Wikipedia talk:ReFill/Archive 3

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Archive 4

I have no idea what this means

Thanks for reFill. Please add tooltips, glossary, etc. to explain thoroughly all the options. I find that developers often fail to do this. And it is a shame because their tools would be used by more people if they did.

For example; I have no idea what this means:

• "Use the base domain name as work when this information cannot be parsed"

I don't want an explanation here alone. It needs to be on the reFill page itself. Easy to get to.

• https://tools.wmflabs.org/refill

-- Timeshifter (talk) 20:39, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

reFill adding languages

Hi Zhaofeng Li. reFill is such a useful tool; it comes in handy a lot. One thing that I've wondered if you've considered is if reFill could possibly be coded so that it could pick up what language the source is in and use the "|language=Italian" for example to denote a source written in Italian. Is this a possible feature that can be worked into reFill? Regards, Vaselineeeeeeee^★★★ 15:22, 23 March 2019 (UTC)

Permission?

Hi, @Zhaofeng Li:, I'm Zanygenius and I would like to use your "reFill" script to help me out with citations. You can learn more about me here, as well as my userboxes. If I had reFill, I would mostly correct my own references, however I would use it to fill in bare references of other users as well. Thank you and have a nice day, Zanygenius_{(talk to me!)(email me!)} 16:35, 23 March 2019 (UTC)

Possible bug in reFill: Space changed to NBSP (in template parameter assignment)

The change of a regular space to a non-breaking space (NBSP) in this edit looks like a likely bug in reFill. It's on the line with |type2=point (but is actually within the assignment of the title parameter, causing the displayed tooltip on the map to be "Al Noor Mosque  ").

Because NBSPs don't work like regular spaces in template parameter assignments, an NBSP (whether a Unicode character or encoded as   or  ) replacing a regular space can break the function of a template more severely than this example. --Pipetricker (talk) 12:48, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

Add support for Ukrainian Wikipedia (uk.wikipedia.org) on reFILL

Hi, not sure where I could submit my request, but I would like to support for Ukrainian Wikipedia (uk.wikipedia.org) on https://tools.wmflabs.org/refill/ . How do I do that?--Piznajko (talk) 20:45, 30 March 2019 (UTC)

Refill dates

Hi, there appears to be a problem with the refill edits filling in invalid dates. This edit added a date of |date=2 April 8008 and this change added |date=2 April 9802. Keith D (talk) 20:17, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Issue with removing https from urls (seemingly) randomly

On refilling Draft:IACCM (International Association for Contract and Commercial Management), the ref https://software.iaccm.com/ was changed from https to http. Not sure why this was changed, as the website supports https (and the certificate is valid etc.) and other websites which support https were not changed to http on the same draft on the same run. Details below:

• Task Name fixWikipage
• Task ID bdd068cb-de47-4107-b1ed-7cd2ad543bf3
• Change ID 8
• Old Text https://software.iaccm.com/
• New Text {{Cite web|url=http://software.iaccm.com/|title=Home page|website=Contract Automation Software Comparison Tool}}

Thanks, Dreamy Jazz 🎷 ^{talk to me | my contributions} 19:32, 26 April 2019 (UTC)

ReFill 2 - Duplicate authors

I love the functionality of ReFill 2, but I have come across one bug:

<ref>https://deadline.com/2019/02/lenora-crichlow-avenue-5-pilot-cast-hbo-armando-iannucci-1202565470/</ref>

renders as:

<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://deadline.com/2019/02/lenora-crichlow-avenue-5-pilot-cast-hbo-armando-iannucci-1202565470/|title=Lenora Crichlow Joins Cast Of HBO’s ‘Avenue 5’ Pilot From Armando Iannucci|first1=Patrick|last1=Hipes|first2=Patrick|last2=Hipes|date=February 26, 2019}}</ref>

and adds the same author twice. It also occurs for multiple authors:

<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://deadline.com/2019/02/avenue-5-josh-gad-star-armando-iannucci-hbo-comedy-pilot-1202562221/ |title=‘Avenue 5’: Josh Gad To Star In Armando Iannucci's HBO Comedy Pilot|first1=Nellie Andreeva,Denise|last1=Petski|first2=Nellie|last2=Andreeva|first3=Denise|last3=Petski|date=February 21, 2019}}</ref>

I have mostly had this happen for Deadline Hollywood citations, which I figured was an issue with their code, but now it has also happened with TVLine:

<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://tvline.com/2019/02/20/zach-woods-avenue-5-hbo-space-comedy-cast/ |title=Silicon Valley's Zach Woods Joins Veep Creator Armando Iannucci's Sci-Fi Comedy Pilot Avenue 5 at HBO|first1=Michael|last1=Ausiello|first2=Michael|last2=Ausiello|date=February 20, 2019}}</ref>

The problem is likely in the external website's code, but perhaps this tool can employ a workaround? Thanks!— TAnthony^Talk 21:04, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Also occurred with Rolling Stone: {{Cite web|url=https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/melrose-place-is-a-really-good-show-57740/|title='Melrose Place' Is a Really Good Show|first1=David|last1=Wild|first2=David|last2=Wild|date=May 19, 1994}}

No one has a fix?— TAnthony^Talk 19:02, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

refill destroys formatting

@Fort esc: seemed to have used refill which destroyed formatting of the references here. it was one reference per line so it is easier to edit. after, everything is one big worm of text. --ThurnerRupert (talk) 16:46, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

@ThurnerRupert: it seems that refill edit is the next, not the one you're referring to (then it would have made more edits there). --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 17:06, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

reFill did not make the first edit. The first edit correctly removed spaces between references, per MOS:REFSPACE. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:28, 11 May 2019 (UTC)

Destroys data when Refill changing bare URLs to google.com

If I run Refill or Refill 2 on this text, it converts the 3 bare URLs to google.com. Any idea why? The text is a (slightly modified) excerpt from this old version of this page. Thanks. DH85868993 (talk) 22:18, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

@DH85868993: This looks like an anti-bot measure employed by the server. I will change the user-agent string to better identify the tool and resolve the problem. Sorry for the late reply. Zhaofeng Li ^talk (Please {{Ping}} when replying) 21:45, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

No worries. Thanks. DH85868993 (talk) 22:06, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

that’s a seriously dubious anti-bot move. Who do think they are? http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/12/john-r-fox-deliberately-called-artillery-strike-position/ AManWithNoPlan (talk) 18:36, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

Destroys data when there are existing named references

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Child_marriage_in_Niger&type=revision&diff=896910605&oldid=896909962

both 1 & 2 versions. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 03:13, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

Fills website with URL address, this creates a Hidden error message

The refill is great. It does however, fill the website parameter with the URL address. This then creates a Hidden error message on articles because the website parameter should not be a URL address but the name of the Website. For example, the website parameter should contain CNN not www.cnn.com --The Eloquent Peasant (talk) 13:38, 23 June 2019 (UTC)

Cite news --> cite web

@Zhaofeng Li: is reFill doing WEIRD? changing "cite news" into "cite web"? Is that new? Thank you for your time. Lotje (talk) 06:17, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

Error msg: Submitting your task... The browser (or proxy) sent a request that this server could not understand

reFill is acting strange today. I use it through the URL https://tools.wmflabs.org/refill/ , then click "Toggle advanced input", and enter a raw URL sandwiched between 'ref' and '/ref' tags. I've been getting the error message:

• Submitting your task... The browser (or proxy) sent a request that this server could not understand.

— Nomopbs (talk) 17:38, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

@Nomopbs: It's part of the migration to the new tool, and the redirect isn't working for raw wikitext input. While I fix the issue, you can use the new interface directly at https://tools.wmflabs.org/refill/ng. The new tool will hopefully completely replace the old one when support for other Wikipedias is improved. Zhaofeng Li ^talk (Please {{Ping}} when replying) 21:49, 1 July 2019 (UTC)

(Almost) zero edit

FYI - I have just had this epic diff on my watchlist, with capitalization of "cite web" to "Cite web" as the only change (?), but with an edit summary: Filled in 1 bare reference(s) with reFill 2. –Austronesier (talk) 15:04, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

Articles getting added to Watchlist

Upon using refill, the articles are getting added to my watchlist. Is it normal? Thanks Vivek Ray (talk) 07:49, 4 July 2019 (UTC)

It's been doing it for ages. Would be nice if it was off by default. - X201 (talk) 08:12, 4 July 2019 (UTC)

Reflinks does this as well. Ostensibly it is so you will be alerted if someone changes your formatting of the bare urls. You just need to remember to click on the blue check mark in the box next to "Watch this page" to turn it off before hitting "Publish changes" - it took me awhile to remember to do this but it does save your watchlist from growing :-) MarnetteD|Talk 14:54, 4 July 2019 (UTC)

Update since 30 June

Hi. What's the deal with Refill opening up new windows when you use the new tool? I don't really need to see that processing/progress page, as with the old version, I'd simply leave the page running for a few seconds, then save once all the bare URLs had been done. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 17:55, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

Hi Lugnuts. I am finding it useful to have the fix page still visible. When there are items that Refill 2 and Reflinks can't fix, since they will have to be done manually, it is nice to be able to look at where those items are in the article. I know this doesn't apply to articles with 20 refs or less but when you get to those articles with 100 refs scrolling through ref section to find the bare url can be a pain. I know you might disagree but I just wanted to share my perspective. MarnetteD|Talk 18:06, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

No, that's fine - it's the new window opening that I find a bit of a pain. But I can live with it! Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 18:07, 8 July 2019 (UTC)

reFill2 continues to produce junk

This from Mikveh. reFill2 converted this:

<ref name="RabbiGrossman">[https://web.archive.org/web/20080407061730/http://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/docs/Grossman-Niddah.pdf Rabbi Susan Grossman, Mikveh And The Sanctity Of Being Created Human, Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, Rabbinical Assembly, December 6, 2006]</ref>

Rabbi Susan Grossman, Mikveh And The Sanctity Of Being Created Human, Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, Rabbinical Assembly, December 6, 2006

to this:

<ref name="RabbiGrossman">{{Cite web|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080407061730/http://www.rabbinicalassembly.org/docs/Grossman-Niddah.pdf|title=Wayback Machine|date=April 7, 2008|website=web.archive.org}}</ref>

"Wayback Machine" (PDF). web.archive.org. April 7, 2008.

The former had meaning and context for readers; the latter is meaningless.

Please fix the tool.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 11:58, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

I don't know how this could be fixed. The link was directly to the archive, so a citation for the archive was created based on the meta data of that URL (best as the tool could determine). The bottom line is the tool is an aid, not a god. Sometimes you'll run into scenarios that need a manual touch. -- ferret (talk) 13:00, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

you'll run into scenarios that need a manual touch and that's the rub isn't is? Too many editors blithely accept that the tool is correct (because it's a tool and we all know that tools are infallible) and don't check what it produces so someone else, more-or-less anonymous gnomes, have to cleanup after them. I grow very weary of undoing crap that this tool and its predecessor leave behind when the tool-initiator pays no attention to the tool's output.

If this example were simply a bare url without label text, I would agree with you that the tool probably could not do better than it did. But, the example has label text that the tool discarded. That was wrong.

Perhaps one simple thing it could do is inspect the extant label for words that match words in the title that it retrieved from wherever it gets the 'new' title (ignoring: 'a', 'and', 'in', 'of', 'the', etc). When when all or most of the words of the two titles are in agreement then and only then proceed. Another thing that might be done is to actually look at the url and notice that the archived url is embedded in the url ...

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:42, 12 July 2019 (UTC)

More, different kind of junk, this from Sara Maitland, the tool converted this:

[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/a-book-of-silence-by-sara-maitland-1017106.html A Book of Silence, By Sara Maitland Reviewed by [[Michèle Roberts|Michele Roberts]]]

A Book of Silence, By Sara Maitland Reviewed by Michele Roberts

to this:

{{Cite web|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/a-book-of-silence-by-sara-maitland-1017106.html|title=A Book of Silence, By Sara Maitland Reviewed by [[Michèle Roberts|Michele Roberts]]}}

"A Book of Silence, By Sara Maitland Reviewed by [[Michèle Roberts|Michele Roberts]]". {{cite web}}: URL–wikilink conflict (help)

The obvious thing that the tool should have done is to remove the wikilink markup and the artice name ([[Michèle Roberts| and ]]):

{{Cite web|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/a-book-of-silence-by-sara-maitland-1017106.html|title=A Book of Silence, By Sara Maitland Reviewed by Michele Roberts}}

"A Book of Silence, By Sara Maitland Reviewed by Michele Roberts".

Interesting, isn't it, that in the first example of this post the tool discarded the external-link label but in this second example, the tool retained the external-link label? Please fix the tool.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:42, 13 July 2019 (UTC)

I wanted to make sure this wasn't a case of the user having done something (which is possible). Confirmed on my sandbox that the tool did this one. Very curious, did it even pull the external metadata in this case? -- ferret (talk) 13:41, 13 July 2019 (UTC)

Mangled CiteSeerX references - "Download limit exceeded"

I just ran into this curios reference [1]:

• <ref>{{cite web|url=http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/messages/downloadsexceeded.html|title=Download Limit Exceeded|author=|date=|website=citeseerx.ist.psu.edu|access-date=15 April 2019}}</ref>

Wikiblame led to a revision from April 15th [2] where apparently a reFill-powered mass edit ran into CiteSeerX's download quota. CiteSeerX - who, jtbc, is undeniably the villain here - redirected to an error page [3], which contains no reference to the requested URL whatsoever - which then reFill seems to have dutifully inserted into the template, replacing the original source, thus rendering the reference completely useless.

I'll notify the user, and fix it in the article in which I found it. Thanks for helping to automate tedious WP tasks, I genuinely appreciate it! <3

Toxide (talk) 12:49, 17 July 2019 (UTC)

Refill 2 and Github titles

Hello, I noticed a problem with Refill 2 including "titles" from Github sources that can only be described as desperate self-promotion. See this good-faith edit including titles such as ... Contribute to BVLC/caffe development by creating an account on GitHub. Currently only 98 articles have such corrupted, promotional titles in Wikipedia (search list), but the number will probably increase. Is there any way to filter such cases either via a Refill-internal feature or a Wikipedia edit filter? GermanJoe (talk) 10:01, 19 July 2019 (UTC)

Refill 2 apparently generating weird first/last parameters

The second ref of this edit seems to be from Refill 2 improperly parsing an India Today article, generating inappropriate first/last citation parameters. Also, that might be better generated as {{cite news}} rather than {{cite web}} Dl2000 (talk) 03:12, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

"Options" section of description confused me

I've never used this tool. I came here to find out about it, but I found § Options baffling. Maybe it's just because I'm used to using templates, and while templates enable options by invoking arguments, the description here doesn't mention arguments at all— because none are used, as I found when I looked at the page by clicking on the stable version and saw that they're controlled by a checklist there. Would you consider adding a note to that effect to §Options? E.g., "See checklist on tool page."

Please {{Ping}} me to discuss. --Thnidu (talk) 16:29, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

Problem

When I want the Retrieved on.. data.. it does not add the info. When I don’t want the Retrieved on...data it gets added. I click on the bracket at the tool but it does the opposite. Please fix the bug.BabbaQ (talk) 20:35, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

The bug is still on. It does not add the Retrieved (date) info. It does not matter if I click on the bracket or not. Please someone fix the bug.--BabbaQ (talk) 21:33, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

Newly deprecated cite parameters

|deadurl= and |dead-url= have been deprecated in {{cite web}} and its variants, in favor of |url-status=. However, I notice reFill 2 is still generating |dead-url=. Monkbot and other editors are in the process of replacing these deprecated parameters across Wikipedia, so it would be great if this tool (which I use all the time) was updated accordingly. Please see Template:Cite web#What's new for details, but note that the "yes" or "no" values also need to be changed to "live", "dead", "unfit", or "usurped", as necessary. Thanks!— TAnthony^Talk 20:55, 19 September 2019 (UTC)

Hi just following up on this. ReFill is still using the deprecated syntax, though InternetArchiveBot and GreenC bot have made the fix. Thanks.— TAnthony^Talk 18:02, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

Hello TAnthony. Responses to posts here are few and far between. I do know that refill two is undergoing some kind of transformation as it has slowed way down in the last couple days. Someone must be working on it somewhere but I have no idea how to find out who or where this is being done. You might try asking about your item at the village pump technical. Hopefully someone there will know something. Regards. MarnetteD|Talk 19:35, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

Thanks!— TAnthony^Talk

Available worker

Out of curiosity, how long should I wait for an available worker? As of this timestamp I've waited ~15 mins for it to find an available worker. Hasteur (talk) 02:17, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

You are admirably and/or maddeningly patient Hasteur. The new program seems to have a snag where this happens. I wait about thirty seconds and if it hasn't started formatting refs I do the old reliable of hitting ctrl-F5 and that usually gets things going. On the rare occasion where that doesn't work I move on to WP:REFLINKS. Best regards. MarnetteD|Talk 03:28, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

Can Refill2 automatically add access dates?

Can Refill2 be configured to automatically add access dates? I used to use this option on Refill, but I couldn't find such an option on Refill2. Thanks. DH85868993 (talk) 20:35, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

It would need to go back and check the date that the reference was added to the article, not just add today's date when it was verified that the reference source exists. "Access date" indicates that the source at this date supported the content it is shown as supporting, and it would be wrong to add any date other than the date the reference was added to the article. Websites get updated or edited, and the "access date" is intended to show which version of the website was being used as a source. Automatically adding the current date would not be helpful or accurate. PamD 21:22, 12 December 2019 (UTC)

@PamD: Thanks for the reply. Recently, I've been using the tool to expand bare URLs which were added only a few hours (or in some cases minutes) earlier, so the current date would be appropriate as the access-date. I'll just keep adding the access-dates manually. DH85868993 (talk) 00:06, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

ReFill 2 still adding deadurl= parameter

In this edit, reFill added the deprecated parameter |deadurl=. To make sure it was the tool, and not a human edit, I copied the previous version of the article into my sandbox and ran reFill 2 against it, with the same result.

The new parameter is |url-status=, with possible values of "dead" or "live". Thanks. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:18, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

Remove Wikipedia references

Drafts are often submitted to AfC with references to Wikipedia. It would be good if these could be removed, and even better if the article name in the ref is in the words just preceding the reference that is linked as well. A recent example: this Cheer KylieTastic (talk) 12:35, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

tool down?

Reported to Github. Chris Troutman (talk) 15:57, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

@Chris troutman: seems to be okay again. :-) Lotje (talk) 17:07, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

ReFill 2 - Duplicate authors

I love the functionality of ReFill 2, but I have come across one bug:

<ref>https://deadline.com/2019/02/lenora-crichlow-avenue-5-pilot-cast-hbo-armando-iannucci-1202565470/</ref>

renders as:

<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://deadline.com/2019/02/lenora-crichlow-avenue-5-pilot-cast-hbo-armando-iannucci-1202565470/|title=Lenora Crichlow Joins Cast Of HBO’s ‘Avenue 5’ Pilot From Armando Iannucci|first1=Patrick|last1=Hipes|first2=Patrick|last2=Hipes|date=February 26, 2019}}</ref>

and adds the same author twice. It also occurs for multiple authors:

<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://deadline.com/2019/02/avenue-5-josh-gad-star-armando-iannucci-hbo-comedy-pilot-1202562221/ |title=‘Avenue 5’: Josh Gad To Star In Armando Iannucci's HBO Comedy Pilot|first1=Nellie Andreeva,Denise|last1=Petski|first2=Nellie|last2=Andreeva|first3=Denise|last3=Petski|date=February 21, 2019}}</ref>

I have mostly had this happen for Deadline Hollywood citations, which I figured was an issue with their code, but now it has also happened with TVLine:

<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://tvline.com/2019/02/20/zach-woods-avenue-5-hbo-space-comedy-cast/ |title=Silicon Valley's Zach Woods Joins Veep Creator Armando Iannucci's Sci-Fi Comedy Pilot Avenue 5 at HBO|first1=Michael|last1=Ausiello|first2=Michael|last2=Ausiello|date=February 20, 2019}}</ref>

The problem is likely in the external website's code, but perhaps this tool can employ a workaround? Thanks!— TAnthony^Talk 21:04, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Also occurred with Rolling Stone: {{Cite web|url=https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/melrose-place-is-a-really-good-show-57740/|title='Melrose Place' Is a Really Good Show|first1=David|last1=Wild|first2=David|last2=Wild|date=May 19, 1994}}

No one has a fix?— TAnthony^Talk 19:02, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

I'm going to try and seek out someone to take over the maintenance of this vital tool.— TAnthony^Talk 16:00, 28 October 2019 (UTC)

@TAnthony: Did you find anyone to take over the maintenance? The tool is still generating duplicate authors. Thanks! GoingBatty (talk) 22:04, 24 December 2019 (UTC)

@GoingBatty: Unfortunately no. I made inquiries at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) and Wikipedia:Bots/Noticeboard, and the last I heard was this edit summary suggesting that Cyberpower678 was looking into the possibility of adopting it.— TAnthony^Talk 15:41, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

TAnthony, I have been added as a maintainer of ReFill. I am planning to work with the author to merge it with InternetArchiveBot. But's it's a long road. Both the bot and the tool have elements that can benefit from one another. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 15:48, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

That's great news, thanks so much for taking the initiative.— TAnthony^Talk 15:50, 26 December 2019 (UTC)

Bloomberg

When Refill goes to the Bloomberg website, it is stopped by a robot checker, loses the original page link and the page name given is "Are you a Robot?"

Is there a way to not pick up that title?

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_largest_pharmaceutical_mergers_and_acquisitions&diff=prev&oldid=934440289

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Kaltenmeyer (talk • contribs) 03:47, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

To anyone who comes across this thread please see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Bloomberg - Are you a robot?. MarnetteD|Talk 17:05, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

reFill

Hello @Zhaofeng Li:, I am from ckbwiki. I want to say why reFill tool doesn't work on ckbwiki? Thanks! --⇒ AramTalk 11:56, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

Tool down again?

Every time I've tried to use it these past couple of days I've gotten an "Internal Server Error" message. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 15:15, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

See also discussion at User talk:Zhaofeng Li#Blue whale reFill errors. --Nessie (📥) 16:56, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

​ It indeed is still down. thank you for looking into it! Lotje (talk) 17:02, 15 January 2020 (UTC)

@Cyberpower678: The tool has been down for a few days, is this something you're able to troubleshoot? Thanks!17:38, 16 January 2020 (UTC)

A most useful tool-thankyou! A pity it is down :| DadaNeem (talk) 01:58, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

• Getting the same message --valereee (talk) 16:30, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Agreed - I can't write an article without reFill! It's invaluable. Please get it up and running again. KJP1 (talk) 17:46, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Hello, Zhaofeng Li! I've been getting the same error message other people have been receiving of "internal server error." The tool's been inoperable for days on end. If you could fix the bug, it would be most appreciated, as I've come to rely on the tool. Thank you so much, and for creating the tool to begin with! Your friend, --Caterpillar84 (talk) 23:31, 17 January 2020 (UTC)

Hello Caterpillar84 I wanted to let you know that ZL has not edited since July 2019. You could try asking what is going on at the WP:VPT. MarnetteD|Talk 00:00, 18 January 2020 (UTC)

Hooray, here he is again... Lotje (talk) 12:01, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

Not for me, it isn't. I'm getting the internal server error again. And Reflinks is also troublesome, frequently not letting you log in so the amended page can't be saved. I've just had to do this, Rudby Hall, by a very laborious cut-and-paste. PLEASE can someone make it work again! KJP1 (talk) 16:40, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

Lotje whatever happened on the French Wiki is good but Refill 2 is still not working here on the English one. Caterpillar started this thread Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Refill not working so readers here can check on that for updates. MarnetteD|Talk 19:44, 19 January 2020 (UTC)

Can a revert to old be written to the source or can a temporary fork be made ?

"I've tried a few times to use this tool in the last couple days. Now, I get a "Failed An error has occurred." when using." Chris-troutman Dec 25, 2019, 7:53 AM PSTGithub

English uses: https://tools.wmflabs.org/refill/ng/

French uses:

https://tools.wmflabs.org/refill/index.php

https://tools.wmflabs.org/refill/result.php

24.7.104.84 (talk) 01:30, 21 January 2020 (UTC)

Hurray, hurray, the tool is back! Thank ever so much Lotje (talk) 16:52, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

It's working for me too. Thanks to whoever got it going again. --Nessie (📥) 17:15, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

@NessieVL: indeed, that is the probleme, one never knows whom to thank. I hope the user(s) who made it work again will read this. :-) Lotje (talk) 04:26, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

Hello all. Please take a moment and see this thread Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Refill not working which mentions who is now running Refill 2. I've already dropped a note of thanks here User talk:Cyberpower678#Yippee!. Cheers. MarnetteD|Talk 15:28, 23 January 2020 (UTC)

BBC

I've just noticed that refill was trying to change a URL from:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50741916

to:

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50741916

(i.e. .co.uk to .com)

Why is this, and how can it be prevented? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:26, 9 February 2020 (UTC)

Domain reselling pages

reFill is undoubtedly a useful tool, but it would be very significantly more so if it could detect domain reselling pages and use that as a trigger that an archive version is needed - see for example the second change in the first diff line at [4].

The following strings in the page title (a non-exclusive list) should all trigger the tool to not use those details and prompt for human action:

• "This website is for sale"
• "Deze website is te koop"
• "Website disabled"
• "HugeDomains.com"
• "Denna sida är till salu"
• "for sale!"
• "主婦が消費者金融に対して思う事"
• "page not found"
• "ACTUAL ARTICLE TITLE BELONGS HERE"

(all are examples I've seen reFill (users) thoughtlessly place into articles. Thryduulf (talk) 12:53, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

'deadurl' parameter

Refill is still using |deadurl, which is deprecated, rather than the preferred |url-status=dead; this causes an error message to be displayed. Here's an example. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 12:56, 13 February 2020 (UTC)

We need you!

It is a real shame this tool doesn't operate as it used to. It was an absolute godsend, but now it fails to operate so often. KJP1 (talk) 22:20, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

What do you mean by "fails to operate" KJP1? It works as it always has for me. Now it does occasionally hang up at the beginning but if you get that "waiting for the next..." message then just hit ctrl+F5 and that gets it going . MarnetteD|Talk 22:27, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Don't forget that reflinks and Citer are also available. You may know about them already but I thought I'd mention them in case. MarnetteD|Talk 22:30, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

I'm glad it works for you - for me, I get the wheel of death, endless "waiting..", and then a frozen screen. It never used to have these issues. KJP1 (talk) 22:36, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Please do try the ctrl+F5 KJP1. That usually gets it going though I do have to use it a second time every so often. MarnetteD|Talk 23:07, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Really appreciate the advice and shall give it a go. KJP1 (talk) 23:11, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Best of luck and happy editing KJP1. MarnetteD|Talk 23:13, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

@KJP1: you could try to use it in another language you are familiar with, there is more than English to pick from... :-) Lotje (talk) 17:30, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Refill

The refill tool is not working again. It states there is a Backend error. And right now it does not process requests at all. [5] BabbaQ (talk) 16:52, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

BabbaQ there is some info about the situation here Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#WP:REFILL is down. I don't know how much longer it will be out of service. I am using reflinks for the time being. MarnetteD|Talk 19:55, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

MarnetteD - Reflinks isn't letting me sign in, and therefore I can't use that either! Any advice. Woe is me! KJP1 (talk) 17:34, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

KJP1 all the tools went down yesterday. I have just gotten on WikiP today and haven't checked to see if things have been fixed. If not we just have to wait until the boffins get things going again. Cheers. MarnetteD|Talk 18:04, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

Citation bot's gone down as well. It fixed one page for me yesterday and hasn't worked again since. This is Paul (talk) 16:35, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Worked for me just now, thank you so much to all involved. Caro7200 (talk) 16:25, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

It had been automatically migrated to a new cloud environment but needed some manual TLC to get it working there. Thanks to BStorm_(WMF) (talk · contribs) for working her magic. Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 17:07, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Error with one specific website

With this edit Refill changed http://jalgpall.ee/koondis/7/koosseis to http://jalgpall.ee/koondis/koosseis which does not take you to the correct place. Another example of similar mistake (removes player ID from database link), same website. Can it be fixed? Pelmeen10 (talk) 19:13, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

301 moved permanently

"301 Moved Permanently".[6] Unreal7 (talk) 11:03, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

FYI all

To those posing here please be aware that Zhaofeng is no longer maintaining Refill. Unfortunately, though the tool is still being tinkered with, no one who is working on it seems to have this page on their watchlist. I know how frustrating this is so I have opened this thread Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Requests for help regarding refill to see if we can get some responses and help here. I don't know whether it will get results or not so you might try posting new questions about the tool at that VP in the future. Thanks to all for trying to get this tool up to date. MarnetteD|Talk 19:40, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Refill logs me out

Every time I used Refill, it logs me out of Wikipedia. So when I save the changes made by Refill, they are saved while I am logged out. Has anyone else had this problem? Pinging Zhaofeng Li. Thanks. Sundayclose (talk) 17:54, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Same here. Caro7200 (talk) 19:04, 16 March 2020 (UTC)

Same - please see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Logged out by using REFILL. GiantSnowman 17:06, 21 March 2020 (UTC)

Same here 7&6=thirteen (☎) 13:33, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

@Sundayclose:, @Caro7200: 7&6=thirteen please take a look here. Might be helful. :-) Lotje (talk) 15:03, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. I will try to pay closer attention. Refill2 keeps doing this to me. I was logged in; refill2 unlogs me. I am using Google Chrome to edit. Windows 10. I love what Refill2 does, but find this issue to be annoying. I have had to ask Admins to redact my IP address. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 15:13, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

@Lotje: Thanks, but I'm a little confused by the post. In my experience it's not true that if I save an edit by Refill and then log back in, the edit is then attributed to my account rather than my IP. It always shows up as my IP. However, I have found that sometimes when the preview page come up and I log in before I save, and then use the Back button to get back to the preview, it attributes the edit to my account. Pain in the ass, but a workaround. Sundayclose (talk) 15:14, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

@Sundayclose: that is exactly what I do now: I log in before I save: -) Lotje (talk) 15:16, 29 March 2020 (UTC)

"Fix wikitext" offline

Hello everyone. The tool to "Fix wikitext" function (under the "Toggle advanced input" option) returns a "502 Bad Gateway" error. The "Fix page" function appears to work as normal. Could someone check on this? Regards, IceWelder [✉] 12:04, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

This appears to happen only from text sized 3,006 bytes and up. Text pastes up to 3,005 bytes work fine. IceWelder [✉] 18:14, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Duplicate template arguments

Hi, in this edit on frwiki, it seems that reFill put 2 arguments "issue" with different values in the template. Can it be fixed? --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 17:12, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Did you ask User:Cauannos whether they filled in one of the |issue= values manually? Did you copy the pre-ReFill text to a sandbox and run ReFill on it to try to reproduce the error? The second step, especially, can help you determine whether this is actually a bug. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:25, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Hi Jonesey95. I just tried reFill directly with <ref>http://www.persee.fr/doc/rhef_0300-9505_1993_num_79_202_1097</ref> (fr:Utilisateur/NicoVTest), and the result suggested by reFill is <ref>{{article|url=https://www.persee.fr/doc/rhef_0300-9505_1993_num_79_202_1097|titre=La Mission mariste en Nouvelle-Calédonie, 1843-1903|premier=Frédéric|nom=Anglevielle|date=20 avril 1993|éditeur=|périodique=Revue d'histoire de l'Église de France|issue=79|issue=202|pages=115–137|via=www.persee.fr|doi=10.3406/rhef.1993.1097}}</ref> with 2 issue arguments, one with value 79, one with value 202. So the problem is not from the user but from the tool. --NicoV ^{(Talk on frwiki)} 20:29, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Well done. That sounds like a real bug, then. I suspect that there is a mistranslation of the "volume" and "issue" parameters, which look like they should be |volume= (79 for that reference) and |numéro= (202 for that reference) for fr:Modèle:Article. – Jonesey95 (talk) 22:33, 20 April 2020 (UTC)

Tool down again again?

Hello Zhaofeng Li, looks like the tool is down (since yesterday). Can you take a look? Thnks. Lotje (talk) 12:17, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

Hello Lotje. As mentioned above Zhaofeng is no longer maintaining this tool. Yes it is down - hopefully it is just a maintenance issue and it will return soon. I wish there was a Wikipedia:Refill noticeboard where we could be kept up to date on this sort of thing. MarnetteD|Talk 16:10, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

Update: It is working again. Yippee. MarnetteD|Talk 16:25, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

Backend error

List of Crips subgroups

https://tools.wmflabs.org/refill/ng/result/fixWikipage/5337cf37-6ff2-4fce-9719-161e06634bd5 ?!?

All the best: Rich Farmbrough (the apparently calm and reasonable) 16:29, 21 May 2020 (UTC).

DeadURL

Hi Zhaofeng Li, In this edit, the script adds "|deadurl=y" however it would seem that that parameter is deprecated as it now says ". Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (help)",
Thanks, Regards, –Davey2010^Talk 22:24, 6 May 2020 (UTC)

User:Davey2010, it is, I have been removing a lot of these in the last few months. The new parameter for dead urls is url-status=dead.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough (the apparently calm and reasonable) 16:31, 21 May 2020 (UTC).

Hi Rich, Many thanks for doing so, Admittedly I don't have the willpower to do these as the way I see it is the work being put in to replace them - Someone in the meantime could be using the Refill tool and adding the deprecated parameter to another article, I wouldn't mind helping once the bug's fixed but for now I'd be fighting a losing battle lol, Anyway thanks again for your efforts in fixing these, Thanks, –Davey2010^Talk 16:46, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

I have just put in a code modification request for this on GitHub. Hopefully it will be picked up and put live. Keith D (talk) 00:44, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

Thanks so much Keith D. This will save us some hunting and copy/pasting timey wimey work. Fingers crossed that it gets done :-) MarnetteD|Talk 01:20, 29 May 2020 (UTC)

Error report - Alice Cohen

Errors when running on the Alice Cohen article include incorrect first/last parameters and no work/publisher parameter

• Task Name fixWikipage
• Task ID 36b71856-1689-47f1-b017-ada62fe5cec5
• Change ID 0
• Old Text https://imposemagazine.com/features/alice-cohens-house-of-mirrors
• New Text {{Cite web|url=https://imposemagazine.com/features/alice-cohens-house-of-mirrors|title=Alice Cohen's house of mirrors|first=About Liz Pelly Liz Pelly is a Contributing Editor at Impose full profile/ twitter/|last=www|date=October 29, 2015}}

— Preceding unsigned comment added by GoingBatty (talk • contribs) 17:21, 14 June 2020 (UTC)

Error report - Sand theft

When run on the article Sand theft, reFill fixes the URL, but reports it as a deadurl. In addition, Template:Cite web no longer supports |deadurl= and uses |url-status= instead.

• Task Name fixWikipage
• Task ID e145a8cb-5459-4a82-949c-3e2f9c16bffb
• Change ID 0
• Old Text [http://www.globalwitness.org/library/shifting-sand-how-singapore%E2%80%99s-demand-cambodian-sand-threatens-ecosystems-and-undermines-good Shifting Sands report] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131004064407/http://www.globalwitness.org/library/shifting-sand-how-singapore%E2%80%99s-demand-cambodian-sand-threatens-ecosystems-and-undermines-good |date=4 October 2013 }}
• New Text {{Cite web|url=https://www.globalwitness.org/en/archive/shifting-sand-how-singapores-demand-cambodian-sand-threatens-ecosystems-and-undermines-good/|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20131004064407/http://www.globalwitness.org/library/shifting-sand-how-singapore%E2%80%99s-demand-cambodian-sand-threatens-ecosystems-and-undermines-good|deadurl=y|title=Shifting Sand: how Singapore’s demand for Cambodian sand threatens ecosystems and undermines good governance|archivedate=4 October 2013|website=Global Witness}}

GoingBatty (talk) 22:14, 14 June 2020 (UTC)

In the same article, it uses |via=www.theguardian.com instead of |work=The Guardian...

• Task Name fixWikipage
• Task ID e145a8cb-5459-4a82-949c-3e2f9c16bffb
• Change ID 1
• Old Text https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/jul/01/riddle-of-the-sands-the-truth-behind-stolen-beaches-and-dredged-islands
• New Text {{Cite web|url=https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/jul/01/riddle-of-the-sands-the-truth-behind-stolen-beaches-and-dredged-islands|title=Is the world running out of sand? The truth behind stolen beaches and dredged islands|first=Neil|last=Tweedie|date=1 July 2018|via=www.theguardian.com}}

...and does not create any work/publisher parameter for this reference

• Task Name fixWikipage
• Task ID e145a8cb-5459-4a82-949c-3e2f9c16bffb
• Change ID 2
• Old Text https://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2018/07/03/singapore-under-scrutiny-for-alleged-involvement-in-illegal-sand-import-for-land-reclamation/
• New Text {{Cite web|url=https://www.theonlinecitizen.com/2018/07/03/singapore-under-scrutiny-for-alleged-involvement-in-illegal-sand-import-for-land-reclamation/|title=Singapore under scrutiny for alleged involvement in illegal sand import for land reclamation|date=3 July 2018}}

GoingBatty (talk) 22:18, 14 June 2020 (UTC)

GoingBatty As I have posted above Zhaofeng is no longer editing or maintaining this tool. Those who are working on it do not seem to have this talk page on their watchlist. You can try posting at the WP:VPT though I can't guarantee any kind of reply. I only mention this because I know your posts take some effort and I am sorry that it seems to be in vain. MarnetteD|Talk 22:24, 14 June 2020 (UTC)

@MarnetteD: Thank you - I've posted at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#reFill error reports?. One nice thing about reFill is that it creates the bulleted information automatically, so it was not a lot of work to report the errors. GoingBatty (talk) 00:21, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know and good luck GoingBatty. MarnetteD|Talk 00:56, 15 June 2020 (UTC)

Down again - 16 June 2020?

Is it down again? Can't get it to work today, even with CtrlF5. KJP1 (talk) 10:44, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

frankly pathetic, it constantly breaks. Why can't Wikimedia have multiple independent versions? Sheila1988 (talk) 11:18, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

Yep it is down again. Please see Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#reFill appears to be down again for more infio. MarnetteD|Talk 15:53, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

ee.co.uk

I've noticed trusted editors replacing references by ee.co.uk when using refill. Examples: Malagasy ariary, Broken Dog. Is this a bug? Certes (talk) 10:38, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Hello Certes. As mentioned above this talk page is not monitored by those who are now operating Refill. You can try asking at the WP:VPT. MarnetteD|Talk 16:06, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

ReFill is consistently inserting false information

I have seen many edits like this which insert false information into fields. If the tool won't be fixed to fix these, please explicitly advise users about it in the documentation. I would request that the name insertion be fixed and that the tool have a way of searching Wikidata for official websites and insert the publication's name instead of the URI. (i.e. in this case, |first=Parry |last=Gettelman |work=The Orlando Sentinel instead of the nonsense |first=Parry Gettelman of The Sentinel|last=Staff|website=OrlandoSentinel.com.) ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:26, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

@Koavf: As the previous editor to make this mistake, I should probably pass on the information that this talk page is not monitored by those who are now operating Refill but you can try asking at the WP:VPT. Certes (talk) 19:52, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

Certes, Thanks. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:59, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

Koavf, the webpage indicates that that is the author though.. Note that the article is from 1990.. Don't expect old content like that to have perfect data across the multiple generations of a publishers content management system. If people do not check the content generated and blindly trust it, there is not much that can be done about mistakes like this. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:16, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

TheDJ, The source is simply <span itemprop="author">Parry Gettelman of The Sentinel Staff</span> and the metadata reads (in part) <meta name="author" content="Parry Gettelman of The Sentinel Staff" />; there is no structured data that says anything like surname=Staff. This tool should not assume that the last bit in a string is a surname. Cf. (e.g.) Dutch names like "van der Hoof" or East Asian names where the surname is first. Those are definitely things that can be fixed but they require a lot more intervention than just "last string of characters is the surname". This is exactly why I don't use tools like this. I'm not suggesting that it's easy to fix but there are in principle ways to set up filters like not publishing "last=Staff" or disallowing more than 170 characters or five spaces for the first name. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 11:26, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

Koavf, well yes, if you cannot accept occasional mistakes, then someone either needs to fix the tool, or we can throw away the tool and all its benefits. The latter seems more logical to me, with the dropping amount of activity of the youngsters. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:30, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

If we disallow "Staff" as a surname (times how many languages?), then I expect we would get complaints from someone who wants to create citations to works be Leopold Staff. Maybe what we need is some occasional nagware to remind people to check the output. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:36, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

Or perhaps editors can apply WP:SOFIXIT. No tool is perfect and it is hard to fathom why editors expect them to be so. If a bare url has been formatted but there is something an editor thinks should be added or removed from the cite template than just make the needed edit. Editors can't read other editors minds as to how they think a ref should be formatted (and I have seen 100s of 1000s of formatting styles in my years of working on these) and a tool can't either. The fact that the people currently maintaining this tool can't easily be contacted (and several editors have tried at the WP:VPT) means getting this tool to format things the way you want them to be is like stepping into the void - it might work out or it might not. Additionally, the loss of reflinks means I have had to go from manually formatting a handful of refs each day to several dozen and the workload gets to be a bit much at times. So any editing that can be done by others to get things the way they want them is much appreciated. MarnetteD|Talk 22:04, 6 July 2020 (UTC)

reFill2 404s and reFill(0) just hangs

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T257481

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T257471

Seems to have started today. No idea where else to ask. Am I alone in seeing this? Fiddle Faddle 13:30, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

You're not alone. Cabayi (talk) 14:22, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

This also happened several weeks ago. Fingers crossed that it means they are working on fixes to the tool and that normal service will resume soon. Giant Snowman (a great username) has opened this thread Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#ReFill 2 so we might get same answers there - more fingers crossed. MarnetteD|Talk 15:13, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

• Sooo..... Did anyone notice that the URL for Refill changed over from Wmflabs to Toolforge? I also noticed that when running Refill now, the interface is somewhat different than it was probably 24-48 hours ago. Steel1943 (talk) 17:39, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

I vaguely remember seeing a post about that at the VPT. I think the switchover is also why reflinks disappeared completely. MarnetteD|Talk 18:22, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

...At this point, it makes me wonder if ReFill will become another defunct tool, given the fact the editor associated with the parent page of this subpage hasn't edited for over a year, and I don't know if there is anyone else maintaining this tool. Steel1943 (talk) 19:09, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

I have read different names at the VPT most prominently Cyperpower. That hard working editor has so many irons in the fire though that I'm not sure that refill is at the top of the list. If this tool leaves then I'm retiring from this Sisyphean task and going back to other editing :-) MarnetteD|Talk 19:23, 7 July 2020 (UTC)

Still not working. Sheila1988 (talk) 10:45, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

Indeed, sadly, still not working. Lotje (talk) 15:10, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

It has been working for the last two days and I just ran it and it worked fine. Please make sure you are using the new refill2 toolforge version and not the old wmflabs one. Also be aware that you can start the tool from any of the various {{Bare URLs}} templates by clicking on the word refill in the (One such tool to fix up some types of bare URLs is reFill, see also its documentation) message in the template. MarnetteD|Talk 15:45, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

Thank you! it's working fine off the new link. Sheila1988 (talk) 21:03, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

You are welcome Sheila1988. I'm glad it is working for you now. The changes to the tool are hard to keep up with :-) MarnetteD|Talk 22:11, 11 July 2020 (UTC)

Huray, Huray, it is working again. Thank you ever so much who-ever or what-ever team fixed it. Lotje (talk) 07:06, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

tool may be adding blank lines to lede of articles

With Cocomelon recently the tool added two blank lines to the beginning of the article while removing a {{linkrot}} template. It's possible that this happens only in the case when the linkrot template is in absolute initial position and followed by a blank line, but can this behavior be fixed even so? Thanks, —Soap— 18:23, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

As mentioned several times above the people operating refill2 do not have this talk page on their watchlist Soap so you will need to ask at the WP:VPT I can tell you that this happens - your best bet is to remove those blank lines yourself. Cheers. MarnetteD|Talk 18:42, 17 July 2020 (UTC)

reFill adding invalid "deadurl" parameter to templates

Well ... reFill is apparently adding the now-invalid "deadurl" parameter to citation templates ... as seen here. As much as I am aware this tool may never get updated again, just a heads up since it is now adding a deprecated parameter in templates. Steel1943 (talk) 17:35, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Sadly, it has been doing that for a long time now Steel1943. In User talk:Zhaofeng Li/reFill#DeadURL thread above Keith D mentions putting a request at Github about fixing this but that was back in May so it may have fallen by the wayside. I have gotten in the habit of, after running the tool, checking the ref section to see if there are any of those red "invalid parameters" messages that need to be fixed. Cheers. MarnetteD|Talk 19:02, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Yes I got no response from the owner of the software, even tried e-mailing them but without any response. They have occasionally been active on Github since I put in the request for change, and supplied the changes required to fix the problem. If we have someone who could set-up a copy and knows how to deploy to the live environment then the change can be made. Keith D (talk) 20:41, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for trying Keith D and for filling us in on your efforts. MarnetteD|Talk 20:48, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

Generated ID in <ref name=ID> incorrect

Running Refill 2 on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddleback_caterpillar generates incorrect IDs in <ref name=ID>. — Lentower (talk) 00:54, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

Lentower per the above no one maintaining this tool is monitoring posts here. Your best bet is to post at the WP:VPT and hope for a response. 03:36, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

Failing again? "Waiting for an available worker."

Can't get it to work today. Sheila1988 (talk) 20:48, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

I'm guessing they are tinkering with it Sheila1988 or at least I'm hoping that is what is going on. With luck it'll be functioning again in a day or so. MarnetteD|Talk 22:27, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

@Sheila1988, MarnetteD, and Zhaofeng Li: Aparently not. Unfotunally though, Zhaofeng Li/reFill wasn't active for over a month, so I think one have to do it manually. Victor Schmidt (talk) 07:59, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

Victor Schmidt FYI ZL is no longer editing so your ping to him will go unanswered - sorry about that. The tool went through some changes several weeks ago and has been working fine until yesterday. Please make sure you are using the new refill2 toolforge version and not the old wmflabs one. If you have any other questions you can try asking at the WP:VPT though I can't guarantee that you will get an answer. Cheers. MarnetteD|Talk 16:19, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

I've reported to the Wikimedia Cloud Services team. Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 16:41, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

Thanks Curb Safe Charmer. Much appreciated. MarnetteD|Talk 16:52, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

thankyou, it seems to be back up now! Sheila1988 (talk) 17:00, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

Yippee. With the demise of reflinks we have both hands tied behind our backs whenever refill 2 goes down :-) MarnetteD|Talk 17:27, 17 August 2020 (UTC)

Glad the tool in on the road again. Thanks to however being able to fix it ! Lotje (talk) 08:05, 18 August 2020 (UTC)

Error report - Monetary policy of the United States

[7]

For the IGM link, it said "No title found". Benjamin (talk) 21:35, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

For the other IGM link lower down in the article, it seemed to tried to add some nonsense before the URL [8], but then I didn't see any difference in the edit window. Benjamin (talk) 21:40, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

Suggestion: dual mode

Many thanks for this tool. I use it often to ensure that named references are set up correctly. Sometimes editors introduce multiple named references with the same content and this tool does a very nice job of rectifying those situations. In fact, it does a more thorough job than AWB does and I trust it more to do it correctly. Sometimes, that is all I want it to do, so the thought occurred to me that maybe the choice to run in "full" mode where it performs all processes that it currently offers, or a "simple" mode where it just takes care of the named reference issue. Just food for thought. Thanks again! Dawnseeker2000 09:38, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Good idea but the problem with any changes is that the tool is currently unsupported as the owner is no longer around and we have been unable to get anyone to take it over. Keith D (talk) 10:35, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Ah OK. Thanks for that. I hadn't realized. Dawnseeker2000 04:58, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Jammed again?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T264233

Been waiting for an available worker a lot. Fiddle Faddle 07:43, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

@Curb Safe Charmer: You were able to report this last time. I tried to follow your route and fell at a hurdle deep inside. Please will you make a further report. Can we consider how to put a big red button "here" so reports can be simplified? Outside my skill set. Fiddle Faddle 08:12, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

@Timtrent: I am just packing for a short wikibreak, and I won't have time to do this before I go, sorry! Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 10:07, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Curb Safe Charmer, we all deserve a bit of fun. Enjoy your break Fiddle Faddle 10:22, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Curb Safe Charmer, yeh enjoy the break, can't wait till y're back Lotje (talk) 15:07, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

The tool is still not working. --BabbaQ (talk) 15:47, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

I think I have managed to follow Curb Safe Charmer path and raised a report about this. Keith D (talk) 19:41, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Keith D, Awesome. Wikipedia thanks you. Do you think there is a Big Red Button route that can be created? Fiddle Faddle 19:55, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Timtrent You would need to have a Prefabricator login set up, then this link gives you a blank report to fill in. You could get some way of filling in the form detail to automate it properly.

If there is some standard text for the report title and the fault description they could be added to the URL using "title" and "description" parameters. Keith D (talk) 20:11, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Keith D, Wow. That is pretty arduous. I managed to jump the hoops, but they are pretty arcane. Would you mind somehow summarising the instructors and placing them in an obvious panel on the user page here, at least as far as the blank form? Fiddle Faddle 21:05, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Back working again, thanks to Keith D's report Fiddle Faddle 21:09, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Timtrent They appear to have created a new project on Prefabricator for reports on Refill. I have put a box at the top of the page with a link that fills in the project and title for the report. You just need to fill in a description and submit. You can change the text if you think there is a better wording. Keith D (talk) 23:07, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

@Keith D: Thanks ever so much! Lotje (talk) 05:56, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

Keith D, Thank you for bringing far more skill than I have to bear on this. I knew "what" to do, but you knew how to do it. Fiddle Faddle 06:31, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

Smarter parameter ordering from reFill is highly desirable

Hi, Zhaofeng Li. I've been wanting to discuss this for a while and I recently came across this edit made using reFill 2 which prompted me again (@Ser Amantio di Nicolao: courtesy ping). There are several things about the formatting of the references generated with reFill that are undesirable.

• Not using spaces before the pipe character makes the output less friendly than it could be because it's hard to read. Worse, since browsers nowadays often do textwrapping in HTML textfield forms, long unbroken strings often wrap in weird ways that make the text harder to read and edit, not just for the reference itself but for the surrounding text. Using a space before each parameter's pipe character would be highly desirable.
• The ordering of the output from reFill is far from optimal. It's not clear that it's been considered. For example, it seems to put |url= first and |accessdate= last. This causes problems for editors because they tend not to realize they are both there because they are so far apart. So they do things like updating |url= without updating the unseen |accessdate=. Some parameters simply belong together like peanut butter and jelly. While there's no official guideline or policy stating that there's any preferred order for cite template paramters (and that makes sense for editors editing by hand) it makes a lot of sense that automated tools should consider ordering if any benefit whatsoever is gained. I think the gain in readability is actually large and definitely worth while. Look forward to hearing your thoughts. I have a well honed recommendation for ordering cite template parameters with rationale that I've refined over tens of thousands of edits, which I can suggest later. Jason Quinn (talk) 09:14, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

That edit is yet another example of ReFill producing crap cs1|2 citation templates that are blithely ignored by the editors who use the tool: |first=Dan Mangan,Christina|last=Wilkie. If I wrote a bot that performed as poorly as this tool, the bot's approval would have been jerked long since. Every edit made by this tool is suspect. Always. Slow down. Inspect each and every change that the tool proposes. Stop making work that other editors have to clean up.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 11:02, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Z has been gone for over a year now. See above threads which mention the state of maintanence for this tool. You might try posting at the WP:VPT. MarnetteD|Talk 13:07, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Forgot to ping Trappist the monk and Jason Quinn. MarnetteD|Talk 13:09, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

I know that. My rant is against editors who use this flawed tool and who routinely ignore the crap that it produces and, by doing so, burden others with the necessary repairs. Editor Jason Quinn should not have to repair edits that Editor Ser Amantio di Nicolao made when using this tool. I think that ReFill should be killed and not restored until there is an active, willing, and able maintainer.

There are quite a few mentions of WP:VPT in earlier discussions on this page. I have seen mention of ReFill at WP:VPT but, except for tool restarts, it is not at all obvious that posts to WP:VPT produce tangible results. If those posts had produced tangible results, the |deadurl=y problem would have been fixed long ago. It has not been (this edit from today – two obviously broken cs1|2 templates; I didn't look very closely).

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:55, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Clearly reFill invokes strong emotion. It definitely is a good question whether it should be used. But ReFill is not the only citation insertion tool to do the things listed above. The same article above has edits that show similar issues with the VisualEditor Citation Tool. It even makes the same mistake with |first=Dan Mangan,Christina|last=Wilkie. I started a discussion on MW about this. I haven't followed the WMF politics of the VisualEditor for a couple years now but I'm still under the assumption the WMF wants it to be the main editor. If so, it has to be good. And people need to consider the quality of the wiki-markup being generated. Jason Quinn (talk) 12:47, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Yep. But, alas, that talk page at MW is moribund so may not be very productive.

The common element between ve and ReFill is, I think, mw:Citoid. Citoid is dependent on the quality of the data that are scraped from websites and retrieved from databases. Citoid can't very easily do anything about scraped data so it comes back to editors actually checking what the tools suggest each-and-every time. I know, that will never happen because, for ve especially, new users are pushed to use ve so the tool comes with the imprimatur of quality, right? After all, Wikipedia wouldn't provide a tool that isn't 100% correct all the time... More experienced editors know (or certainly should know) that the tools are flawed so they know that they should check each-and-every-edit that these tools suggest. Clearly, as the example edit here shows, they do not.

For ve, parameter order is, I think, controlled by TemplateData. So for {{cite book}}, as an example, the order is defined in the table paramOrder (Template:Cite book/TemplateData). If you believe that you have a better scheme for ordering parameters in wikitext, you might start by editing the TemplateData for the various cs1|2 templates.

WP:ProveIt creates cs1|2 templates (and uses Citoid). I seem to recall seeing a complaint somewhere about parameter order used by that tool but can't remember where. Also, WP:RefToolbar uses citoid and, no doubt, has yet another cs1|2 parameter ordering scheme...

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:42, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

That information is very valuable to me. Thank you, Trappist! I will look into it over the coming days. I may contact you again for further consultation on these issues. Thank you. Jason Quinn (talk) 02:40, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

Down?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T271989

Hi, is the tool down? Thank you for your time. Lotje (talk) 15:27, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

Lotje, Also down today for me (in Ireland) several attempts to fix pages I encountered via page curation JW 1961 Talk 16:15, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

@Keith D: or anyone else who sees this that has a phab log in - which I don't. When you have a moment would you please get the process started to get this tool going again. It has been down for several hours now so it seems to be more than routine maintenance. Thank you. MarnetteD|Talk 20:12, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

I have raised a ticket for this. Keith D (talk) 21:22, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

Many thanks @Keith D:. MarnetteD|Talk 00:40, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

Still seems to be down for me...is there a way to track the ticket's progress? — Mainly 23:15, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

You should be able to click on the ticket number to see what is happening - but you may need access to the Phabricator system. Currently all that has happened is it has been assigned to Aklapper (Andre Klapper (WMF)). Keith D (talk) 23:32, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

Hoera, hoera, hoera, our beloved reFill tool is back . Thanks to the busy bees out there somewhere!!! Thank you, thank you ever so much. Lotje (talk) 07:11, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Interesting that no one has updated the ticket to indicate they have fixed the problem. Keith D (talk) 12:18, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

I'm glad it is working for someone as it isn't working for me yet :-( MarnetteD|Talk 15:42, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Looks to be working again. Thanks and cheers to all. MarnetteD|Talk 17:45, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

They closed my ticket and did it under another one. See T272161 for detail. Keith D (talk) 19:12, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T272483

Is ReFill down again? Thank you for your time. Lotje (talk) 13:30, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

I have raised another ticket. Keith D (talk) 13:55, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

As always thanks to you both for working on this. MarnetteD|Talk 18:39, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Update - ticket has just been allocated to Brooke who got things going last time. Keith D (talk) 19:20, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

@Lotje and MarnetteD: Looks like we are back in action again. Keith D (talk) 21:13, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

Great news @Keith D:. More good news is that reflinks has been resurrected. It has a couple improvements over the old version - one drawback is you have to make sure and set it to "interactive" each time you use it otherwise it only adds a bot generated title to a bare url. Very nice to have all these options for fixing bare urls again :-) MarnetteD|Talk 21:22, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

@MarnetteD:, indeed, as you rightly say back in action with this magical tool. Thanks to all having taken care of it. Lotje (talk) 06:28, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

Help help help...

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T278211

Is reFill down or am I the only one encountering this? Thank you for your time. Lotje (talk) 08:40, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

@Lotje: Yes, it is stuck again. I have reported it. Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 08:46, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Thank very much Curb Safe Charmer. Lotje (talk) 08:48, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

@Curb Safe Charmer: up and working again Thank you busy bees wherever you might beeeeee. Lotje (talk) 09:16, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

@Curb Safe Charmer: Have to crrect myself, only in German is working from what I see. (sadly) Lotje (talk) 10:42, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

Lotje, Curb_Safe_Charmer, still down, yesterday also issues. CommanderWaterford (talk) 19:47, 23 March 2021 (UTC)

@Curb Safe Charmer: @CommanderWaterford:, it seems strange, but on the German Wikipedia reFill is still happy to assist, remarkable... Wonder what it does on other languages. Lotje (talk) 06:16, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Did the test at the Dutch Wikipedia (knowing it might cost me my head :-) and also there it works. I'll keep watching... Lotje (talk) 07:04, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

It breaks down constantly, very frustrating. Sheila1988 (talk) 20:15, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Sheila1988, you might join the Ticket at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T278211 CommanderWaterford (talk) 20:29, 24 March 2021 (UTC)

Still down apparently, displaying only "Pending/Waiting for an available worker." after a request is submitted. General Ization ^Talk 17:27, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

The usual method of getting the service started has not worked. May be they will try again or come up with another solution. Keith D (talk) 20:34, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

In this thread Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Can anyone find out what is going on? Muboshgu mentions having contacted Dispenser. Let's hope at least one of the two tools gets fixed. This is the longest I can remember both of them being down at the same time (yes reflinks was gone for about a year but at least refill2 was operating during that time) Meanwhile Category:All articles with bare URLs for citations keeps growing and my attempts to use Citer to stem the tide are leading to a distinct feeling of being burned out :-/ Regards to all. MarnetteD|Talk 21:22, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

I have a question if anyone knows the answer. This tool gets fixed, then for unknown reasons (at least unknown to me) it stops working. How does that happen? Does someone tinker with the code, and if so do we know who? Sundayclose (talk) 21:45, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Good question Sundayclose. I have suggested a "bare url noticeboard" a couple times but I have no idea how to start one. My hope would be that the noticeboard would allow those tinkering with the tools to leave us messages about what is going on. From my limited understanding both tools are now maintained offsite so answers are even harder to come by then when we could contact the editors who created the tools here. MarnetteD|Talk 22:08, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Just to keep people up to date on ticket – Bstorm has added following comment.

I don't have much ability to troubleshoot why it isn't recovering. Nobody has changed it because it is unmaintained. If someone would like to take over the tool, that would be great. As is, it is stuck on python 3.4, which is dead software anyway.

It is logging completions of tasks, so it appears to be working some of the time at least, but I don't have any real insight into why it is throwing errors or even if those task completions are legitimate in the logs.

I deleted the webservice pod as well (refill tool), but I doubt that will have much impact. I can find nothing helpful that I can do without some pretty solid knowledge of the tool and a lot of time to rewrite parts of it. I hope this isn't the death of it, because I know people use it.

Not very hopeful. Keith D (talk) 01:49, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Also not working for me. Which is sad because this tool was very easy to use and worked great most of the time. Does anyone know of a simple to use alternative citation tool? Thanks, Archives908 (talk) 13:51, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Hello Archives908, an alternate easy tool to use is Citation Bot [9]. Wikiminds34 (talk) 14:55, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Hi Wikiminds34 and thanks for your help! Sadly, it doesn't seem to work for me either. I'm trying to reference a new article created, preferably in one shot like reFill allows. If the site works for you (or anyone else reading this), I'm trying to fill in bare references for Homeland Salvation Movement. Much appreciated! Archives908 (talk) 15:37, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

No problem! Unfortunately, the website doesn't work for me either. It works on Romanian Wikipedia and probably others. The English one is the only one that is not working for me. Wikiminds34 (talk) 15:45, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Oh ok, well I appreciate your assistance anyways. Cheers, Archives908 (talk) 15:48, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Oh no - not again. This tool is so helpful. I can't make the other suggested tool work either. Can Wikipedia not spend some money to maintain ReFill? It is invaluable for article creators. KJP1 (talk) 12:49, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

@KJP1: not only for article creators, also for the gnomes. Look at this... and the list is getting longer every day... (sigh) Lotje (talk) 13:00, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

Yes indeed - that's a horribly long list. I've just to to do them manualy, which is an absolute pain! KJP1 (talk) 13:04, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

• The refill tool is definitely still down. Not working for days.BabbaQ (talk) 17:34, 29 March 2021 (UTC)
• I don't know if anyone has done anything to fix it or if this has happened out of the blue, but is working for me now, as seen here. Microwave Anarchist (talk) 21:34, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Huray, Huray, reFill is up again, missed him so much!!! Thank you invisible creatures...

@Microwave Anarchist and Lotje:The original developer of the tool, Zhaofeng Li, briefly came out of retirement yesterday to update some components and make an improvement, resulting in it springing back into life. He has given me access to the internals, so if we have another outage hopefully I'll be able to troubleshoot it. Pinging @BabbaQ, KJP1, Archives908, Wikiminds34, Sheila1988, Keith D, Sundayclose, and General Ization: Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 13:06, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

@Curb Safe Charmer: big hug to Zhaofeng Li and thank you for keeping an eye on this precious tool. :-) Lotje (talk) 13:10, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Thank you. Great news!BabbaQ (talk) 16:11, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

Grateful thanks indeed. To Zhaofeng and to you. I can’t stress enough how incredibly valuable this tool is, to creators and others, as has been pointed out. It would be nothing short of a minor tragedy if it ceased to operate. I hope WF can do something to make its long-term future more secure, but huge appreciation to Curb Safe Charmer for their ongoing efforts. KJP1 (talk) 20:01, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

farsi

does it not work in farsi? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Baratiiman (talk • contribs) 14:54, 9 November 2020 (UTC)

@Baratiiman: please do sign your edits. And no it is not working in Farsi as yet. Lotje (talk) 15:31, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

Marks citation as edited but no edits have been made

• Task Name fixWikipage
• Task ID 5b6e03e6-0add-439e-9fba-169f76119532
• Change ID 4
• Old Text {{Cite web|url=http://www.amphionsemi.com/wp-content/uploads/Amphion-CS8142-One-Pager.pdf|title=CS8142 Preliminary Product Brief}}
• New Text {{Cite web|url=http://www.amphionsemi.com/wp-content/uploads/Amphion-CS8142-One-Pager.pdf|title=CS8142 Preliminary Product Brief}}

Nathanielcwm (talk) 04:44, 11 October 2020 (UTC)

Error report - Johannes Huebl

This diff demonstrates two errors in the edit to one of the citations. The first is that Refill has picked up the author of the comment at the bottom of the page, "Chris Stewart", not the author of the actual article, "Karen Alberg Grossman". The second is that Refill has picked up a load of extra HTML and leaves it showing in the Wikipedia article.

• Old text <ref>https://mr-mag.com/influencer-of-the-year-award-johannes-huebl/</ref>
• New text <ref>{{Cite web|url=https://mr-mag.com/influencer-of-the-year-award-johannes-huebl/|title=INFLUENCER OF THE YEAR AWARD: JOHANNES HUEBL|first=<img src="https://assets2 mr-mag com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/mr-default-150x150 png" width="100" height="100" alt="Avatar" class="avatar avatar-100wp-user-avatar wp-user-avatar-100 alignnone photo avatar-default" /> Chris Stewart|last=says|date=July 19, 2019}}</ref>

-- John of Reading (talk) 17:12, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

Possible reFill 2 bug

This edit introduced a broken reference name, can't tell if this was a bug or if it was due to human error. Note sure if reFill was really used or used properly, but since if it's a bug, it would be a pretty annoying one, I thought it was nevertheless worth reporting. Personuser (talk) 23:27, 21 March 2021 (UTC)

I have tried it on the version before it was run here and it does not produce the same result, so looks like the user may have done some modifications to the result. Keith D (talk) 00:16, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Whatever, it seems as if the bot has conked. - Derek R Bullamore (talk) 22:44, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

reFill is down

Apologies if this is common knowledge / wrong place to post. A few days ago I was getting stuck on a loading-type screen after starting a reFill request. Now I end up with a HTTP 502 Bad Gateway error. Daß Wölf 06:02, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

@Daß Wölf: Thanks for reporting, though I have justed used ReFill and it is working fine, so please could you try again? Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 08:40, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

@Curb Safe Charmer: Sorry, it appears the underlying problem was on my browser's end. The 502 error is gone now, but while my usual browser hung again at "Submitting your task", another one pulled through. Many thanks for maintaining reFill! Daß Wölf 16:32, 10 May 2021 (UTC)

The bot seems to have conked again. - Derek R Bullamore (talk) 15:26, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

@Derek R Bullamore: Seems fine to me, now at least? Can you retry? Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 16:04, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

Have done so and it is now working for me. Thank you. - Derek R Bullamore (talk) 17:21, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

Adding deprecated parameter "deadurl"?

While filling out refs for an article here, I see that it added a deadurl=y parameter to a citation template, which then caused the ref to throw an error. It suggested url-status=dead, which worked fine. Might warrant coding into the bot. jp×g 04:28, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

@JPxG: This has been raised several times (see above & archives). I put in a pull request on Gehub in May last year to fix the problem, but the originator is no longer active. In the last month while I was without a PC they came back to get Refill running again and a new maintainer came on board, but they do not appear to have picked up the change. @Curb Safe Charmer: Keith D (talk) 10:37, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

Noticed this bug as well today. Hopefully the change gets merged soon, should be pretty simple to fix. - Indefensible (talk) 01:32, 19 May 2021 (UTC)

bugs

At this edit, ReFill 2 created two broken cs1|2 templates from archive.is urls. In both cases, ReFill 2 failed to create |archive-date= when the snapshot date is clearly available in the archive.is urls. In both cases, ReFill 2 created |deadurl=y. That parameter was deprecated 3 September 2019 and has not been supported since 11 January 2020. More than a year later, this bug still has not been fixed.

ReFill 2 also created these parameter values:

|first=Deutsche – not an author's name (see Deutsche Welle)

|last=Welle (www.dw.com) – not an author's name

|title=Kosovo MPs elect lawyer Vjosa Osmani as president | DW | 04.04.2021 – title is "Kosovo MPs elect lawyer Vjosa Osmani as president"; the rest is not

These failures are likely because ReFill 2 relies on citoid which relies on the website that it scrapes so I can't lay this crap at ReFill 2's feet. But, this kind of crap, which I have fixed much much more often than I should, can be laid at the feet of the editors who use this tool. Please, editors, it is not a race. You are responsible for every edit that ReFill 2 suggests so you must take the time to inspect every citation that this tool creates. Do not make work for other editors to clean up. Both of the citations noted above bleed . When you see that, do something about it or abandon the edit.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 13:12, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

@Trappist the monk: thanks for reporting these issues here. ReFill has been unsupported for the last two years, so maintenance that should have taken place, like removing deprecated parameters, has not. In the last week I have stepped in, though I am looking for others to help. It will take me a while to get familiar with the code before I start to make changes. In the meantime, I have added a section to the project page explaining to users that they are responsible for their use of the tool and will have to manually fix some citations that it generates. I have used the examples that you have helpfully given above. The problem with the author name containing junk, or the title containing things that we don't want in the title of the citation are things that I don't envisage being fixed, however, as it will be difficult to code something to strip them out. That is, unless you are willing to provide a reliable regex? Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 15:10, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Yep, I know that you have stepped in and that is a good thing. I agree, there is nothing that can be done with sources that provide corrupt metadata on their web pages (there are a handful of Indian newspapers that are notorious abusers – troll through Category:CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list for examples of that).

My complaint for ReFill is |deadurl=y because it hasn't been supported for more than a year and the failure to create |archive-date= when filling a cs1|2 template from an archive snapshot url that has the snapshot timestamp. For the |deadurl=y problem, the correct parameter (if a parameter is needed at all) is |url-status=dead. The simple fix is to omit that parameter entirely because cs1|2 templates presume that |url= is dead when |archive-url= is present and has an assigned value. |url-status= is only needed when the source at |url= is known to be live (and so known to support the content of the en.wiki article) so that |title= links to the live url.

|archive-date= is required so if this tool is creating a |archive-url= parameter it must also create a |archive-date= parameter. There are valid archive urls that do not have timestamps so when a timestamp is not available, probably best to abandon the edit.

Thanks for taking on this task; you will, no doubt, make my life easier. If you have questions about how cs1|2 works, give me a shout.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 15:37, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

My thanks as well Curb Safe Charmer. Keeping the tool running and improving it is a huge and important task. If I can do anything to help I will be happy to do so. I am not as well versed in things as Trappist but I have been working with it for over four years so that experience may be of some help. There are two things that Wikipedia:Reflinks could do that you might adapt to refill (if possible). One is detecting dead links and adding that tag to the bare urls. The other is formatting PDF's. While reflinks couldn't get 100% of either of these it did get enough to be a big help. Now I know these come way way down the list of what you are dealing with so I just mention them for future reference. Thanks again a best wishes in your task of working on this tool. MarnetteD|Talk 17:53, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Ignoring options

The tool now appears to be ignoring the option to add |access-date= when expanding the bare urls. Keith D (talk) 23:12, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

The "o" option in the left toolbar now does the same as "reFill 2 New" option, the "o" option should bring up the options page to allow you to set the options before you run the tool. Keith D (talk) 13:09, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Enhancement request

Here is an enhancement request for the tool. If the <ref></ref> tags contain a capital letter the tool currently ignores the reference. Suggest that as a precursor to processing the tool starts by de-capping the tags and outputs the de-capped tags when it has done its processing. This should allow the tool to convert more bare URLs at the first usage. Keith D (talk) 10:46, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

I have had a look and possibly by modifying refill/backend/refill/transforms/mergeref.py to lowercase tag.tag on line 15 will do this. Keith D (talk) 23:20, 12 May 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your work on this Keith D. Though the use of capital R's doesn't happen very often it is a total pain to fix them when it does. Do you think adding a note to the instruction guidelines for references would help? MarnetteD|Talk 01:07, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

It may do. I was hoping that a fix to the code could do it in a single pass by picking up the reference regardless of the tag. Keith D (talk) 09:35, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

Gotcha Keith D. If you are successful than a note may not be needed. Now if we could just get editors to not put a period at the end of the url things would be peachy keen - almost :-) MarnetteD|Talk 16:27, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

accessdate enhancement suggestion

Would it be a lot of trouble to add today's date as the accessdate in the cite created for successfully processed bare urls? Alaney2k (talk) 20:09, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

I should add, in the format 'accessdate=YYYY-MM-DD' is fine. For example accessdate=2021-06-01. Of course if it could detect date settings for the article, and use that date format, that would be even better. Alaney2k (talk) 20:13, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

I would oppose any automated assertion of |access-date= because this tool is so often used to cleanup after editors who only provide a url as a reference. The purpose of |access-date= is to identify a point in time when the source linked from |url= supports the text in an en.wiki article. If I am not mistaken, this tool is not sufficiently sophisticated to confirm (without human intervention) that sources support our articles. That there is something other than a 404 page at the url does not confirm that a source supports our article.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 20:50, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

I think that you might be being hasty in judgment. Are we not already trusting the tool anyway to generate a |title= and |website=? In other words, are we not already trusting this tool? How would adding today's date make this situation worse? To be honest, I don't have any bad cases to judge from. Possibly you have run into those. If it generated a bad title, (e.g from a 404 redirected page) then the situation would be the same. It would need human intervention. I am not sure what happens in that case or what we should mark up, but it seems to me that having the |access-date= available is better than not. Alaney2k (talk) 22:11, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

Not being hasty. The tool scrapes the target web page for |title=, |website=, |date=, etc. It does not have the ability to determine that some fact used to support a statement on an en.wiki article page was (AGF) present on the web page on the date that the url was added to the en.wiki article is still present on the web page. Web pages are ephemeral. As such, the date that a web page was known to support an en.wiki article text is important so that an appropriate archive snapshot can be located if (when) the web page goes 404. Dropping today's date into |access-date= gives the false impression that today, for sure, that web page supports our article text without actually confirming that the support still exists. Just slapping today's date into |access-date= has no more value than randomly picking any post 2001-01-15 date and using that.

I have complained before about this tool, mostly about editors who use it, because of all of the many, many thousands of cs1|2 templates that I have repaired, a goodly number have been the result of editors failing to check that each and every newly created cs1|2 template has been correctly written – I tend to fix only those cs1|2 templates that are currently showing error messages so, no doubt, there are many templates created by this tool that aren't correct. Citoid is getting better but every cs1|2 template created by this tool must be checked for proper parameter data and, if you want to include |access-date=, you as the tool operator, must confirm that the cited source still supports the en.wiki article.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 22:56, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

Well, thanks for sharing your insight! Alaney2k (talk) 04:26, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

ReFill2 errors

I used ReFill2 on the Manas Kongpan article, but the edit appears to have included several errors which required fixing manually (Special:Diff/1027015472). I'm not sure if I did something wrong, or if this is a problem with the tool.--Gronk Oz (talk) 23:10, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

@Gronk Oz: The problem is the data that ReFill gets from the web page, I was thinking of looking at trying to fix some of the common errors it produces. We need to get the existing code updates deployed to fix the |deadurl= problem first. The new maintainer has not yet found time to work out how to do a deployment. Keith D (talk) 22:54, 14 June 2021 (UTC)

@Keith D: thanks.--Gronk Oz (talk) 00:36, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

Another enhancement request

Hello, with the mass addition of {{Bare URL inline}} templates inside the <ref></ref> tag may be it is a good idea to ignore this when scanning the for bare links to convert rather than ignoring the reference all together. You could remove the tags first before running the tool, but if the tool cannot fix all of the references, you then have to go back and return the tags. Keith D (talk) 12:03, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

It is better to just replace them with the {{linkrot}} (or one of its variations) at the top of the article. The reasons for the inline tags use were strictly cosmetic and, as you point out, have created unnecessary extra work. They also do not allow access to refill the way the regular template does. Regards. MarnetteD|Talk 12:10, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

This discussion about bulk application of the {{Bare URL inline}} tag is tangential to ReFill.

Since these are being added by a human operator rather than a bot, I assume there was a consensus somewhere for their mass addition of tags to around 20 pages per minute? Is this what they call a WP:MEATBOT in action? They are very disruptive indeed and not useful to either readers or editors alike. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 16:43, 30 June 2021 (UTC) AFAIK there was no consensus. I noticed the additions beginning in May and requested that the pace be slowed so that those of us who work on formatting bare urls could fix them in a timely fashion. I was told no and that, in fact, I preferred things to go unfixed - see this thread. The result is that there is now one more set of tags (joining "unsourced", "notability" "lead too short" among many others} that may not be acted on for months or years (if ever) being placed on the 'pedia's articles. MarnetteD|Talk 17:21, 30 June 2021 (UTC) @MarnetteD: The whole point of tagging a problem is to identify it so that it can be fixed whenever an editor has the will to do so. Cleanup tags assist that identification in several ways, including: a) by providing a visual indication on the article; by triggering an entry on watchlists when the tag is added; c) by creating categories of articles with he problem which can be browsed; d) by allowing the use of tools such as Petscan to scan categories for articles needing cleanup. Your own post here makes it very clear that you would indeed prefer problems to go unfixed. Your comment here is now one more set of tags [snip] that may not be acted on for months or years (if ever) being placed on the 'pedia's articles makes it crystal clear that you prefer the problems to be unidentified and unfixed, instead of being identified so that editors can find and fix them. I was not aware of any Wikipedia discussion which reached a consensus not to tag problems because they made an article look ugly, nor any consensus that cleanup categories should be kept small so that MarnetteD can have the satisfaction of apparently clearing the backlog (I say "apparently", because MarnetteD's preferred approach of not tagging the articles doesn't lead to the backlog being cleared; it just means that the backlog is not recorded). I asked MarnetteD to identify any discussion where these notions had been agreed, and no such discussion was identified. So the whole "don't tag bare links" thing is a head-in-sand approach. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:59, 30 June 2021 (UTC) I think someone with 2 million edits probably already knows that making thousands more without consensus isn't what we do here. It's not about making anything ugly, it's about managing a situation which clearly needs community input before loads of AWB edits. Tragic. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 20:02, 30 June 2021 (UTC) Actually, Marnette's objection is to having articles tagged but not fixed The community's established way of helping editors to identify problems is to tag them. Heck, AWB's WP:GENFIXES even has several built-in tagging functions.

The only credible reason for objections to the tagging is that editors who use a tool to do cleanup encounter a severe bug in the tool. But pending a fix to the tool, there are other ways of filling bare URLs. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:20, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Maintainer?

Does anyone maintain this tool ie. fix bug reports? -- GreenC 17:22, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

@GreenC: As there had been nobody with access to the source code or able to deploy changes for several years I stepped forward, not that I have all the skills needed but better me than nobody! 'Maintainer' might be too strong a term though. Volunteers welcome! Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 17:28, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Getting an answer to that one has been elusive GreenC. A couple years ago (around the time of the changeover from the original refill to refill2) I think Cyberpower678 was working on it - though I hasten to add that I could be wrong. Whoever it was was a very busy editor and put it on the back burner. Since then a couple threads at the VPT have mentioned that it is being maintained somewhere other than Wikipedia but I can't remember any of the details. Hope always springs eternal that new info may show up to answer your question. MarnetteD|Talk 17:32, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Ah my reply ec's with your Curb Safe Charmer. Thank you for taking on this massive task!! MarnetteD|Talk 17:33, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Great, Curb Safe Charmer! Hope you can tame it, this is favored tool but one with significant bugs and difficulties. I'd help but not my language. I think Cyberpower678 wanted too but other things took priority. -- GreenC 17:36, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

With the slew of tags being added (to around 20 articles per minute) we need to get reFill in a position where it can be deployed to fix these myriad tags with minimal effort. Prior to the tags addition, reFill seemed to cope okay, but it seems to struggle now these inline tags are there. Which is a shame for both editors and, more importantly, readers. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 17:40, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

This discussion about bulk application of the {{Bare URL inline}} tag is tangential to ReFill.

The comment above repeats an error that i have seen several times in discussions today. The tags are not the problem, and do not need to be "fixed". The tags are just markers of a common problem which until now has not been systematically marked. There is no deadline. Wikipedia is a work-in-progress, and the fact that a problem has been tagged does mean that a rapid fix is required (except in extreme cases such as BLP). --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:28, 30 June 2021 (UTC) Stop mass-tagging. Where is there a consensus for you to meat-bot at 20 articles per minute? The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 20:31, 30 June 2021 (UTC) Where is the consensus that bare urls should not be tagged? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:35, 30 June 2021 (UTC) You know that mass tagging and meat-bot edits need a consensus. Tagging 20+ pages per minute is utterly inappropriate, as I alluded to when I suggested you should look into a bot for this when you falsely accused me of bad faith. It's fine, I am fully aware of the sorts of things you've been involved with in the past, but I'm please you've decided to stop flooding watchlists with edits that require consensus. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 20:39, 30 June 2021 (UTC) TRM, you accused me of a "spree", repeatedly called me "mad", accused me of "racking up" edits, and called my tagging a "tirade". So you were ABFing, and you have continued to do so. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:45, 30 June 2021 (UTC) Your edits just today alone have racked up hundreds, if not thousands, of tags which is mad (I never said you were mad, so fix that now). I accept that "tirade" should have been "overwhelming torrent". I tend to assume that "tirade" means "endless stream of unhelpful comments" but I accept it's not universal, so let's replace that with "overwhelming torrent". The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 20:49, 30 June 2021 (UTC) There you go again. The tags didn't add themselves, and they are not sentient beings, so your attempt so disown the meaning is bogus. Millions of Wikipedia articles have cleanup tags. If you think thousands of tags are mad, then most of Wikipedia is mad ... so why are you here? As to tirade, the dictionary definition is clear. You chose to use that word just to ramp up the hostilty. Own your choice. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:56, 30 June 2021 (UTC) No I'm sorry I used tirade, I meant "torrent". If you can't accept that, then no problem, I know exactly who I'm dealing with. Thousands of tags per day is the issue. You know that. It's odd you think this is a good use of anyone's time. But hey, your mileage might vary. Sorry again for using the wrong word, it happens sometimes for me, but I don't expect any special treatment, but I do expect it to be acknowledged when I apologise. Perhaps you're just not into that kind of discussion though. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 21:00, 30 June 2021 (UTC) So, a very belated posto-facto switch to slightly softer form of perjorative terminology for just one of your hostile terms is your idea of an apology? If you actually want to apologise, just retract the lot ... as I asked you to do at the outset. You're right, i'm not into the kind of discussion where someone acts aggressively and insultingly for hours on end and then claims to be injured party because their very slight retraction wasn't greeted with a hug. And you still have not identified how or why the volume of cleanup tags is a problem. That's the sort of thing we could have had an actual discussion about if you had chosen to try to engage with civility instead of repeatedly dialling up the hostile rhetoric. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:11, 30 June 2021 (UTC) Jesus. TLDR. I apologised for using the wrong word, nothing more. I have nothing to retract. You were the one literally giving out the improvement on your edit count because you didn't look to actually improve the articles you were tagging at a rate of 20 pages per minute. You have no consensus for this meatbot behaviour, as you know. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 21:15, 30 June 2021 (UTC) Sadly, it seems that you really do think its fine to post perjorative hyperbole. As to improvement, I have been clear from the outset that the purpose of those edits was to mark the articles which need the fix, in order to allow more editors to do more fixes. Locating the problem is a necessary step on the path towards improvement, and tagging means that i am not working alone of a large set of articles. Do you not comprehend that basic purpose of tagging? Or are you simply choosing to misrepresent me? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:46, 30 June 2021 (UTC) I think mass-tagging without consensus speaks for itself. Your attitude to being questioned about it speaks for itself. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 21:47, 30 June 2021 (UTC) My positive attitude to being questioned about it is shown by the numerous civil discussions about this on my talk page. What you have encountered is my attitude to being repeatedly antagonised by your hyperbolic insults. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:04, 30 June 2021 (UTC) There was nothing personal. This is it for me: you made thousands of edits which have to be undone and worked on without consensus in a single day. I consider that to be disruptive. You may not consider it the same way, but you are in the minority. Given your curious objection and "ban" on my comments on your talkpage, I also consider the matter to be of no interest to me any longer, I have far more pressing issues to deal with beyond fixing your urgent AWB-based mass edits which cropped up on my talkpage. I will be monitoring any further such behaviour. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 22:10, 30 June 2021 (UTC) TRM, I did an even bigger tagging run at the end of May. There were extensive discussions on my talk, and it seemed that most people were happy. So no, I do not accept that I am in a minority. Any cleanup tag should be removed when the problem is fixed, and this one is no exception. You have focused solely on an the consequences of the brokenness of reFill, and consistently ignored the desirability of identifying articles which are subject to linkrot. Again, if you had chosen to ask civil questions rather than hurl insults, you could have learnt why I did the edits on a single day. The disruption consists solely of your repeated choice of provocation and confrontation rather than dialogue. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:27, 30 June 2021 (UTC) I didn't "hurl insults". That's rather sad. Your bot-like edits are unwelcome. Your attitude to being questioned about the edits has been very unpleasant. I'm happy to leave you now to your mass edits and your general unwelcome disruption. As I noted, I failed to see a single editor in favour of your approach, but maybe consensus doesn't apply here. I'll unwatch all the articles you have just summarily tagged because I don't need this kind of stress. Good luck with making it to three million edits and all that. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 22:37, 30 June 2021 (UTC) My attitude to being questioned is shown by the numerous civil discussions i have had about this on my talk with editors who — unlike you — conduct themselves with some civility. Your denialism adds some levity to the drama. I don't know whether you genuinely believe that describing another editor's work as "mad", "spree", "tirade", "smashing out" etc is not insulting. But either way, it's absurd. And, of course, you continue to simply ignore the fact that these edits were clearly made to locate a problem. That sustained, widespread denialism is highly disruptive. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:47, 30 June 2021 (UTC) "denialism"?! Really. You still have no consensus for your meatbot edits, which is adequately demonstrated by your acceptance to stop. You had to do that. It's not about discussions on your talk page now. It's wider than that. You've stopped, which is proper. Your edits were not helpful, as I pointed out right from the moment I saw them happening. I'm glad you've stopped, and I'm not alone. Thanks very much. Don't do it again. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 22:53, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

@The Rambling Man: in what way is it struggling? I haven't seen a problem yet, probably because the articles I have ran refill over recently haven't had the tag. Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 18:27, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Have a look at User talk:Trappist the monk. The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 18:29, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Bare URL inline tags

From my small experiment here, ReFill doesn't like the first URL but is happy with the second. So it can cope with the {{Bare URL inline}} tag, at least sometimes. Could others add more examples to my test page, so I/we can get a clear picture of under what conditions it works, and when it doesn't? Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 17:38, 2 July 2021 (UTC)

I think the first one fails because the URL is dead and returns a 404 error. Keith D (talk) 23:39, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

Yes, and I think people's distaste for conflict aside, the mass meatbot edits adding literally thousands of these tags actually makes it even harder to fix the issue. Of course, somewhere there's a consensus for the meatbot edits being made at 20 pages/minute, right? The Rambling Man (Stay alert! Control the virus! Save lives!!!!) 23:46, 3 July 2021 (UTC)

@The Rambling Man: In this thread I would like to leave the rights and wrongs of mass tagging to one side and concentrate on troubleshooting the tool.

@Keith D: If you take a look at my test page again I have deleted the bare URL inline tags from both of the refs that ReFill was failing on, and run it again. Both of these refs fail without the tag. This seems to indicate that the tag is not the problem - ReFill cannot extract the title etc from the ref irrespective of whether it has been tagged. It would be useful to identify whether there are any refs that ReFill can expand when there is no tag but adding the tag stops it doing so. Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 17:43, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

Curb Safe Charmer I am late to this. Until now my experience is that anything other than a bare url between the refs tag prevents any of the three tools from fixing the ref. That includes the bare url tag, clarification needed tag, extraneous info like a date, even something as simple as a period "." (which for some reason editors from India like to use) can stop the tools. I just ran refill on 1997–98 Sheffield United F.C. season (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs) and it did format one ref with the inline tag. That is quite helpful and will save us time in hunting for them. I removed the tag on the other one and ran the page with reflinks. It marked the link as dead. The ability of reflinks to tag dead links is one of its biggest pluses over refill. Mind you it doesn't tag all dead links but it gets a fair number of them. I have no idea if that feature can be added to refill but it would enhance its usefulness. I also know that you are very busy learning and working on this tool so please don't worry about looking at that enhancement anytime in the near - or even distant - future. I will keep an eye out for any instances of refill being stopped by the inline tags use. Thanks again for all that you are doing here. MarnetteD|Talk 19:30, 4 July 2021 (UTC)

Broken image

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T300114

I guess this is where I report this particular issue(?). At the bottom of the reFill page at Toolforge is a series of linked text. The farthest-right hypertext reads "Powered by Wikimedia Labs" and to the left of it (sharing the same hyperlink) is the image favicon.ico (https://tools.wmflabs.org/favicon.ico), which should appear, but instead an error box is displayed. This is a low priority bug. — CJDOS, Sheridan, OR (talk) 10:15, 9 September 2021 (UTC)

Looks like there is a problem on tools.wmflabs.org as things are just redirecting to https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Portal:Toolforge Keith D (talk) 00:30, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

Romanian wiki

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T295327

The following error occurs in any article ro.wikipedia: Error Uh-oh!. We couldn't retrieve the page! Either it doesn't exist, or there were some network hiccups. Please try again. E.g. - ro:Pandemia de COVID-19 în Germania. -Terraflorin (talk) 08:50, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

@Terraflorin: This affects all non-English language versions of Wikipedia at the moment. The bug has been logged, but no fix estimate at the moment. I could do with a hand from someone with Vue.js skills. Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 09:33, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Curb Safe Charmer, just a wild guess, but if the issues appeared in November, there is a good chance it was introduced during the dependabot merges in October. Binary search through those commits would be my first debugging attempt.--Strainu (talk) 09:51, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

@Strainu: I like your thinking, but... (i) the issue was first reported on 10 October and (ii) the dependabot merges haven't actually been deployed into production (because I don't have a working test environment or deployment process at the moment). There haven't been any deployments to live since March. So this is caused by something external to the codebase. There's nothing helpful in the logs, so I need to run a debugger over the front end to see why it is emitting that error only for non enwiki articles. Thanks for the suggestion though. Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 11:29, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

• just wanted to add that on Fr:wiki[10] its not working either,--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 14:20, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Garbled URL / website value in output

Anyone got a clue what the tool was attempting to do here^{(imgur-hosted screenshot)}? Just tried it again with a random athlete profile in my sandbox and it doesn't seem to be a fluke [11]. Certainly not ideal that this would happen with a currently extremely high-profile site like olympics.com. AngryHarpy‍^talk 06:38, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

There's something odd about that database: using the Reftoolbar to fill in a ref from a url gives ".." as the website name. PamD 07:13, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

Like this: <ref>{{cite web |title=Swimming MASO Alaa - Tokyo 2020 Olympics |url=https://olympics.com/tokyo-2020/olympic-games/en/results/swimming/athlete-profile-n1485487-maso-alaa.htm |website=.. |access-date=30 July 2021 |language=en-us}}</ref>. PamD 07:15, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

Looking at the page information it gives "../../../en/results/basketball/athlete-profile-n1322233-abalde-alberto.htm" which it looks like the tool is picking up. Keith D (talk) 11:20, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

Breaks references in Draft:Vanity, like so.

Breaks references in Draft:Vanity, like so. --Gryllida (talk, e-mail) 12:45, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

@Gryllida: I have simplified it down to this test case. Not sure why it is happening. Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 10:58, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

@Gryllida and Curb Safe Charmer: Have been playing with this one and it appears to be something to do with the different number of spaces after the URL and before the closing </ref> tag. If the spaces are removed it appears to work as expected. Keith D (talk) 17:39, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Error using ReFill2?

Hi. this edit to Welsh Whisky completely invalidated the reference in the Aber Falls section. It's now been corrected, but is this an error on the part of ReFill? Hogyn Lleol (talk) 12:06, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

@Hogyn Lleol: I don't think it is a bug as such. Instagram does something different depending on whether the user visiting a post is logged in or not. If logged in, you'll see the post. ReFill will be redirected to a login page. I am not sure what else it can do. Anyway, I have replaced the ref with the following: <ref>{{Cite instagram |user=aberdistillery |postid=CO5CIVFqS85 |title=This week we made history by bottling our very first casks of whisky. This is the first bottle we numbered, 1 of 2000. What a moment! |date=15 May 2021}}</ref> Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 12:38, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks. Hogyn Lleol (talk) 12:44, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

CBC

Hi there, I've noticed over the past year that links from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's websites are rarely able to be auto-generated by by Refill or VisualEditor. Wondering if there is a fix to this. For example: [12], [13]. CaffeinAddict (talk) 16:02, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Hello CaffeinAddict. You are correct that neither refill2 or reflinks formats the CBC refs. I have had success with Citer. The drawback is that you have to process them one at a time. I hope this is of help. MarnetteD|Talk 18:28, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the response and that's a good workaround for the time being. Is there any understanding as to why this particular website doesn't work? CaffeinAddict (talk) 18:44, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

These are at User:Curb Safe Charmer/sandboxCBC if anybody wants to investigate. Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 19:34, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

I'm glad that citer is working for you CaffeinAddict. Curb Safe Charmer I am glad you are working on this. There is another website that even citer won't format but as it has been awhile since I've seen it unfortunately its name escapes me at the moment. It is used mostly in articles about businesses so when I see it again I will leave an example on this talk page. Again thanks for all you are doing to improve this tool. MarnetteD|Talk 20:17, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

RefFill 2 returns error-type-ReadTimeout when processing the examples. May be there is some way to tweak the tool to extend the timeout? Keith D (talk) 21:01, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk

www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk URLS get destroyed and turned into login urls. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 18:10, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

@AManWithNoPlan: here you wrote that this had been fixed in citation bot - is that the case? If so, what was the fix? Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 18:17, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

ReFill harms the URLs much more than Citation Bot ever did. I am cleaning up after Refill also. Citation Bot no longer will make this mistake, but Refill still does. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 18:20, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Ok, so did you fix Citation Bot? If so how? If not, can you direct me to the fix? Curb Safe Charmer (talk) 18:22, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

The bot just ignores that website completely. I am looking into adding code to convert the login urls back into real urls, since they are encoded AManWithNoPlan (talk) 18:36, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Fix code deployed. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 18:47, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Adding Wikidata support?

A biblio-data bot for Wikidata was chosen as a tech wishlist item, but then unchosen because fully-automated luxury bibliommunism is hard. (see phab:T285498) Have you considered adding WD as an option for ReFill? Your comment on that thread would be welcome. – SJ + 17:31, 27 October 2021 (UTC)

Found one and remembered another

Hello Curb Safe Charmer. The site used as a reference for business articles that refill (and reflinks) can't format is bizjournals.com. Here is one example https://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/news/2016/10/20/cincinnati-unveils-historic-murals-in-new-downtown.html.

Another site is US News.com. Specifically their pages that have ratings for colleges and universites. http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/wayland-baptist-3663

Now I know you are busy busy with many things so these may be on the back burner for weeks, months or years. Do you want to set up a workspace or sandbox separate from the one you started for CBC refs where we can leave examples of websites that refill has problems with? Whatever works best for you will be fine. MarnetteD|Talk 20:49, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

"deadurl" results

The bot finds dead urls and labels them as such. But the preview mode says such dead url tags are ignore. It then suggests we use "url-status=". Would you kindly fix this? Thank you. – S. Rich (talk) 02:45, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Hello S. Rich. Requests to fix this go back at least 7 years. In that time refills operators have changed several times. I know the fix you are requesting is on the list but there is no way to know how long it will take. After I run refill I check the ref section of the article and, for those that have the red message noting the problem, I copy/paste |url-status=dead over the "dead-url=y" in the ref. I know it is laborious and slows things down but it is the only solution currently available that I am aware of. Regards. MarnetteD|Talk 03:23, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

@MarnetteD:. Thanks. I see the Citation Bot will fix the dead url label after running ReFill. (But Citation Bot seems to get bogged down.) I hope this helps. – S. Rich (talk) 18:57, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for the info S. Rich. It doesn't matter how long I've edited here there is always something new to learn. Cheers. MarnetteD|Talk 19:06, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Non-English no longer supported?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T295327

Since a few weeks (?), I get an error message every time I use ReFill to check a page in a different language, such as Dutch (nl). Does anyone know if this is going to get fixed soon? I'd love to be able to use the tool again... Thank you in advance, Laurier (talk) 14:31, 1 November 2021 (UTC)

@Laurier: This affects all non-English language versions of Wikipedia at the moment. The bug has been logged, but no fix estimate at the moment. I could do with a hand from someone with Vue.js skills. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Curb Safe Charmer (talk • contribs) 09:35, 16 November 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply! I found https://refill.toolforge.org/ng does work, so for me, this problem isn't urgent anymore. Laurier (talk) 13:53, 20 November 2021 (UTC)