The tracking category is visible in preview, as is the red CS1 error text.

This bug continues to spread bogus links and titles in references throughout the corpus. Sure, that's a problem caused by the users who trust the script too much and don't review the changes they're making, but it could be mitigated very simply with a fix in this code -- why not speccificly block "are you a robot?" titles from being created until a better fix can be developed?

Unfortunately, no metrics of the bot's activity are visible to me. Since we know that it's not checking it's own work, how are measuring its error rate?

If its behavior can't be fixed, then it shouldn't exercise that behavior -- that is, it should not longer make changes to any reference, since it can't know if it is making the article (or the reference) any better or worse. The automated unpredictable breaking of articles isn't desirable. I don't think machine learning is necessary; just defensive programming in the face of dirty input. Being more efficient at breaking articles is not a feature compared to not breaking articles more slowly.

Why can't IABot know that there are multiple definitions of the reference it's about to change?

This IABot edit to the Abasy article shows a slightly different pattern. Duplicate (but identical and safe) definitions were present in the refs= list, but IABot decided to shorten one to a self-closing tag, and that caused a duplicate ref def error.

Considering the "ARIA News 28 Oct" reference in the "ARIA Music Awards of 2014" article, there was previously no duplicate reference. This can be seen by viewing the article revision before InternetArchiveBot made its edits. In that version, there is on error listed in the "References" section of the article. In that revision, the "ARIA News 28 Oct" is defined twice. One definition is in the body of the article, the other is given as a parameter to the refs= parameter of the {{reflist}} template. These references aren't duplicate as far as the rendering engine is concerned because, even tho they have the same name, their content is identical, character-for-character even including case and white space.

You've said "no further report is needed", but the bot is still causing duplicate references in its edits. Does your comment meant that you're not interested in fixing this problem, or that you believe to be fixed -- even though it actually isn't? Or, maybe something else ... ?

Another example is here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Everyday_(Ariana_Grande_song)&type=revision&diff=908535879&oldid=902472967&diffmode=source

Here is another problematic edit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Firework_(song)&type=revision&diff=908421990&oldid=904848422&diffmode=source

Another faulty edit is shown here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Debashree_Roy&diff=next&oldid=906145012&diffmode=source

That seems like a fine solution to me. If the bot can't handle badly formatted input, it should do what it can to detect that condition before it performs an edit. I think your proposal would do that.

Another faulty edit is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=British_Rail_Class_314&type=revision&diff=902025852&oldid=900760109&diffmode=source

> does not mean it's valid wikitext

Here's another edit where IABot created a duplicate reference:

> The MediaWiki parser is quite generous,

I can't understand why you're saying that the article has invalid wikitext. The page rendered correctly and without error before InternetArchiveBot made its edits. To be clear, it was only after InternetArchiveBot made its edit that the page rendered with an error.

References in wikipedia can be reused. We can say <ref name="AnchorName">The Pittsburgh Press</ref> to define a reference named "AnchorName", then use only <ref name="AnchorName"/> when we want to repeat that same reference elsewhere in the article.

This edit is another recent example: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Beast_(Canadian_band)&diff=prev&oldid=895490927&diffmode=source

I'm sure there's a lot that I don't know about the developmnet process used by this project. For example, I don't understand what "a patch was uploaded" means. I guess it doesn't mean that a fix was actually deployed, because if the fix was live, the kludges wouldn't be necessary.

Over the last 12 hours (or so) there has been a significant drop in the number of topics in Category:Pages with duplicate reference names. I don't see here any notes that indicate an intentional fix was made. But I also note that all I know about the mechanisms involved came from researching this issue.

The number of articles listed in Category:Pages with duplicate reference names continues to grow, I guess as the safe copies of the cache expired.