The ReferenceExpander script has the attractive potential of enabling an editor to turn any number of unformatted citations into beautiful and correct citation templates. Unfortunately it pays no heed to anything present between a pair of <ref> tags other than the first URL, and replaces the contents of the affected citation with Citoid's output from processing that URL. The dangers of this approach and associated damage have been well discussed at MFD, AN, and within the edit summaries at the cleanup hub of the first phase of this task. A general treatment is available at Wikipedia:WikiProject Citation cleanup/Repairing algorithmically generated citations.
In a surfeit of trust, editors trusted ReferenceExpander to expand references without damaging or garbling them. ReferenceExpander trusted Citoid to produce good and complete output for any arbitrary URL. Citoid trusted Zotero to provide complete and accurate information. Without checking output, but passing it one step downstream, thousands of references have been damaged or enclosed in templates with missing or incorrect information.
All edits must be checked. Following phase one (c. 2500 diffs from January to April 2023), the present batch is composed of ReferenceExpander-assisted edits between July and December 2022. More cleanup pages will follow, with another 2100 diffs from the time period May 2020 through June 2022.
Progress as of 17:21, 2 November 2024 (UTC): checked: 287; remaining: 512.