The following discussion is an archived debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA. The result of the discussion was Approved.

Operator: Smith609 (talk · contribs)

Automatic or Manually assisted: Automatic, in response to user input

Programming language(s): PHP

Source code available: [1]

Function overview: Add names to anonymous reference tags

Links to relevant discussions (where appropriate): User_talk:Citation_bot#Suggestion

Edit period(s): Continuous

Estimated number of pages affected: 1–3 thousand at present; ongoing rate of dozens per day

Exclusion compliant (Y/N): Yes

Already has a bot flag (Y/N): Yes

Function details: Citations created with {{cite pmid}}, {{cite doi}}, {{cite jstor}} etc only contain a unique article identifier. Thus it is difficult for editors to recognize what is being cited, and difficult to use the reference elsewhere in the article.

If no name= parameter is present in the ref tag containing these templates, the bot will add name=FirstauthorYear from the information in Wikipedia. (The bot already creates this information in subtemplates, per Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/DOI_bot_2.) If there is already a citation with this name it will append "a", "b", etc after the year to ensure that the ref names are distinct.

If there are multiple identical citations in the article, duplicate citations will be replaced with <ref name=Refname />. (Identical means "every parameter has the same value", whitespace notwithstanding.)

So this basically makes the reference markup code more readable by adding a reference name (in some style, like Harvard)? Though reading the suggestions, I doubt adding anything more than last name + year + optional letter is needed. I suppose it is preferred over bare cite pmid's. I would suggest making <ref name="Smith 2002"> though, with quotes and spaces. —  HELLKNOWZ  ▎TALK 23:29, 14 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Approved for trial (50 edits). Please provide a link to the relevant contributions and/or diffs when the trial is complete. MBisanz ^talk 22:43, 19 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Related edits can be observed at Special:Contributions/Citation_bot_1. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 03:23, 23 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I've coded up the script (see successful edit and would appreciate any test cases that anyone may wish to offer, so that I can be sure that the bot is as robust as possible before I proceed further. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 07:25, 23 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If there's no comments then I guess it's Trial complete.. Martin (Smith609 – Talk) 00:43, 14 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

{{BAG assistance needed}}  Approved. MBisanz ^talk 08:26, 16 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. To request review of this BRFA, please start a new section at WT:BRFA.