Regarding the OrphanReferenceFixer and TagDater, please note:

AnomieBOT is not an anti-vandal bot, so complaints about AnomieBOT "hiding" or not reverting vandalism are out of place here. AnomieBOT's current strategy is "wait 10 minutes to an hour or so to let ClueBot, VoABotII, other anti-vandal bots, or RC Patrollers fix the vandalism". I am open to specific suggestions on detecting vandalism, but keep in mind that the false positive rate of any method must be near zero to be useful. AnomieBOT honors {{inuse}}; please use it if you have excessive edit conflicts. If the reference errors or undated tags were caused by vandalism, just revert AnomieBOT's edits along with the vandal's. AnomieBOT will not be offended. If AnomieBOT made a mistake in correcting a reference error or dating a tag, please correct the error by hand and report the URL of the problem diff below. Don't just revert the bot without fixing the error, or AnomieBOT is likely to "fix" it again in the same broken way before I get a chance to fix the bug. If you have a problem with T11790, please take the issue up there. You will be having the problem with more than just AnomieBOT's edits. Thank you.

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I've been spending some time on Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting recently and have seen the following pattern, well, more than once:

• (In the distant past) An editor adds a reference with the name enclosed in curly quotes in place of straight quotes
• (In the distant past) Visual editor "corrects" this by wrapping the curly quotes in straight quotes
• (Now) AWB running as Monkbot converts the curly quotes to straight quotes (example)
• (Now) AnomieBot removes the contents of the outer pair of quotes (example)

And the last step breaks the reference, which incredibly MediaWiki manages to parse at all the previous steps. I don't know how best to avoid this story ending with a broken reference, but could I suggest that one improvement would be for AnomieBot to convert <ref name=""foo""> into <ref name="foo"> rather than <ref name="">, since that is apparently how MediaWiki parses it? I can also see that it might be good for AWB to remove the curly quotes in this situtation rather than converting them, or for a new bot task to fix all the references with curly quotes, nested or otherwise. Pinging @Trappist the monk for comments since Monkbot is involved as well. Thanks, Wham2001 (talk) 15:39, 5 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

PS Since I'm here, perhaps now is a good moment to say thanks for AnomieBot, which amongst its many helpful tasks has saved me countless hours manually filling in the |date= param on maintainance templates, for which I am very, very grateful. Best, Wham2001 (talk) 15:41, 5 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, monkbot (not AWB) is likely guilty of creating name=""summat"" ref names. But not all. If we are to believe this search there are about 460 articles with reference names that begin name="“ or name="”. There were a couple of articles in the categories where task 21 is working that I have fixed.

Similarly, this search indicates that there are some number of ref names that end with “" or ”"; the search times out. Constrained to the categories where task 21 is working, the search finds no articles.

Given these search results, I not inclined to tweak task 21's code though I will make a note in the source should I ever decide to reuse it on another task.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 16:28, 5 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds good. 460 is few enough that I'm tempted to go through and fix them all myself. Is this the sort of task that AWB would be useful for? Otherwise I could simply work through all the hits in your search by hand. Best, Wham2001 (talk) 19:11, 5 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps. This find regex:

(<ref\s+name\s*=\s*")[“”]([^\>]+)[“”]("\>)

and this replace:

$1$2$3

should be good for a start. The above won't fix stuff like <ref name="“”"> or <ref name="Historical Log 3C: Mutant-Hunting Exonims Begin “The Decimation”">.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 20:01, 5 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Note that search-and-replace will probably break articles like Diictodon in a different way. MediaWiki considers <ref name=“Ray2003”> and <ref name="“Ray2003”"> as being the same. The search-and-replace described here will only change <ref name="“Ray2003”"> to <ref name="Ray2003">, which MediaWiki will not consider the same as <ref name=“Ray2003”>, leaving one of the two orphaned. On the plus side, it looks like AnomieBOT will do the right thing with that to finish the fix. Anomie⚔ 00:08, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Anomie: Right – if I do this using AWB I would want to check each edit manually before saving it. AIUI it lets you do this.

TTM: Thanks – in that case I will request access at PERM and give it a go. Best, Wham2001 (talk) 09:27, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A quick update: I decided against using AWB in the end since I thought it would violate the letter (if perhaps not the spirit) of WP:COSMETICBOT. I've fixed the 460 articles thrown up by the search above and, while it was quite dull as an editing task, many of them would have needed tweaking by hand even had I used AWB. Best, Wham2001 (talk) 20:49, 28 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I note the summary is not quite correct, it's broken already after Monkbot's edit. See the error in Special:Diff/1314161747#Lifestyle for example. Anomie⚔ 23:46, 5 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That said, the suggested fix seems reasonable enough since the bot already has a similar fix for <ref name=''foo''>. Anomie⚔ 23:53, 5 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You're quite right – I didn't check the article state between the two edits carefully enough. Wham2001 (talk) 09:25, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm curious why AnomieBOT only substituted some of the instances of {{Format ISBN}} and not all of them in this edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Druze&diff=prev&oldid=1313816758 --Lexiconaut (talk) 03:13, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Some of AnomieBOT's wikitext processing hasn't kept up with certain changes in MediaWiki over the years. In this case, AnomieBOT saw the <!-- near the end of line 505 (not far after the last instance of the template it did subst) as beginning a comment which contains the rest of the article, while MediaWiki's parser at some point changed to ignore a <!-- not matched by a -->. Probably I should look at changing that in AnomieBOT one of these days. Anomie⚔ 03:23, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Turns out it's a bit more complex than that. MediaWiki actually does still let an unclosed comment run out, the tricky part is that an unclosed comment inside an extension tag like <ref> only runs to the end of the tag, not to the end of the document. For that matter, if you try to do like <ref> ... <nowiki></ref></nowiki>, MediaWiki sees that as an unclosed <nowiki> inside a <ref> rather than an unclosed <ref>, while currently AnomieBOT's "strip_nowikis" function would see it as the opposite. I'll have to adjust AnomieBOT's code that "strips" comments and nowikis to take this into account. Anomie⚔ 17:22, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks very much for your reply. I have been seeing more unclosed <!-- inside <ref></ref> recently. I can't figure out why they are suddenly popping up. I've removed the offending <!--. --Lexiconaut (talk) 17:52, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I think what often happens is that someone does something like {{cite whatever |blah=... |blah3=... <!-- |blah2=... -->}}, and then other bots or scripts try to reorder the parameters or otherwise adjust parameters without properly handling comments (e.g. {{cite whatever |blah=... |blah2=... --> |blah3=... <!--}}). See Wikipedia talk:ProveIt#Does not properly handle commented-out parameters in cite templates for one example.

In this case with Druze, it looks like Monkbot saw {{cite journal |... |jstor=25802822<!-- |access-date=22 November 2023 -->}} and decided to remove the access-date non-parameter in Special:Diff/1313811285. @Trappist the monk: for info. Anomie⚔ 18:38, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Nice find! Interestingly, Monkbot only changed one instance of a commented-out access-date; there's another instance further up in that diff that the bot didn't change. --Lexiconaut (talk) 19:11, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like the other three in the article weren't actually parameters to the template, they were like <ref>{{cite whatever}}<!--|access-date=...--></ref>. Looks like those probably go back to Special:Diff/724728852 from 2016. Anomie⚔ 19:39, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict)

Monkbot deletes |access-date= parameters that exist in a cs1|2 template when that template does not have |url= (or one of the |chapter-url= aliases). The commented-out |access-date= parameters that were not deleted are outside of cs1|2 templates so were ignored.

I have modified the task to delete the parameter and its assigned value (must be one of the permitted date formats) commented or not. The bot will then delete the <!--...--> markup if empty. Right now this applies only to |access-date=.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 19:45, 6 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks @Trappist the monk:. Is there a case to by made to have a bot remove all comments inside all citation templates? --Lexiconaut (talk) 02:49, 22 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Doubtful. Some bots use html comments as a way of preventing edits; see User:Citation bot § Stopping the bot from editing for example.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 12:54, 22 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding [1], X-ray is on a fairly different topic and the content near the ref tag is not similar. Maybe the bot needs a filter for generic ref-names when looking for inter-article correspondence? DMacks (talk) 18:03, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It has a filter for the ":0" style VE does, but it's not AI to try to detect every possible generic name someone might try to use. Anomie⚔ 22:32, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Special:Diff/1318939209 BTW. Anomie⚔ 22:36, 26 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

User:AnomieBOT/Nobots Hall of Shame, a page which you created or substantially contributed to, has been nominated for deletion. Your opinions on the matter are welcome; you may participate in the discussion by adding your comments at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:AnomieBOT/Nobots Hall of Shame and please be sure to sign your comments with four tildes (~~~~). You are free to edit the content of User:AnomieBOT/Nobots Hall of Shame during the discussion but should not remove the miscellany for deletion template from the top of the page; such a removal will not end the deletion discussion. Thank you. JFHJr (㊟) 05:19, 2 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Vexatious and purposefully inaccurate MFD. 🙄 Anomie⚔ 13:07, 2 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I'd like to report a problem with the User:AnomieBOT/PREQTable template. I noticed that in the table's associated category, unprotected requests that are in the article namespace are supposed to be colored in green, while unprotected requests in any other namespace are supposed to be the baseline wiki color (which is usually gray). However, I noticed (with this recent revision as an example) that, regardless of which namespace the pages are in, all unprotected pages are always the baseline wiki color; the pages that are supposed to be green in the table aren't colored as such. Do you think you can tend to this issue? — Alex26337 (talk) 17:27, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It was requested that the PREQ table not highlight any namespace, but apparently no one updated Template:Edit fully-protected/color legend when used on Category:Wikipedia partial-block edit requests to match. OTOH, if people would rather, I could have the bot start highlighting mainspace. CC Pppery. Anomie⚔ 23:26, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

No strong objection to highlighting mainspace - I just didn't see the value in doing so since I didn't think mainspace was special in the context of partial blocks. But if others think it is and the highlighting is useful I say go for it. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 23:32, 3 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

AnomieBot has stopped editing for 4 hours, latest edit 23:25 4 November Special:Contributions/AnomieBOT --pro-anti-air ––>(talk)<–– 03:44, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Looks like Toolforge had database issues. Anomie⚔ 12:18, 5 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, Anomie,

i don't see any recent reports at User:AnomieBOT III/Broken redirects which is odd because I'm still deleting broken redirects to draft pages. Could you check on this for me? Thank you. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 19:51, 10 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The bot just updated the report page at 22:34 UTC. The userspace report was updated at 22:34, and before that at 16:32 and 10:30. Anomie⚔ 00:26, 11 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

User:CSD U6 Bot now exists, for Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/CSD U6 Bot. Anomie⚔ 23:38, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the notice, I was wondering what would happen with U6s and U7s. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:54, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, Anomie,

I'm not sure what happened but AnomieBOT III didn't issue a broken redirect report on its regular schedule. So, maybe it needs a restart. Thank you. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 23:53, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I cleaned up the bot's config file earlier, removing the passwords that shouldn't have been being used for years since I switched to OAuth. But in some of the older tasks there was some code still incorrectly checking that a password was set. That should be fixed now. Anomie⚔ 00:03, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Please, you revert and block this change: Special:Diff/1325215363. Dušan Kreheľ (talk) 21:41, 1 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The action is valid. Maintenance templates need a date for proper categorization. If this template really needs to be used without being substed (I don't think we normally do page sections with templates like that though), you'll have to have it take a |date= parameter to pass through to the maintenance template, and then I or another admin can add it to User:AnomieBOT/Dating rules. Anomie⚔ 00:28, 2 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Special:Diff/1331338545 introduced a malformatted category link that caused many pages transcluding this table to be miscategorized into Category:Editnotice templates. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 21:54, 5 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the report. Should be fixed in the code now; the bot may take a few minutes to update the page. Anomie⚔ 22:16, 5 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

This bot recently created Category:Wikipedia articles with circular definitions by month from January 2026. Not sure why. The monthly category should be Category:Wikipedia articles with circular definitions from January 2026. I probably set up the categories for {{circular definition}} incorrectly; apologies if so. Could someone more knowledgable help? – Scyrme (talk) 04:19, 10 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

AnomieBOT created that category because Category:Wikipedia articles with circular definitions by month is in Category:Wikipedia maintenance categories sorted by month. The normal thing, if you want Category:Wikipedia articles with circular definitions from January 2026, would be to have Category:Wikipedia articles with circular definitions be the parent category that is in Category:Wikipedia maintenance categories sorted by month. If you want AnomieBOT to automatically add the |date= parameter to the template when people leave it out, that also wants pages without |date= to be put into a category that is a subcategory of Category:Wikipedia maintenance categories sorted by month. See also Wikipedia:Creating a dated maintenance category. Anomie⚔ 14:43, 10 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! I've amended the category structure and tagged the mistakenly made category for deletion. Hopefully there are no further problems. – Scyrme (talk) 21:06, 10 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

I've been thinking about requesting that User:AnomieBOT/C/Good articles in need of review be moved to a name that better reflects its scope, such as User:AnomieBOT/C/Good articles in need of reassessment. I already would've taken it to WP:RMTR had it not required part of the bot's code (specifically, the code that tells it to check the page every few hours and make edits when necessary) to be rewritten, and I'm hesitant on taking it to the page's talkpage because it doesn't currently have one. If there's anything you feel I should do regarding this, some advice would be appreciated. JHD0919 (talk) 11:57, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

The name of the page matches Category:Good articles in need of review. The bot does not support changing one without changing the other. If you do get the category renamed, an editor with appropriate rights can both rename the bot's page and Template:CF/Good articles in need of review and edit User:AnomieBOT/CategoryLister/Categories to match. Anomie⚔ 12:57, 13 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]