Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Citation cleanup

message: This is the first WikiProject I'm joining.  I forgot where I originally found the :Category:Pages with duplicate reference names link from, I think it was from a technical discussion related to adding warnings and automatically categorizing articles with redundant reference names.  As I started slowly going through it, I wondered if there was a related WikiProject, and this seems to be it.  The backlog is so huge, that I'm inviting others to also join in .  I'm not sure who started, but when I did, apart from recently changed articles, the A-B was already done.
It's a mostly systematic and boring task, but apart from exceptions, per-article work is not too long, so it's easy to just put in some available time, and stop anytime.  I so far found a few sometimes challenging aspects, maybe some of this could eventually be part of the WikiProject documentation:
* Infoboxes may already have reference tags, so duplicates may still show up for some sources when the deduplicating work is fully done.  Checking the infobox template, then fixing the article source to use that reference may be necessary.  I have lost half an hour fiddling with references on an article before discovering this.  Common examples are country census data.
* Some climate articles include chart templates causing some citations to clash.
* It may be difficult to quickly distinguish identical and redundant inline citations.  When an article is especially messy, copying all or most citations to the reflist (Help:Footnotes#WP:LDR), and then replacing inline references with tags seems to help.
* It is unfortunately common for articles to have multiple citations with a common redundant tag, as well as a number of inline references to that tag.  This means that precise information, if it once existed, was already lost.  Checking external references to fix these may take longer, or may not be possible.  When those point to multiple parts of a single site, or multiple pages of a single book, a strategy may be to consolidate those into one generic link to that resource (i.e. a range of pages, or sometimes just the whole book, etc).
* I come across various citation templates which I'm not always familiar with, so some articles require me to read the Wikipedia citations documentation.
**Song articles often use the singlechart or Certification_Table_Entry templates which support the optional refname parameter.
**Schools using the NCES School ID template support the optional ref_name parameter.
* The red error message shown about the redundancy shows a tag name.  This name is not always obvious to locate in the article source, because various characters are substituted.  Moreover, some citation templates automatically aggregate information into tags.
* And of course one encounters many other types of citation related bugs when doing this (incomplete or obsolete accessdate, external links in website, red links, etc).  It can also be the opportunity to add relevant top-page tags, categories or stub-template whenever necessary.
** Short incomplete articles needing stub tags near the bottom using the appropriate stub category template
** Tagging articles with bare URL citations using 
That's about it for now I think.  PaleoNeonate (talk) 19:21, 27 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pages with duplicate reference names 

message: Hi! I know this WikiProject deals with this category: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_references_cleanup , 
and I think it may be helpful if https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CS1_errors was added as a subcategory of that because people looking in the ref cleanup category may also want to help fix some pages with CS1 errors. The category https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_with_invalid_ISBNs from WP:CHECKWIKI could also possibly be added for the same reasons. BhamBoi (talk) 03:53, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text:  . Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 14:17, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Category:Wikipedia references cleanup 

message: I'm currently working on a project to enable sharing of citations across articles using a common reference library for a group of articles related to each other by a common theme. It's new, and currently limited to articles using short footnotes. See working example on the doc page at , and live at Judicial police (France) and Public action in French law. This should enable improvement of citation quality through division of labor (i.e, just one place to look to fix or improve some/all citations for a group of articles), and improvements to verifiability through ease of locating and reusing quality citations for content that might otherwise go uncited. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 00:16, 8 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Mathglot, With all these conditionals and the great potential for feature creep for such an ambitious goal, I am wondering why you don't code this in Lua module instead?  J JMesserly (talk) 22:11, 18 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sharing citations 

message: Hi! I'm pretty sure this is the place to ask, so I'm asking if we could do  tag removal drives. There's a large amount–according to Category:Articles with unsourced statements, there's more than 606,000 articles containing either citation needed or  tags. So, in order to reduce those by replacing the tags with reliable sources, should we start a drive to remove and replace the tags listed above? Thanks! Tails Wx 03:50, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
replies: text:  I think WikiProject Reliability be the place to ask. This project focuses more on reference errors and formatting. Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 14:16, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Alright. Thanks for the recommendation! Tails Wx 17:49, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  {{tl|Citation needed}} removal drive? 

message: Use of the ReferenceExpander bot without manually checking its output has led to references being contracted instead. For example, the bot sometimes follows a link that now redirects to a new, uninformative place, but since the link technically "works" the auto-generated citation omits the archive-URL and creates a footnote that is nicely templated but completely useless. It also removes all sorts of ancillary information included in manually-formatted citations, like quotations. If multiple citations were gathered into the same footnote, it creates a replacement based on only the first of them. It can see a citation to a chapter in an edited collection and replace the authors' names with the editors of the volume. It can see a URL for a news story and create a  footnote that omits the byline which had been manually included. A list of potentially affected pages is available here.
Some of these are quick fixes, while others take more work. Any help at all would be appreciated. XOR'easter (talk) 00:05, 19 May 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: This is still ongoing. We're now in the part of the worksheet where the script technically made the pages longer, in terms of character count, but sometimes it still removed information (e.g., turning a manual book citation into a  and losing the page number). It also throws junk into citations, of the sort you've probably seen before, like |last=Staff |first=News and such. And it tends to change access-date parameters to the date that the script edited the page, rather than the last date that a human actually read the source, which basically fabricates history. My own feeling is that the fixes are getting easier, and more of the potentially problematic edits are turning out fine, but help bringing this whole task to a conclusion would still be greatly appreciated. XOR'easter (talk) 22:14, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

text: If you were upset that you missed the chance to work on the ensmallened articles, there's a second batch that needs checking. XOR'easter (talk) 22:01, 20 July 2023 (UTC)

text: This is still ongoing, if anyone needs a new hobby.... XOR'easter (talk) 16:56, 2 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Help needed fixing bot-mangled citations 

message: Hi everyone, I'm not a member of this WP but I just thought it would be nice to say that this Cat is now (effectively) empty, bar a Help page. Yww.  Mattdaviesfsic (talk) 20:30, 2 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[:Category:Pages with missing references list]] - empty 

message: I got this idea from Tails Wx, who proposed a  drive. I doubt anybody watches this page, but here's my proposal anyways:
*There are currently 65 000+ articles tagged with bare URL citations
*This has only decreased by 4 000 since 4 Jun.
*Bare URLs are for the most part easy to fix.
Perhaps we should initiate a Bare URL drive, like GOCE drives, to reduce the backlog and increase editor participation. Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 14:23, 21 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bare URL drive? 

message: You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Pawn Stars § What to do about notes masquerading as citations?.  I could really use some guidance here, please advise. SmileySnail (talk) 07:19, 31 July 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: Discussion at [[:Talk:Pawn Stars#What to do about notes masquerading as citations?|Talk:Pawn Stars §&nbsp;What to do about notes masquerading as citations?]]

message: To make category pages easier to use, for the individual months within :Category:Articles with unsourced statements I added these:
* Random page button
* Topic filter
* Help message
These additions are "cloned" from changes done for:
* :Category:Orphaned articles individual months
* :Category:Articles lacking sources individual months
This update is being posted at:
* WikiProject Citation cleanup
* WikiProject Reliability
Overall, I am hopeful these changes will help editors new to article citations and those regularly working to reduce the backlog. Regards, JoeNMLC (talk) 22:02, 8 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Update to Category pages 

message: Wondering what is/has happened with :Category:Articles with unsourced statements from September 2023? For "Sports" topic there are 14,637 articles. Is this possible from a bot run? August 2023 has 9,715 articles and Sept is only the 9th day. Regards, JoeNMLC (talk) 23:16, 9 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Question about 17,118 September 2023 articles 

message: Hello. The footnotes of Pompey need some work. Some citations don't have links to the works cited, for example. If you have the time or interest, your input is appreciated. Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 02:39, 25 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: Pompey needs work

message: Under Open Tasks there is a reference to a project that is no longer maintained:
 skarz (talk) 05:42, 28 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Link to dead project