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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3

Blacklisted newspapers

Is this the page to report problems with Reflinks inappropriately blackisting newspapers? This case removing The Australian looks clearly wrong.

Although the Daily Reporter of Spencer, Iowa is not a national broadsheet, it does not seem to deserve blacklisting either, as in this other case. – Fayenatic L (talk) 13:53, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

The tool didn't remove that link. However, I've change the warning from "Blacklisted title" to "Unusable page title" to prevent further confusion with our other blacklists. — Dispenser 02:53, 23 March 2012 (UTC)
Which link are you saying Reflinks did't remove? Both edit summaries state Filling in x references using Reflinks - removed blacklisted reference source, the diffs include a citation being removed entirely, and the editor who was using it referred us to the tool. – Fayenatic L (talk) 16:51, 23 March 2012 (UTC)
The user noticed the warning using Reflinks, misunderstood it as a message from the spam blacklist, removed the reference, and noted it in their edit summary. This has been addressed by making the warning clearer. — Dispenser 13:27, 24 March 2012 (UTC)
OK, thanks. – Fayenatic L (talk) 17:46, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

This tool doesn't understand Unicode

and so this happens. The Web is international, the content-type header of that page is correctly set, and even if it weren't, you should be assuming UTF-8 by default. If it is unsure of the encoding, the tool should do nothing, rather than spewing mangled UTF-8-interpreted-as-ASCII onto pages. Gurch (talk) 13:48, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Upstream This is a limitation of UnicodeDammit to understand invalid UTF-8 (value="\xc8\xf1\xef\xf0\xe0\xf2\xe8">). The library falls back to a statistical approach to determine the encoding (from Firefox). — Dispenser 16:50, 20 April 2012 (UTC)
Is the title of the page invalid UTF-8? The characters added in the diff -- Во новото цеде вложив многу енергија и љубов -- if I take the encoding of those characters in ASCII and instead interpret it as UTF-8, I get Во новото цеде вложив многу енергија и љубов without any invalid characters. Possibly I have misunderstood how the library handles things, not your fault in any case. Gurch (talk) 23:52, 20 April 2012 (UTC)

Picked up time stamp as 'author'

Not being a reflinks user, I have no idea whether getting the timestamp in the author field in this edit is an issue with the code, or just operator error, but I figured I'd mention it here just in case it's the former. 71.197.246.210 (talk) 23:40, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

Hello, Reflinks is messing up section links for wikilinks on Alaska Airlines. See this diff. Reflinks shouldn't even be doing this, especially considering that the links are not part of a reference. This is the second time this has happened on this page. Is anyone else seeing this happening? —Compdude123 16:48, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

Also noticed this on UPS Airlines, which I fixed in this edit. The links were obviously fine to begin with. Someone please fix Reflinks so it stops doing this. Thanks, Compdude123 16:53, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
I'm not going to say whether or not reflinks should be doing this or not, but it's not actually messing anything up. The links still link to exactly the same section of articles - for example McDonnell Douglas MD-80#MD-82 (DC-9-82) and McDonnell Douglas MD-82 both end up at the same content. The second seems like an improvement, since it is shorter, and easier to fix if the McDonnell Douglas MD-80 article was to be rearranged, as only the redirect would need changing, not all the articles that have the link to McDonnell Douglas MD-80#MD-82 (DC-9-82). Unless I'm mistaken, the same applies to all the other links that reflinks changed. SmartSE (talk) 17:06, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
That's not my point; my point is that Reflinks should not be doing this. In my opinion, links shouldn't go to a redirect page; they should go directly to the article and section. Also I think there is a function in AWB that fixes links that lead to a redirect page, so Reflinks is just making more work for AWB editors. Reflinks should not mess with section links at all. Section links aren't necessarily a bad thing. —Compdude123 22:38, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

Actually I've changed my mind about this Reflinks feature. Disregard the above comment. Now that I understand the logic of this particular reflinks function, I think the problem was with one redirect that it was changing the link to, and so from now on I don't care if reflinks does this anymore. That was why I was ranting about this. So Reflinks can carry on... —Compdude123 22:44, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

Youtube bug

Hi,

  • I've noticed that sometimes, when folk use reflinks to clean up a Youtube ref, it adds "author=Meld je aan of registreer je om een reactie te plaatsen!". Since this is dutch-localised Youtube saying "Sign in or register to post a comment!" it's not a helpful addition to the author field. Obviously, with an automated tool it's inevitable that some editors won't notice the problem. What's the best way to fix this hiccup?
  • Examples: [1] [2] [3] [4]

Have fun... bobrayner (talk) 08:52, 17 July 2012 (UTC)

This issue was also reported on User_talk:Dispenser#Reflinks bug - FYI in April. I just fixed 11 articles that had |author=now to post a comment! I don't see any articles with |author=Meld je aan of registreer je om een reactie te plaatsen! GoingBatty (talk) 22:47, 17 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks. There may not be any now, because I intermittently clean them up (as does User:Arcandam, I think) and I commented here after the most recent cleanup session. Some will reappear, soon enough. Looking for "Registreer" alone would also yield a bunch of Facebook cites with a similarly dubious author string (though I just cleaned up some of those too). If you found "now to post a comment!", maybe it would be worthwhile keeping an eye out for other silly authors...? bobrayner (talk) 10:48, 19 July 2012 (UTC)
Thanks for the heads up, bobrayner. I've cleaned up the remaining articles that contained "Registreer". GoingBatty (talk) 22:41, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

Followup

Perhaps the problem is a little wider than first thought; I just found (and cleaned) about 50 articles which cited sources written by somebody called "Login or register to post comments" and there are more articles with other variations (we seem to cite a few metromix.com pages written by somebody called "Please log in to comment"). Since the automatic populating of this field demonstrates that the source is a website and it's accessible (not a 404), and the author field is slightly irrelevant when citing many websites, I don't think this kind of faulty citing really undermines WP:V; but it's still a visible mistake in an article... bobrayner (talk) 18:18, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Memory error

Reflinks, when run on Colchester Rubber Co., which has lots of bare urls, produced this message "<type 'exceptions.MemoryError'>" immediately after this URL: http://www.archive.org/stream/connecticutmotor1920stat/connecticutmotor1920stat_djvu.txt . I tried twice, same result. Here are the listed tracebacks:

/home/dispenser/public_html/cgi-bin/tracebacks/tmpt36ZZZ.html
/home/dispenser/public_html/cgi-bin/tracebacks/tmpIlX6C1.html

Would you like a screencap of the Python trace? --Lexein (talk) 01:38, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

I had a pleasant IRC chat with Dispenser. The memory issue was caused in this case by a URL pointing to a webpage with a humongous amount of text, which clobbered Python's available memory, running as it was on a server with high memory utilization. There's no easy fix right now, as it's pretty old code. Workaround: manually expand the ref with the troublesome URL, save, then run Reflinks to fixup the rest. --Lexein (talk) 06:28, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Apparent "var authorId" bug?

Somebody brought up an apparent bug related to this script at WP:AN. Could you please check over at this thread? It's about something that happens in edits such as this, where instead of an author parameter a string like author=var authorId = "" &nbsp; gets inserted. Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:32, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Fixed I've added JS-like variable declarations to the recently introduced author blacklist. — Dispenser 03:13, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Problem with names and groups

Hi. I used your non-interactive version of Reflinks and got this result, not exactly what I was expecting.   — Jeff G. ツ (talk) 01:11, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

Problem with urls ending with a dot (.)

Reflink failed at http://polar.geom.uni.wroc.pl/?Historia:Historia_Stacji_Polarnej_IGRR_UWr. even as it worked correctly on other pages from the site. It seems it was ignoring the dot (.) at the end, and thus getting a 404. PS. This may be a MediaWiki error, as I see that the link is broken here, too. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 20:49, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

Watch this page

Hi Dispenser and thanks very much for Reflinks, it's a tool that I find immensely useful and promote at every opportunity. One thing I would ask though is how I can turn the default value for "watch this page" to "off"? It's a minor thing, but not having to uncheck the box each time I deploy the tool on articles that I've randomly stumbled across and need the refs tidied but which I have no real interest in adding to my already extensive watchlist would be nice. Thanks. danno_uk 01:15, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) In the Preferences menu, uncheck the "Add pages I edit to my watchlist (otherwise remove)" box. GoingBatty (talk) 01:21, 16 September 2012 (UTC)
Thanks very much. Chalk one up to "look harder next time". danno_uk 01:47, 16 September 2012 (UTC)

504 Gateway Time-out

is the error message I have been getting for the last few hours. Is this some sort of maintenance glitch? --Lolo Lympian (talk) 15:23, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) It appears to be a problem with the toolserver, not just Dispenser's tools - see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 120#Toolserver Gateway Time-out error. GoingBatty (talk) 15:28, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

I have seen Reflinks strip the two column parameter from articles. An example is here. Why? If there are more than four or so refs two columns is a better layout. -- Alan Liefting (talk - contribs) 19:20, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Awkward error

Look at this edit.

For some reason, it keeps generating invalid dates of 1970-01-01. MadGuy7023 (talk) 21:44, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) When I view the source of the web page, I see (function(){var e="ckns_policy",m="Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT". GoingBatty (talk) 22:59, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

border="1" and tables

Reflinks is removing border="1" from tables. See this diff.

border="1" is actually recommended in HTML 5. It is still added by some versions of the existing editing toolbar on Wikipedia. See this discussion:

In 2008 border="1" was added to the Wikipedia table wikitext created by the table button on the toolbar:

I use the Firefox browser and the Vector skin. At Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing I have "Enable enhanced editing toolbar" checked. This is unchecked: "Enable dialogs for inserting links, tables and more". This is what I get right now when I click the table button: 

{| class="wikitable" border="1"
|-
! header 1
! header 2
! header 3
|-
| row 1, cell 1
| row 1, cell 2
| row 1, cell 3
|-
| row 2, cell 1
| row 2, cell 2
| row 2, cell 3
|}

When I or others paste Wikipedia text or tables in email or blogs it loses everything except inline styling. class=wikitable is external styling, and so it is lost. So the only thing that remains in tables is border=1 (quotes around "1" are optional). It is inline styling, and all it does is add a primitive border around all table cells. Without borders (even primitive ones) many tables are incomprehensible or very difficult to decipher.

Good short summaries that explain HTML 5 and border=1 in tables:

Date field

It appears that Reflinks is not populating the date= field on the citation template. This has been happening for a couple of days. - X201 (talk) 08:45, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Please remove replacement <br clear="all"> by Template:- in German WP

Template:- does not exist in the German Wikipedia, so the replacement of <br clear="all"> is counterproductive. However, DE:WP does use de:Vorlage:Absatz, what is the equivalent to Template:Clear. --Matthiasb (talk) 10:19, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Wow!! Bad page title (spam)

Wow!!! See this diff. I looked at the HTML for http://www.thyateira.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=102&Itemid=119 and didn't see any reason this ought to have happened. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 22:27, 3 November 2012 (UTC)

I have just seen an article with an external link in the format:

* http://www.example.com

which should, of course, be:

* [http://www.example.com Example page title]

Presumably, REFLINKS already includes the necessary code to fetch the page title, so could it fix such instances, as well as URLs in references?

As a bonus, it could fix some special cases, such as:

* http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099136/

to:

* {{IMDb title|0099136}}

For a number of external inks templates. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:40, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

Note that it should be {{IMDb title|0099136}} per the template documentation, and would need another parameter when the Wikipedia article title does not match the film title. GoingBatty (talk) 18:00, 12 January 2013 (UTC)
Fixed, thank you. Editors using Reflinks can make changes before saving, adding titles as necessary.. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:53, 12 January 2013 (UTC)

Fixes to Wikipedia "cite web" references

Here's an interesting result from a Reflinks run: [5]. Interesting because it dutifully fixed two references which were using Wikipedia as the source. Can Reflinks be modified so that an alert be given to the user about these improper links? Depending upon the number of offending citations out there, this would greatly enhance the value of the tool.--S. Rich (talk) 20:35, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Please be careful with authors

See User talk:Lotje/Archives/2013/January#Please be careful with authors. Where does the responsibility lie when a {{cite web}} is filled in with duff data? --Redrose64 (talk) 12:30, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

I don't use reflinks myself... does it have some sort of sanity check, or even a preview feature, by which such errors may be trapped before they end up in the article? --Redrose64 (talk) 14:42, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
It's obligatory, you can't save the changes directly. But unfortunately that doesn't stop people from saving some of the crap that gets inserted automatically. Cleaning up can be fastidious, although I'm trying to automate it to some degree, but it's not easy. -- Ohconfucius ping / poke 16:12, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

German translation

Hi Dispenser. Could you please correct the German translation:

<!-- Automatisch generierter titel -->

needs to be

<!-- Automatisch generierter Titel -->

In addition I would suggest to change the edit summary from

Bot: Korrektes Referenzformat (siehe en:User:DumZiBoT/refLinks)

to something like

tools:~dispenser/view/Reflinks: nackte Links automatisch mit Titel versehen

Thanks in advance. --Leyo 09:15, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

The documentation for {{dead link}} state that is should be placed just before the </ref>. However, when clicking on the {{dead link}} tag in Reflinks, Reflinks adds it after the </ref>. Could you please fix this functionality? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 02:26, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

when it automatically adds ref columns it adds the syntax |colwidth=30em but it only needs to add |30em thanks Tom B (talk) 14:45, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia as a citation

There is universal agreement that Wikipedia is not a suitable source to be cited for our articles. If possible Reflinks should be programmed to first strip out such references before populating the citations. It would save processing time as well as help to remove the bad examples set by instances like here. Thanks, -- Ohconfucius ping / poke 08:31, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

If this change to Reflinks is made:
  • the tool might replace a single citation to WP with {{Citation needed}}. Obviously, if there are multiple adjacent citations, this isn't needed.
  • in some (enough? many?) of these cases, the citation to WP could be replaced by a Wikilink. I'll leave it to you to decide what to do. Lentower (talk) 20:49, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

Please check your links. If Reflinks wants to expand a citation to something like the one below, use your noggin and overrule it with a {{deadlink}} tag or whatever. There's a reason this isn't done by a bot.

  • "Cash Advance | Debt Consolidation | Insurance | Free Credit Report at". Itfeurope2012.com. 2012-08-09. Retrieved 2012-09-09.

And especially don't add a bogus accessdate. Make sure the version you accessed on that date is valid. A url without an accessdate is better than one with a wrong accessdate. Kilopi (talk) 06:10, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

404?

In the past few days I cannot use reflinks, each time I try I get "404: The requested URL /~dispenser/view/Reflinks was not found on this server." --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:02, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

I am having the same problem --Racklever (talk) 05:26, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
I believe it was an issue with the toolserver, which now seems to be resolved. Please try again. GoingBatty (talk) 03:01, 18 April 2013 (UTC)
Ok, now this is strange, a few days later I'm now experiencing the same behavior, including server 500 errors. Hasteur (talk) 19:14, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
And of course, as soon as I start complaining, the behavior stops. Stranger and stranger. Hasteur (talk) 19:29, 29 April 2013 (UTC)

New bot to remove incorrect authors

As mentioned in the #Youtube bug section above, sometimes Reflinks suggests an incorrect |author=, and sometimes editors don't fix it before saving the change. I've gotten bot approval to remove these incorrect author values, such as "Log in om een reactie te plaatsen". As you see incorrect values in the author parameter, please post them here, and I'll be happy to remove them. Hopefully, Dispenser will also update the tool to prevent these incorrect values from being suggested in the first place. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 00:33, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Issues with Subscription required template

Although the instructions at Template:Subscription required indicate that {{subscription required}} should appear before </ref>, Reflinks adds it after </ref>. Also, Reflinks adds the template with a |date= parameter, even though there's nothing in the template code or documentation about supporting a date. Could you please update Reflinks? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 13:13, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Some problems about the tools

1. In the article zh:少女&坦克, when I clieck the "Reflink" button, The tool changed to try to fix ref links in zh:少女 instead. And 2. for a reference <ref>http://www.ching-win.com.tw/?sinfo=detail&b_unit=6428&template=comic</ref>, It faced a problem of character encoding mismatch, erroneously getting the title as ĺ°‘ĺĽłčˆ‡ćˆ°čťŠ(01)-é?’文眲衯書店 instead of original 少女與戰車(01)-青文網路書店 it should be. C933103 (talk) 16:50, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

Why does reflinks change [[Page#Section|Pipe]] to [[Redirect to Page#Section|Pipe]]? For example, here. Such an edit increases future workload if the redirect is a redirect with possibilities and eventually becomes an article, and adds unnecessary redirecting leading to possibly misleading links to a reader. — Reatlas (talk) 12:04, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

I would have thought the opposite: if somebody converts Atmosphere of Neptune into a full article, we don't then need to go around finding links to Neptune#Atmosphere and fixing those. Therefore, the future workload will be decreased. --Redrose64 (talk) 12:44, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
Ok, that isn't really a good demonstration of the issue. But in the specific article in which this issue was raised, [[Machinima.com#Inside Gaming|Inside Gaming Awards]] was auto-changed to [[Adam Kovic|Inside Gaming Awards]]. Here, if Adam Kovic becomes an article, the link needs to be updated back to Machinima.com#Inside Gaming, which is the appropriate link. — Reatlas (talk) 13:03, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

Google.com as book publisher?

I would have preferred that this question be posed by someone who has actually used Reflinks, but here goes. Reflinks, it seems, does not recognize as referring to books Wikipedia citations that clearly indicate a book's publisher, year of publication and ISBN. It treats the citations as generic web links, and proceeds to give Google.com as publisher of the books. I raised this question at User talk:M.O.X, where you can find examples, but M.O.X. has made no alteration to the results of his use of Reflinks, and has only told me to ask you about the fault. Esoglou (talk) 15:04, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

  • It's much easier to just click on the reflinks button, sit back, and then press 'save', and leave the work to others. Google Books is not supposed to be included in the "|publisher=" field, yet Reflink automatically dumps it there. It can be fastidious work to look up the publisher and replace GB, like this. Fortunately, it's not one of those "half-jobs" that has to be undone. Perhaps better if Reflinks strips Google Books from the publisher before it displays the output of the metadata extraction. -- Ohc ¡digame!¿que pasa? 10:24, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Reflinks breaks links to sections with &nbsp; in their title. For example, for a section titled with text like ==Test&nbsp;1.0==, the correct link is [[Page#Test.C2.A01.0|Test 1.0]]. However, for that link Reflinks changes [[Page#Test.C2.A01.0|Test 1.0]] to [[Page#Test 1.0|Test 1.0]], which fails to work correctly. For example, this Reflinks edit changes OpenGL ES 3.0 to OpenGL ES 3.0. The original works, the replacement does not (at least in the Safari 6 browser). —RP88 (talk) 02:40, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

The replacement doesn't work in Firefox 23 either. But the question is: why is it necessary to have non-breaking spaces in section headings? Especially when these headings are so short that wrapping could only occur on the narrowest of screens. --Redrose64 (talk) 13:43, 14 September 2013 (UTC)

Suggestion

Can the tool have a feature added to remove {{Cleanup-bare URLs}} and redirects as well as {{Bare-inline}} after the tool corrects the links? Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 01:44, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

See the #Bare URLs template section above. GoingBatty (talk) 15:00, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

Issue with language parameter

When I made this edit, Reflinks added |language={{es icon}} to some of the references, and I copied it to others. Unfortunately, this displays as "(in (in Spanish))". Per the {{cite web}} documentation, I changed all of these to |language=Spanish to eliminate the duplicate parentheses. Could you please change Reflinks so it does not use the icon templates in the future? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 18:30, 3 January 2012 (UTC)

@Dispenser: Although Reflinks is still making this error, the citation templates now support the two character codes such as |language=es. Would this be an easier fix for you? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 16:52, 26 December 2013 (UTC)

Is there a particular problem with citations from nytimes.com? I notice from this version, after running Reflinks, leaves the metadata of a number of these references unpopulated. -- Ohc ¡digame! 04:36, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

GBooks redux

This tool does not work well for Google Books links, or apparently for Google-hosted patents either - see for example this diff. Can it either be improved or made to ignore these links? Nikkimaria (talk) 00:42, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

404 for the past hour

I can't get to https://toolserver.org/~dispenser/view/Reflinks I get a 404. JavaScript is returning the same error. Walter Görlitz (talk) 00:34, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

same here, lets hope its a temporary thing. Tigerboy1966  13:57, 9 March 2014 (UTC)
It's been like this for me for a few days. Citation bot and the Edit counter are also down. Mz7 (talk) 18:03, 9 March 2014 (UTC)
I'm getting a red "Page not found" notice, but I've only had problems today. Hope it gets fixed soon. Paul MacDermott (talk) 19:28, 9 March 2014 (UTC)
It seems to be back up now. Walter Görlitz (talk) 16:25, 10 March 2014 (UTC)
Sometimes it seems to be working, and sometimes it seems to freeze up, leaving a blank screen. That is what happens now.--DThomsen8 (talk) 12:20, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

Suggestions March 2014

A few suggestions follow: -- 109.176.255.224 (talk) 17:20, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Add the format parameter for PDF, DOC and XLS URLs

Where the |url= parameter value ends .pdf, .doc or .xls suggest automatically adding the respective |format=PDF |format=DOC or |format=XLS attribute. -- 109.176.255.224 (talk) 17:20, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Suppress addition of accessdate where publication date is already specified

The |accessdate= parameter records the date an online resource with no discernible publication date was accessed. Where the |date= parameter is present and the value is populated, suggest suppressing the addition of the |accessdate= parameter. -- 109.176.255.224 (talk) 17:20, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Add archiveurl and archivedate options

Editors are encouraged to pre-emptively archive references. Suggest adding the |archiveurl= and |archivedate= parameters to the list of available quick-add options to encourage their wider use. -- 109.176.255.224 (talk) 17:20, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

The coauthors attribute is deprecated

The coauthors attribute is deprecated. Suggest removing this parameter from the available quick-add options. -- 109.176.255.224 (talk) 17:20, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Please consider a "with archive links" option. Upon ticking a box (or some other suitable mechanism) to activate, references with a URL present e.g. |url=http://www.example.com/ could have three more parameters automatically added: |archiveurl=, |archivedate= and |deadurl=no. The first would point to a generic Wayback Machine archive URL for that resouce and the second record a placeholder * for the date, e.g. |url=http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.example.com/ and |archivedate=*. The third parameter styles the reference appropriately.

The Wayback Machine URL with a * in place of the date and time accesses a page showing one of three things: a calender detailing existing archive snapshot dates, a link allowing a new on-demand archive to be created or an error message explaining why the resource cannot be archived. Adding this URL format to the reference allows easy one-click access to archived pages and requires only a simple manual edit to replace each * with the real archive date/time to finish off. -- 109.176.255.224 (talk) 17:20, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Leave {{reflist}} parameters alone

On encountering {{reflist|2}} or similar, please leave as is and do not change to {{reflist}}. -- 109.176.218.64 (talk) 15:43, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

Strange edit

I noticed this odd edit (diff) where some parts of existing text were replaced with "#", including periods in a url address, left and right parentheses and a letter "m". Explanation?--Auric talk 00:49, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

@Auric: See [6] GoingBatty (talk) 04:36, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
That says nothing about what I saw.--Auric talk 10:15, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
@Auric: When using older versions of Internet Explorer, the effect of "purposely corrupts the textarea" is the insertion of the "#" characters. You may want to check what browser the editor was using. GoingBatty (talk) 13:13, 4 May 2014 (UTC)
I have Internet Explorer 11, which came out in 2013, and I get this problem sometimes. --P123cat1 (talk) 09:38, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

Webreflinks page

In the Webreflinks page that appears on my screen, the "Show preview" button is greyed in and the "Save page" is not. I understand from the Help Desk that it should be the reverse. (See third screenshot just below this uploaded by Dismas - next commenter.) The next stage in applying Reflinks is pressing the "Show preview" button, which I cannot do. If I press the "Save" button, the article comes up in non-edit mode with a red message saying "could not edit owing to data loss" or words to that effect. I have checked my .js page to see that Reflinks is loaded correctly and it is, so cannot understand what is going wrong. Has anyone else had this trouble with Reflinks? Is the Reflinks tool faulty or the code used to upload it corrupted, perhaps? --P123cat1 (talk) 09:38, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

Screenshots

I made these screenshots to help another user with some problems they were having. I just figured I'd post them here in case anyone wants to use them on the Reflinks page.

A bare URL used as a reference
Reflinks converting a bare URL using the cite web template
Reflinks offering the Preview button with the Save button greyed out
Saving the article back on Wikipedia

Dismas|(talk) 12:06, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

Be warned, Internet Explorer is incompatible with Reflinks, even the latest version, Internet Explorer 11. (For what can happen using Explorer 11, see my earlier comment, above "Screenshots".) This problem has been reported. Reflinks works well with Chrome and Firefox, which are very easy to download. More than one web-browser can coexist on the same computer, so there is no need to swap IE for another browser, if you are particularly attached to using it. Using Reflinks is much preferable to using bare URLs for footnotes, as the latter are vulnerable to link rot, which will make a footnote literally useless. --P123cat1 (talk) 16:12, 14 May 2014 (UTC)

User script

Under "User script", the second sentence beginning "Building off the code ..." has no verb and is nonsensical. Can someone who understands the sentence edit it, please? --P123cat1 (talk) 12:51, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

I changed it. I hope it makes a bit more sense now. Dismas|(talk) 00:04, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

Cross-language {{cite web}}?

Just discovered Reflinks and it's an awesome tool. One thing that the interactive mode seems to currently lack is the ability to use {{cite web}}-like templates that exist on non-English wikis (e.g. French Wikipedia's {{lien web}}).

I could play around the Python code and see if I can get something working. Would you be willing to add such an option to Reflinks? Moxfyre (ǝɹʎℲxoɯ | contrib) 16:41, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

It would be awesome to have a version of Reflinks that ran on an editor's client machine. Perhaps using Javascript inside web browsers. Perhaps as a separate program. Dispenser can you do this? Thanx either way — Lentower (talk) 16:59, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Hm, you might want to have a look at Cite4Wiki – not exactly what you're suggesting, but it's quite similar. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 07:46, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

FYI: The toolserver.org reference converter seems to be shut down

I just saw the following error when visiting both http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/webreflinks.py and http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/view/Reflinks:

"Good bye Toolserver

As of July 1, the community run Toolserver was shut down. My tools weren't aligned with the Wikimedia Foundation's priorities, so they didn't make the transition to Labs."

In my opinion, this is a valuable tool that should be retained, not disbanded. --Jax 0677 (talk) 02:51, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm pretty bummed it got shut down. I don't how I will go back to filling references manually again. Koala15 (talk) 05:11, 1 July 2014 (UTC)
I agree, it was a very useful tool. Is there any alternative? Mick gold (talk) 06:19, 1 July 2014 (UTC)
Reply - FYI, there is an active discussion taking place at Wikipedia:VPT#No_more_reflinks. --Jax 0677 (talk) 06:39, 1 July 2014 (UTC)
From looking at the above-mentioned discussion recently, it's pretty obvious to me that not much of anything will be done about this situation anytime soon. Could the owner/developer of this tool consider releasing the code for the tool so that others could work to improve it and/or somehow move it over to a server that will work in the future?
Even though everyone should have known that this day was probably going to come to pass, something should have obviously been worked out in advance to avoid this highly unfortunate situation. I can't tell you how many Wikipedia articles that I've improved by simply using these tools. They were extremely useful, and simply pointing to other tools that will help formatting new citations is not a fix for this current situation. Guy1890 (talk) 19:15, 1 July 2014 (UTC)
Reply - Agreed. --Jax 0677 (talk) 19:19, 1 July 2014 (UTC)

I am very disappointed. I agree with all the comments above. This was such a useful tool, and really gave a professional appearance to the reference sections. I could go on and on about the usefulness of this tool. Just terrible news.Christian Roess (talk) 09:35, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Seconded. I've used it many a time - it's very, very useful. It should not have been allowed to lapse like this. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 13:23, 2 July 2014 (UTC)
Me too. I have to say, and this is a little hard to say as someone with over 100K edits and 1K pages created, but without Reflinks, I'm far less likely to edit in the future than I have been up until now. Filling in references manually is a chore, and while Reflinks wasn't perfect and had to be spot checked every time, it made editing a lot less tedious than it is now without it. – Muboshgu (talk) 14:43, 2 July 2014 (UTC)
I wouldn't go quite that far. However, I loathe, loathe, loathe formatting references (always have, even since college), and this was a great way to get around the problem while still actually providing worthwhile, understandable references.
More to the point, it's a hugely useful tool, and a lot of people have relied on it. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 14:51, 2 July 2014 (UTC)
I may walk that back at some point, who knows. It's just the immediate feeling, because I'm with you on loathing reference formatting and its overall usefulness. – Muboshgu (talk) 15:30, 2 July 2014 (UTC)
I'll miss all the tools that are gone, but especially Reflinks. It takes me a lot longer to build a reference without it. Improving Wikipedia has been slowed down. — Lentower (talk) 16:51, 2 July 2014 (UTC)
  • Boo! I just want to add that this is/was one of the few tools that actually helped in writing the encyclopedia rather than administrating it. I sincerely hope someone can find a way to make it work again in the future. SmartSE (talk) 21:28, 3 July 2014 (UTC) forgot to sign yesterday
Did anyone try negotiating with the reflinks people? Or was it "We want 24Tb", "No", "OK fu we're out of here". V sad if that's how it happened. It cannot be beyond the wit and wisdom of the entire WP community to come up with an alternative. Tigerboy1966  22:02, 2 July 2014 (UTC)

Reflinks is back, at http://tools.wmflabs.org/dispenser/view/Reflinks, but the link on my WP pages redirects there.

Does anyone know what changed? Can anyone post a link to the announcement? Is this only temporary? Thanx either way — Lentower (talk) 16:05, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

It looks like Dispenser might be running it on his own infrastructure...so I would characterize that as a temporary fix. Guy1890 (talk) 21:00, 3 July 2014 (UTC)
It's not working for me at the moment. The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 07:38, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
Yeah, it breaks while trying to display the results of filling in the references. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 07:43, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
It's been causing me problems, too - actually, it's not the only tool to be having trouble right now. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 14:14, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
That's what I found when It came back.It was back for a little while, and I was using it w/no issues (very grateful for that). But now Reflinks is breaking while trying to display the results, just as it's been pointed out above. Let's hope Ser Amantio is correct, and that it could also be problems w/ other tools too.Christian Roess (talk) 00:16, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
  • I would continue to watch this space as well as some other spaces mentioned above and this other one for more future developments. As I tried to indicate above, these "solutions" so far to this situation seem very temporary to me, which basically means that one shouldn't rely on these tools for the time being. In recent days, I've been able to use these tools occasionally but not reliably. These issues have not been solved by a mile as of yet. Guy1890 (talk) 03:10, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
  • Module failed here. -- Ohc ¡digame! 06:50, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
It's annoying because I cannot write articles or add full citations quickly without it. The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 08:45, 8 July 2014 (UTC)
Agreed. Also, the tools are now being blocked for me by my office firewall, for some reason - they've been fine for months on end. I don't know what's changed, but it's become rather irritating. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 13:20, 9 July 2014 (UTC)
Mine too. That never used to be the case. – Muboshgu (talk) 21:01, 9 July 2014 (UTC)

Hindi bug

could you please make for hindi url106.219.185.135 (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 09:13, 9 July 2014 (UTC) Amt000 (talk) 03:27, 12 July 2014 (UTC)why this tool dont convert hindi url or hindi wikipediaAmt000 (talk) 03:27, 12 July 2014 (UTC) Any bodey hereAmt000 (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 14:43, 13 July 2014 (UTC)

date=1970-01-01

The world wide web wasn't invented until 1990. If it a website reports its creation/modification date as 1970-01-01, Reflinks should be smart enough to ignore it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Matt me (talk • contribs) 20:52, 15 July 2014 (UTC)

Yes, please, if you get a chance, put a algorithm in the Reflinks tool to ignore the creation modification date of a web source when it is set to the beginning of Unix time. Peaceray (talk) 19:38, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

I'll give the whole situation. I accessed the full web Wikipedia version of an article, not the mobile version, using Safari on an iPhone 5. I clicked under the Reflinks' link that I have set up under Tools on the left. This took me to the generated Reflinks page for the article. Whenever I clicked on "Sign in", it redirected me to this page, User_talk:Dispenser/Reflinks. Go figure! I do not know if you are in a position to reproduce this, but I thought I would let you know about the anomaly. Peaceray (talk) 19:38, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

No changes were necessary (need to handle bare URLs with different syntaxes)

I tested both of the tools, but the result say that No changes were necessary. The article I tried to test was Tadhkirat al-Fuqahā, as you see lots of bare links are used int this article. Mhhossein (talk) 05:59, 23 July 2014 (UTC)

All of the bare urls on that page were external links; the tool only works with bare urls within <ref></ref> tags. -- Ohc ¡digame! 06:38, 23 July 2014 (UTC)
For example: <ref>http://google.com</ref> — Lentower (talk) 19:23, 23 July 2014 (UTC)
@Ohconfucius Is there any tool working with all bare urls? Mhhossein (talk) 09:56, 23 July 2014 (UTC)
Not that I'm aware of. I just make the edits by hand to the syntax Relinks needs.
  • There is Find Replace add-on for the Firefox web browser. You could use it to build up a set of patterns to change to the one Reflinks needs. One can use Firefox's profiles to keep different sets of these rules (e.g. "firefox -Pbareurls" at a shell prompt). I've yet to do this for bare urls, though I have used it to add and remove columns for Wikipedia tables. The same or similar add-ons might exist for other browsers.
  • You could also configure most browsers to use an external editor for Wikipedia editing. Then use the editor's find/replace function(s) to make modifying the bare urls syntax easier. See the articles in the Help and Wikpedia namespaces.
  • A few browsers have Find/Replace function(s) for use in text editing boxes.
— Lentower (talk) 19:23, 23 July 2014 (UTC)
I don't know of any either, but one workaround I use is to convert external links into refs by adding a pair of <ref></ref> tags to each link, run Reflinks and then remove the ref tags again. Obviously not worth doing if there is only one link to do up. ;-) -- Ohc ¡digame! 04:33, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Hi Dispenser I may have misunderstood the situation but is reflinks down, because you won't make it open-source? If so why don't you make it open source please? Tom B (talk) 14:53, 29 August 2014 (UTC)

There is code that incorporates code with unclear licensing. If I'm rewriting code it would make sense to improve our citation tools. The ultimate version of reflinks would use offline processing necessitating ~24 TB of storage. I notified WMF of this in (IIRC) January, spoke to employees in June, worked with Betacommand drafting up an RFC and that's been dead for over a month now. The hardware costs $1,000-10,000, is already install, and hasn't been earmarked yet. The cost is in the ballpark for what WM-DE and WMF programming contracts (e.g. catscan). It would be doubly great if they could pay me on top of that for dealing with their temperamental staff, but that's more than I'm asking for. — Dispenser 02:48, 30 August 2014 (UTC)
thanks for response, most of that is over my head! hopefully this will get resolved soon, Tom B (talk) 22:03, 4 September 2014 (UTC)
While it would be nice to get an improved tool, reflinks worked well enough as it was. How about releasing all code with clear licensing under an open source, and asking community to help with the rest? We don't need a better tool, we just need to keep this one working. I am all fine with WMF offering you support and even money, but I don't understand why you have not open sourced the code you can yet? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:41, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
If it's unclear licensing for some of the code that may not be such a good idea. I like this part: "dealing with their temperamental staff". I can vouch for that. Concerning that, and also WMF and delays, look at the fiasco called the Visual Editor. The majority of people who have posted in one long Bugzilla thread have been asking for over a year for the WMF and the all-powerful developer cabal to implement true section editing in the Visual Editor. See Bugzilla 48429. So the VE wouldn't be so slow in many pages in opening up for editing. But they have been ignored. --Timeshifter (talk) 05:00, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
WMF has offered no money, no support, nor initiated any contact. They really don't know how the encyclopedia works. — Dispenser 06:09, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
Hi Dispenser, thx, you say not initiated any contact but this is contact [7], albeit non-positive? What is the fastest way of getting reflinks going again please? How do much do you need to opensource the code? Tom B (talk) 11:19, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
Reflinks URL is https://toolserver.org/%7Edispenser/view/Reflinks - that page says
"Why the Tools are down? Blame Coren. And consider signing the petition to remove WMF's self-granted superpowers".
There is discussion here:
Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Letter petitioning WMF to reverse recent decisions
Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Abandonment of Reflinks
There is related news here:
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-08-13/News and notes - "Media Viewer controversy spreads to German Wikipedia". Discussion about WMF "superpowers".
I do not understand all the technical side of this, and don't pretend to. If the problem is unclear licensing of some code, then that is a common problem plaguing the software industry with all kinds of confusing lawsuits going on. And maybe Dispenser just does not have the time to fight those wars, or the money. Rewriting code is time-consuming, and the time of developers like Dispenser is valuable. And people working for free like independence.
Maybe someone can offer to host all of Dispenser's Reflinks software on a server not owned by the WMF. Then Reflinks is just one of the many tools used to edit Wikipedia and the Commons, that are not open source, and not hosted on WMF servers. Many tools are closed source. I edit images with IrfanView. It is not open source. More tools and resources:
commons:Category:Commons resources and commons:Category:Commons tools
Commons:Convert tables and charts to wiki code or image files - a page I edit. --Timeshifter (talk) 07:10, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
The tools need a database connection from WMF. And Coren's literally changed rules just to block me. — Dispenser 19:39, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
  • Well, that Village Pump discussion thread went nowhere pretty fast. As far as I can tell throughout this situation over these last many months, no one side is totally without fault here, and the blocking of these useful tools recently had nothing to do with any online petition about supposed "superpowers". Dispenser has been using verbiage on the links to his tools to try & quietly slam the WMF for quite a while now, almost as long as (as far as I can tell) his tools were being run basically on his own infrastructure, which was never going to be a final solution for anything. At this time, I still don't understand at all why the code that's been used to run these tools all along can't be made open source at this point, and I don't understand why WMF doesn't seem to care much that thousands (or more) of Wikipedia editors need these kind of tools to work now, not at some point in the future in some piece of software that many of us will never use in the first place. There appear to be too many egos & past bad blood involved on all sides at this late date, which is helpful to no one in the end. Guy1890 (talk) 04:29, 7 September 2014 (UTC)
    I've opposed the WMF since I tried helping in their Usability Initiative (2009). God forbid someone who help people offline offer a slice of reality to the designers in their iPod tower. An audit could be performed with the problematic parts rewritten, it would take 40-100 hours * $35 per hour, so $1,400-3,500. — Dispenser 19:39, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

There is a rewrite of Reflinks. See:

Error 404 on Toolserver redirect

At this moment, I can't reach tools:~dispenser/view/Reflinks, I get a 404-error. Does anyone know if there is a problem and if it will get fixed? Or does anyone know another way to reach a reflinks-fixer? Laurier (talk) 11:38, 11 October 2014 (UTC)

Try this substitute toollabs:fengtools/reflinks/ -- Moxy (talk) 13:28, 11 October 2014 (UTC)
This is a design flaw in Wikimedia Labs web server where it never restarts if it unexpectedly dies (no bugzilla). The entire design is a hack running mini-web servers (one for each tool, Toolserver's used ZWS instead) so IIRC fast-cgi would run as each user and it don't auto restart if it crashes. I requested skipping the intermediate redirect six week ago, I've nudged WM-DE to resolve this. — Dispenser 17:59, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Not working

I don't understand any of this tech code. Repeated attempts to use the tool all get error messages like this: 

<class 'oursql.InterfaceError'>: (2003, "Can't connect to MySQL server on 'enwiki-p.userdb' (111)", None)
      args = (2003, "Can't connect to MySQL server on 'enwiki-p.userdb' (111)", None)
      errno = 2003
      extra = None
      message = ''

BarronofChris (talk) 22:54, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) @BarronofChris: Unfortunately, Dispenser's tools have been blocked. Hope this can be resolved amicably soon! GoingBatty (talk) 01:51, 31 August 2014 (UTC)

Solution: I have found User:Zhaofeng Li/Reflinks which does work. BarronofChris (talk) 17:49, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

And in the meantime we are supposed to use what exactly?--Egghead06 (talk) 05:20, 2 September 2014 (UTC)
Reply -Tell the Wikimedia Foundation exactly how you feel. --Jax 0677 (talk) 19:22, 2 September 2014 (UTC)
WMF is not the culprit here. WMF is not the party refusing to host the tools on a whim, they are simply asking Dispenser to open source them, as this is a perfectly reasonable requirement for the new lab server. And WMF is not the only one doing this; I for once have asked Dispenser to open source his tools months ago, and never got as much as a single reply. And I am pretty sure I wasn't the only one. This was years in coming, and it all could've been avoided if Dispenser would consider open sourcing the tools. Or, per above thread, not using "code with unclear licensing", which to me sounds quite close to copyvio. We cannot and shouldn't take shortcuts like this, or endorse them. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 02:46, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
We allow closed source bots, why is this different? I host the tools on my own dime and they've badgered me every other week with the privacy policy. And am not sure why you defend WMF's refusel of spending $1,000 on Hard Drives to make a better Reflinks. Clearly they see our time as worth nothing ($0/hr)? Also, Coren been lying about that open source "requirement". — Dispenser 05:19, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
My one experience with Coren years ago was basically him invading my user talk page years ago out of the blue to tell me rudely to shut up. He was an arbitrator at the time. I had no clue who he was, nor ever dealt with him before. I had to look up info on him from his user page. I was discussing an issue on an article talk page elsewhere, and he came to my user talk page to threaten to block me basically because I continued to disagree with a friend of his on that article talk page. It was the first time I had ever experienced such outright power-mad censorship on Wikipedia talk pages. I was well experienced in all aspects of editing at the time, and thought talk pages were sacred as long as people weren't rude. When years later I heard Coren was put in charge of the Wikimedia Tool Labs I vaguely remembered that name, and looked him up in my talk page history. I asked around, and found that others were still worried about him, and him being in charge. People change. Maybe he hasn't. --Timeshifter (talk) 06:23, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
With all due respect, this is fucked up. The tool is important enough that its lack is causing significant damage each day (which of course is not news to anybody reading this). Is there literally nothing the average user can do? Vanamonde93 (talk) 04:36, 9 September 2014 (UTC)
You could use this instead. It actually works pretty well. I think the only thing that it doesn't consistently handle well right now are PDF links. Guy1890 (talk) 04:49, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks friend! Wasn't aware that that existed. Perhaps a link could be posted in a more visible place on the main tool page? Vanamonde93 (talk) 15:34, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Still bloody rude to turn of the Reflinks function all together by whoever is "guilty".--BabbaQ (talk) 20:07, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
Dispenser is free to continue to run closed source tools from his own server (or personal machine); if I'm not mistaken, it's just labs access that's been pulled. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong...) On the other hand, my experience with Coren was that Coren interpreted policy with gross incompetence, and was a terrible communicator - unwilling to explain his actions or answer reasonable questions. Sometimes I'm right, even though everyone thought I was wrong. --{{U|Elvey}} (t•c) 23:23, 16 September 2014 (UTC)
Correction; Dispenser IS running the tools from his own server: http://dispenser.homenet.org/~dispenser/view/Reflinks so what was the basis for the block? I don't get it at all!--{{U|Elvey}} (t•c) 02:44, 17 September 2014 (UTC)
In a previous talk section Dispenser wrote: "The tools need a database connection from WMF". More details in that talk section. --Timeshifter (talk) 14:25, 17 September 2014 (UTC)
In my experience, the tool you just posted is good, but not quite as good as Reflinks was. Specifically, it had trouble pulling publishers and titles, and also with pdfs. It also does this funny thing where it deletes the date of a news report, and replaces it with the date the tool was run as the access date. Vanamonde93 (talk) 04:06, 17 September 2014 (UTC)
@Vanamonde93:What you say is very true, so I'd suggest you help the creator improve the script (by notifying the bug) rather than get mired in politics. ;-) -- Ohc ¡digame! 06:53, 17 September 2014 (UTC)
Fair enough; at the same time, I'm still under the delusion that if enough people speak out against stupidity, it will have some effect. ;-) Vanamonde93 (talk) 15:34, 17 September 2014 (UTC)
Agreed. It was stupid of us to allow closed/potentially illegal source code to be used for years. This should've been rewritten ages ago. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 04:10, 29 September 2014 (UTC)
Piotr. I think you are part of the problem with Wikimedia the last few years since the Usability project. You try to speak with authority, but do not have any. And you did not answer Dispenser's reply to you, higher up: "We allow closed source bots, why is this different?" --Timeshifter (talk) 12:02, 29 September 2014 (UTC)
Ridiculous, blame the victim? I am not the one who designed a tool using problematic code. WMF is doing well trying to clean this up; they should've done it sooner, but I guess they waited for the community to handle it first - and clearly, the community failed. Now, regarding bots, I don't know, but it smacks with "why fix this problem if there are others attitude". IMHO we should not allow closed source bots either, and here's hoping they'll be retired soon, too. I have no problem with paying developers (and I would support Dispenser receiving some financial compensation for his past efforts, for example), but this is an open source project, and any closed source is hurtful to our future. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 05:32, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
WMF is not interested in paying me, they want my work for free. Why do you think they were harassing me weekly? Why did Coren ban me while I was addressing the problems? Why is Coren suddenly adding rules to impede me? What with the other non-Free software on Labs? The reality is like many US non-profits the Foundation core goal is growing in power, influence, and money. Bringing everything in-house the Toolserver, Developers, Tools and Bots strengthens them. I wouldn't be surprised if in 10 years the WMF was charging for API access. The only thing that's holding them back is half the staff isn't competent. — Dispenser 16:20, 17 October 2014 (UTC)
I have seen this in another non-profit. The staff expands, and soon becomes more concerned with pay and job security, than with competency, and the survival of the mission. One problem I see is that the WMF board, staff, and technical crew all have different skills. There should be separation between the chain of command of the technical staff from the chain of command of Wikipedia as a whole. Lila Tretikov should not be in charge of overall Wikipedia/Wikimedia. She should only be in charge of the technical crew, and only after a break-in period. Wikipedia should be run by the arbitrators, not a board of outsiders. The board should be more of an advisory role. An honorary board of directors.
Some of the rest of the staff should be fired, and the money used to pay for skilled technical staff, and contract work. Such as paying for temp work from obviously skilled, Wikipedia-loving people like Dispenser, etc.. A lot of outsiders were brought in for the useability project, but they remained outsiders because they tried to get feedback through the ridiculous wikis such as the Meta Wiki, etc.. A wiki almost nobody uses due to the lack of an integrated watchlist. I think a lot of the rest of the staff were hired by systems of cronyism, and also never really integrated and got much feedback from Wikipedia. Due to living in the ivory towers of the WMF wiki, Meta wiki, Strategy wiki, etc.. So their jobs are make-work in many cases. And they try to boss around the technical crew at times, it seems, even though they are not skilled in the technical stuff.
So the technical crew is losing out on dollars paid to non-tech workers who do little of value, and just get in the way. We need 2 executive directors, not one. Someone like Sue Gardner in charge of non-tech crew, and Lila Tretikov in charge of the tech crew. And both should have had longer break-in periods. Both should be answerable to the arbitrators, not some clueless board of outsiders. --Timeshifter (talk) 05:17, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
I've experienced something similar in commercial environments, and I wonder why does that usually happen to many organizations and companies? Why is there an endless supply of incompetent money-greedy individuals? — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 04:42, 20 October 2014 (UTC)

When will this useful tool be fully functional again?

Dear folks, it's unfortunate that this useful tool is still not fully functional. It was great for condensing repeated references into a single footnote, and it really speeded up cleanup efforts. As you know, there are a lot of poorly-formatted references out there, and those few of us willing to work on this task really need help!

As one of the editors who relies on this tool to improve content quality, I wish the folks on the tech side could get past whatever interpersonal and organizational obstacles are preventing us from getting this thing fixed. Although I'm not a programmer, I gather from the technical discussions above that if this tool worked before, it should be possible to make it work again.

What would it take to make this tool a priority, and where would I need to submit my request? --Djembayz (talk) 23:24, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

See the link to the new fengtools Reflinks above. It works well, except when it is down. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:37, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
The foundation is only interested in their pet issues (re-skinning the website, bullshitting on equality)—not summing all of human knowledge. An example of that is the anti-net-neutrality Wikipedia Zero, actively working with ISPs across the world to crave out a free lane for themselves, while ignoring AT&T's Sponsored Data as if the US didn't have a "digital divide". On the upside piece for a dedicated server are coming in this week, despite me being nearly broke for doing so. — Dispenser 06:45, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
@Dispenser: Will the Reflinks tool become open source at any time in the future? Jarble (talk) 18:09, 19 November 2014 (UTC)
@Jarble: As a note, my rewrite of Reflinks is open-source right from the beginning. It's unrelated to Dispenser's one, though. Zhaofeng Li [talk... contribs...] 10:08, 2 December 2014 (UTC)
@Djembayz and Jarble: Looks like Dispenser's Reflinks tool is back up and running! I updated User:Dispenser/Reflinks with the appropriate URLs. GoingBatty (talk) 16:18, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

Bug report - unusable web page titles

Happy New Year Dispenser! Glad Reflinks is up and running again! I see that when I run webreflinks for the Inga Peulich article, it gives warnings for unusable web page titles. However, when I do the same with the regular reflinks tool, it creates bad titles. Would it be possible for you to incorporate your webreflinks logic for unusable web page titles into reflinks? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 16:23, 3 January 2015 (UTC)

Bookmarklets

Hi Dispenser, please would it be possible to update the bookmarklets? they don't work any more as their addresses to the toolserver. Tom B (talk) 21:16, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

Updated bookmarklet

So it seems the new reflinks doesn't like https, so I had to change both the location of the python file and remove the protocol bit from the beginning. Otherwise it seems to work OK: 

javascript:location='http://dispenser.homenet.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/webreflinks.py/'+(typeof%20window.wgPageName!='undefined'?wgContentLanguage+':'+window.wgPageName:'')+'?client=bookmark&citeweb=on&overwrite=simple&limit=20';

Or for the non-interactive version (which just inserts a name for url-only references): 

javascript:location='http://dispenser.homenet.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/reflinks.py/'+(typeof%20window.wgPageName!='undefined'?wgContentLanguage+':'+window.wgPageName:'')+'?&autoclick=wpDiff';

Cheers, Nikthestunned 12:54, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Cosmetic edits

Have a look at this. This seems to be to violate the principle of cosmetic automated edits. All it did is change capital Cite to lowercase cite. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 04:54, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

I don't know that I see an actual problem here, since the tool (at the same time) also removed an extra space after the reference "[1]". I know that there's been some chatter recently elsewhere about whether changing these kind of references from "Cite" to "cite" is of questionable value, but I've never followed that rationale myself. Guy1890 (talk) 05:57, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Granatstein, J.L. 1968. "Canada: Peacekeeper. A survey of Canada's participation in peacekeeping operations", in: Peacekeeping: International Challenge and Response, [Toronto]: The Canadian Institute of International Affairs, p. 161.

The other issue is the inaccurate edit summary, which says "filled in references" when it actually did no such thing. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 15:21, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

(talk page watcher) @Oiyarbepsy and Guy1890: Reflinks doesn't automatically create citation templates for PDFs. It would have been better if Oiyarbepsy Guy1890 would have used Reflinks to view the PDF and make an edit like this before saving. GoingBatty (talk) 02:18, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
I didn't make the edits, I just saw what Guy1890's edits did. And I don't see the relevance of PDFs to this. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 22:58, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
@Oiyarbepsy: Oops - I fixed my comment above. It appears that when Guy1890 ran Reflinks against the article, there was only one bare link, which was to a PDF file. Since Reflinks doesn't automatically add a citation template for a PDF file, it only suggested the cosmetic changes you noted. Therefore, I was trying to agree with you, and suggest that Guy1890 could have manually added the citation template (as I did) before clicking the Save button to avoid a cosmetic edit. Hope this helps! GoingBatty (talk) 03:31, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

Still, the script handled it wrong. It should show a message "unable to fill in any references on this page" and then not do any edit at all. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 04:34, 27 February 2015 (UTC)

@Oiyarbepsy: The script makes it clear that it is unable to automatically fill in any references on the page, but then allows the user to manually add the template. The user of the script always has the opportunity to review the script's suggested changes before saving. GoingBatty (talk) 02:22, 12 March 2015 (UTC)

Reflinks should replace all vertical bar (pipe, or |) characters in "title" parameters with &#124; but it does not currently do so. When it leaves the pipe in place, it displays a CS1 error and puts the article in Category:Pages with citations using unnamed parameters. Here's an example of this behavior: Look for "ENS". Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 01:21, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

In the edit you provided, Reflinks suggested |author=By A Sharadhaa | ENS, but should have suggested |author=A Sharadhaa with no pipe at all. Other incorrect values in the author parameter include "Written by" and dates/times. GoingBatty (talk) 02:54, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
I misspoke in saying "title" above, but this happens in titles as well, I believe. This is just one example among many that I have corrected after someone has run Reflinks. (It is possible that titles are processed properly now and the errors I am seeing are from an older version of Reflinks.) In any event, I'm sure that author data is what Reflinks pulled from the source; it's just working with the data it can find. All it needs to do now is format that data so that it does not generate citation errors. If humans then choose to remove spurious text from author and title parameters, that's an added bonus. – Jonesey95 (talk) 04:14, 24 October 2013 (UTC)
This is still happening, often in |author=. Take a look at the author parameter in the second citation here. It happens quite a bit with a few newspaper web sites from India, where the author contains a date stamp and a vertical bar along with other text. I believe the fix is for Reflinks to replace | characters with &#124; in parameter value fields (except for URLs). Is there someone who watches this page who can fix the Reflinks code? If not, is there a better place to report this bug? How can I help get this bug fixed? – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:42, 3 December 2013 (UTC)
This is still happening in |author=. See this edit. Please fix it. Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 05:49, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
  • There's so much gunk and mispopulated metadata in Indian news websites that makes me wonder whether they understand what these parameters are for. It would be immensely helpful if Reflinks could automatically strip the author field of dates and times too. -- Ohc ¡digame! 02:17, 7 April 2014 (UTC)
Many of these issues are caused by editors who run Reflinks and then hit "save" without making any attempt to manually edit the references - and in many cases who seemingly do not even look at what they are about to add to the page. -- 79.67.241.210 (talk) 17:37, 22 April 2014 (UTC)
True, but those people will always be with us. Given that, Reflinks should replace vertical bars with appropriate wikitext that does not generate error messages. It should be a quick fix. Does the editor responsible for Reflinks even exist anymore? – Jonesey95 (talk) 18:12, 22 April 2014 (UTC)

Can you please fix this bug? It is still happening. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:27, 3 May 2014 (UTC)

And it's still happening. It's been a year and a half since I reported this problem. I recommend that people use http://tools.wmflabs.org/refill/ instead. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:34, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
@Jonesey95: I recommend that people who don't want to check their work use reFill instead, or better yet, just leave the bare URLs for others to fix. IMHO, Reflinks is still the better tool for those who want to check each reference before saving. Now that the Toolserver drama is over, I hope Dispenser will be willing to make his tool even better. GoingBatty (talk) 04:29, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi Dispenser! It appears that Reflinks is still adding language icon templates inside citations. For example, in this edit, Reflinks added |language={{el icon}}, which does not display properly to the reader. Could you please tweak your tool so it would only add |language=el? Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 21:28, 16 February 2015 (UTC)

On a related note, in this edit Reflinks has wrongly added a '(in Danish)' to a source from the Guardian. Even if this issue has been fixed in Reflinks, there is apparently still a need to check and fix any (other) pages Reflinks has processed. Thanks, Lklundin (talk) 14:58, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

Please let me know if this has already been discussed/addressed. I'm in a rush: Reflinks removes reference information, and editors sometimes don't notice the mistake. These were caught and salvaged [8] [9]. --Ronz (talk) 15:03, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Capitalization

I saw in this edit that Reflinks changes the capitalization of maintenance templates. That is in violation of guidelines, which say that automated tools should not be used for making trivial edits. Bot have been blocked for this. Please change the code so that Reflinks will stop changing capitalization. If anything, the names of templates should be capitalized, since that is their proper name. Debresser (talk) 16:16, 24 October 2015 (UTC)

Debresser, are you thinking of WP:COSMETICBOT? That policy says that "Cosmetic changes (such as many of the AWB general fixes) should be applied only when there is a substantive change to make at the same time." (it said "substantial" until a few minutes ago, which was not the right word). Reflinks is making substantive changes to the page by replacing bare URLs with citation templates, and it is allowed to make cosmetic changes at the same time, as are most bots and automated tools. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:58, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
That is correct. However, capitalization of templates is not something that bots should touch at all. There is no rule that says that capitals should or should not be used. If anything, as I said, they should be capitalized, since the name of templates uses capitals, e.g. Template:Citation needed, not Template:citation needed. Please remove this from the bot in the next update. Debresser (talk) 10:08, 25 October 2015 (UTC)

Greetings, all. The reflinks tool itself has been working fine for me in the past few days, but the link on the toolbar in the left appears to have been broken; it takes me to a 404 page with a new link on it. It's a minor point, but since the purpose of this tool is to save time on grunt work, is there a way to fix that? Regards, Vanamonde93 (talk) 18:52, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

broken |doi= paramenter values

In this edit, ostensibly accomplished with Reflinks, the tool adds a period to the end of the |doi= identifier. Terminal punctuation is not appropriate in this parameter value.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:27, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Special character in author

Hi there. In this edit it appears reflinks copied the author data from the source unmodified. This would normally be OK, but the author data included a pipe (|) character, and copying it without escaping the pipe broke the reference format. Can anything be done to fix this? Thanks. --Floatjon (talk) 17:02, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

Inappropriate removal of {{morefootnotes}} template

Thanks for creating Reflinks :)

In this edit, the {{morefootnotes}} template was removed inappropriately. According to the edit summary, that edit was made using Reflinks. Is this a known bug?

Please WP:MENTION me in your reply. Thanks! zazpot (talk) 22:36, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

As of today

Is the bot having problems today ? - Derek R Bullamore (talk) 13:52, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Afraid DNS's homenet.org domain server seems to be down. The web server is running and still serving user (running the old cache). — Dispenser 14:02, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
For me it seems to be working intermittently. I've been able to run articles through it, but can't do another one immediately afterwards. Instead I get the message "Sorry, the website dispenser.homenet.org cannot be found". This is Paul (talk) 18:16, 28 July 2017 (UTC)
Not working for me at the moment. DNS down again? EDIT: Just noticed the huge banner at the top of this page that says DNS is down. Never mind. :) B.Rossow · talk 14:05, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

For some reason, (maybe the DNS issue?) when I click on Reflinks in left margin, it takes me to this page. I thought maybe deleting it from common.js and putting it in vector.js would help, but it doesn't. I'm using the online tool which works great but was wondering if/when the sidebar tool will be up and operating. Thanks for all the great stuff you do!! Atsme📞📧 18:03, 11 September 2017 (UTC)

Thank you, Guy1890 - I've been accessing the online tool in my bookmarks but my question to Dispenser was about the code (// Add WP:Reflinks launcher in the toolbox on left) which saves me from having to search through my bookmarks for the url. My browser favorites are already overflowing. It's possible he's transitioning from one host server to another, I don't know. Yep, it's a DNS issue. I love the toolbox access for Reflinks so hope he can get it operating again. Atsme📞📧 11:48, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

date format bug?

I don't use "Reflinks". But I've just encountered an edit that used it on a UK article. The article had (correctly) a {{Use dmy dates...}} at its start. But the insertions it made were of the form "date=yyyy-mm-dd" (and "accessdate=yyyy-mm-dd"), rather than the expected "date=dd Monthname yyyy". Might there be a bug? Feline Hymnic (talk) 20:44, 23 August 2018 (UTC)

"the bookmarklet" in User script section is dead. Bináris (talk) 15:00, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

Reflinks is logging me off when I try to use it. So when I go to inspect the changes, it shows me as an IP user. So if the page is protected, it won't let me proceed at all. Is anyone else experiencing this problem? DougHill (talk) 17:56, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Inline window

Would it be possible for this to be accessible via an inline window, such as WP:TWINKLE?--Launchballer 00:33, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

RfC announce: Citation tools

There is an RfC at Wikipedia talk:Citing sources#RfC: Citation tools regarding whetyer citation tools should allowed. Your input on this question is welcome. --Guy Macon (talk) 22:01, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

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