeed an odd one. Fixed Dalba 07:46, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

That string is still generating the "502 Bad Gateway" error on my system. Swood100 (talk) 14:46, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

Hopefully it is fixed this time. Several fundamental changes have been made under the hood. Let me know if you see any issues. Dalba 23:15, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

Unclosed ref tag

Hello again. I tried to use Citer just now, but it seems like when I use it, the ref tag doesn't seem to actually be closed. For example, for this url, I get the following:

<ref name="Davidson 2021 j149">{{cite web | last=Davidson | first=Justin | title=Riverside Park Is Falling Apart | website=Curbed | date=May 12, 2021 | url=https://www.curbed.com/2021/05/nycs-riverside-park-is-falling-apart.html | access-date=July 21, 2023}}<ref>

I think the last <ref> should actually be a </ref>. Thanks again for your hard work. Epicgenius (talk) 00:06, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

Hi! Thank you! Fixed Dalba 00:46, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

That was fast, thanks! Epicgenius (talk) 01:05, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

Intentional change?

Hi again. I have noticed a few changes recently, one of which is expanding the ref name, but also leaving the url behind in the input field after creating the citation. Was this intentional? I find it a bit of a nuisance having to clear it each time I want to create another one. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 01:49, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Hi! I've made a change that brings back the old behavior by clearing the input field after each submit. Let me know if you notice any other/related issues. Dalba 08:04, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! :-) Laterthanyouthink (talk) 09:20, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Sohu

Hello, the Sohu website（https://www.sohu.com/） consistently lacks https:// every time. Could it be fixed, please? Since the Sohu website is one of the larger platforms in China, it's frequently used when composing articles.--日期20220626 (talk) 06:22, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Sohu is not using "og:url" meta tag properly. I've configured citer to ignore its value when it lacks a URL scheme. ( Fixed) Dalba 11:45, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

IUCN pages

I use IUCN pages for referencing the conservation status of plants. If I enter a specific page like this it references to https://www.iucnredlist.org/en , which is the generic front page that is not directly useful for someone cross referencing sources. --Cs california (talk) 07:18, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting the issue. Fixed Dalba 04:44, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

Highlighting words on the target page

Hi again. If I enter this address to the citer:

https://books.google.com/books?id=GVIEAAAAMBAJ&dq=oppenheimer+%22if+the+radiance+of+a+thousand+suns+were+to+%22&pg=PA133

it results in a citation without the highlighting instructions:

https://books.google.com/books?id=GVIEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA133

Of course, I can add it back in, but would there be any way of having the citer retain the highlighting? Swood100 (talk) 17:49, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Hi! Actually, retaining the search highlights was the way Citer originally used to work, but then some users asked for the highlights to be removed automatically, arguing that the highlights may be irrelevant/distracting. I can't remember if Google provided the "Clear search" link at the time, but I can see it is there now, so it should be easy for users to remove the highlights themselves. I'm OK with this change, just not sure how other editors will receive it. Dalba 11:07, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

An unknown error occurred

Hi again. The following address:

https://www.isu.org/inside-isu/rules-regulations/isu-statutes-constitution-regulations-technical/29326-constitution-general-regulations-2022/file

results in the message: "An unknown error occurred." Swood100 (talk) 19:03, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

Related to the above is this address:

https://www.isu.org/inside-isu/rules-regulations/isu-statutes-constitution-regulations-technical

In the result, the website= parameter is "-", as is the first part of the ref name. Also, two words in the title are run together. Continuing to love the citer! Swood100 (talk) 19:49, 10 September 2023 (UTC)

In case it helps you find the cause of the problem, I just had the same issue with this address:

https://stillmed.olympics.com/media/Documents/News/2023/03/Participation-for-Individual-Neutral-Athletes-Personnel-with-a-Russian-or-Belarusian-Passport.pdf

Best regards Swood100 (talk) 00:34, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

And also with this address:

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23387965/bills-117hr7776eas-rcp117-70.pdf

Swood100 (talk) 19:28, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Help" Citer has stopped working

Dear Dalba I am using Citer many times per day, it is possible to fix it? maybe it's just the server.. anyway thanks for your work..Gives de msg. "504 Gateway Time-out" Mcapdevila (talk) 09:52, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I have also encountered this situation. 日期20220626 (talk) 10:40, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

I just restarted the web-service, it should be back up. Will investigate later. Thanks for reporting the issue. Dalba 10:53, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Hi, it's working again, thanks.. La-Rierada (talk) 13:58, 12 September 2023 (UTC)

Ça marche de nouveau!, merci!! Mcapdevila (talk) 14:00, 12 September 2023 (UTC)