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Redirect Fixer (fixDoubleRedirects.php script) moved an unrelated page
Closed, InvalidPublicBUG REPORT

Description

The Redirect Fixer modified a completely unrelated article for no reason we can understand.

Here is the situation:

  1. Article "Blackberry" exists
  1. Redirect "Blackberry tip" points to "Blackberry"
  1. A user moves "Blackberry" to "BlackBerry" with a capital "B".
  1. The Redirect Fixer updates "Blackberry tip" to point to "BlackBerry". This is correct.
  1. [BUG!] Immediately after, the Redirect Fixer also modifies a completely unrelated article, "Changing user information in QuickBase", turning it into a redirect pointing to "BlackBerry". This original article was not even a redirect!

I have never seen this behavior before. Any ideas?


Version: 1.15.x
Severity: major
OS: Linux

Details

Reference
bz22863

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 21 2014, 11:07 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz22863.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

capmo700 wrote:

I've seen this happen more than once on the wiki I administrate (cpdl.org). Still no idea why it misbehaves this way. I wish there was a setting that would force the display of Redirect fixer changes on the RC page, so that these cases could be caught more easily.

Adding IAlex as cc (could be interested by this bug).

GregUbben wrote:

We've seen this happen at least 4 times on our wiki over the last 5 years (roughly once every thousand edits the fixer makes). We are still on 1.17 now, but it happened in 1.13 too.

Many of our changes are due to moving a page with many subpages. In one case the page had a previous name, so each subpage already had a redirect. As the fixer was running through the list, it suddenly just grabbed some random page that had no relation at all to the pages being processed, and replaced its contents with the redirect. I've found no pattern between the four cases. It acts like a race condition that occasionally just gets the wrong pageid.

Krinkle renamed this task from Redirect Fixer moved an unrelated page to Redirect Fixer (fixDoubleRedirects.php script) moved an unrelated page.Jul 31 2017, 9:27 PM
Krinkle removed a project: MediaWiki-Redirects.
Krinkle removed a subscriber: wikibugs-l-list.
Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Bug Report".
Aklapper subscribed.

8 years later, is this still something that folks experience in a recent MediaWiki version?

No reply; assuming this is obsolete