I've pinged the bot maintainer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Citation_bot#Fixing_Citation_bot

Martin (the bot maintainer) would be happy for us to work on fixing the bot. He suggested that the issue might be due to using http instead of https for some of the API requests. I've asked to be added as a maintainer to the Tool Labs projects (there are 3).

From sprint kick-off meeting:
Support: Very High
Feasibility: Good
Impact: Medium
Risk: Low

Priority: High

We already have Citoid and the citation generation function in VisualEditor. Wouldn't the most effective approach be to build a version of that for the wikitext editor?

@harej-NIOSH The (old) Citation bot ran on existing references on articles and filled out /chenged information in them. Like if only a doi was added, the bot would fill out that template completely, without having the user copy every single doi/reference in to a tool. It also make searched on crossref based on author, title, journal etc. to find doi's, which Citoid doens't.

suggestion to start a CitationBot-project here on Phab?

Will the bot/tool be supported by the Community-tech in the future if problems would arise, or would that be left to the community to fix. (see my above commment)

@Josve05a:

We don't currently have plans to maintain this bot, as we're working on it in the time before launching our community ideas survey. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Community_Tech_team has our current plans, and if this comes up as a community priority in the upcoming ideas survey we'd work on it then. Regardless, if there are people in the community interested in maintaining or improving it, I've added some documentation to the repository already and I'm happy to walk them through my understanding of the bot/tool/gadget and how they all fit together.

I would still like to see the bug reportings for this bot/tool be on Phabricator, for greater...exposure, so to speak, even if there are no set developers. What do you think about that?

There's a related discussion on tracking gadget bugs on Phabricator, here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T85433#1549981

If there is a maintenance team that wants to use Phabricator to communicate and consolidate reports, I support them using whatever tools they think are appropriate, but I fear that making a board for an unmaintained project may lead to the expectation from reporters that their reports will be acted on quickly/at all, leading to frustration when they are not.

What about showcasing Citation bot as automated tool taking advantage of Parsoid?
@ssastry @cscott

In T108412#1652190, @Ricordisamoa wrote:

What about showcasing Citation bot as automated tool taking advantage of Parsoid?
@ssastry @cscott

Not to rain on anyones parade, but I do believe that the bot is smarter than Parsoid, accepting more kinds of IDs and can expand current references. I think Citoid can take advantage of the bots code however.

Are you guys talking about Citoid (rather than Parsoid)?

In T108412#1654735, @kaldari wrote:

Are you guys talking about Citoid (rather than Parsoid)?

I am not.
Parsoid could be useful to replace the parser in https://github.com/fhocutt/citation-bot/blob/master/wikiFunctions.php

I haven't followed the discussion here .. but quickly, as a superficial remark, if wikitext parsing is involved and if that is what tripping up this tool, then yes, Parsoid could be helpful. I'll have to come back and take a closer look at all this, if you need more informed input about the problem.

Frankly, if I were to make any more substantial changes to this bot I would want to rewrite it from scratch. It's true it might benefit from using Parsoid, but it would also benefit from not using a 15-year-old scraping library to handle the HTTP. Again, I'm happy to coordinate and discuss with anyone who's interested in taking on maintainership or working with the bot's code.

Wiki comment with updates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Citation_bot#Update:_Security_fixes_and_code_cleanup