Intention:
Blank a page (prior to setting a redirect).
Steps to Reproduce:
Actual Results:
Categories, defaultsort keys, and page protection templates are not removed.
Reproducible: Always
Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
URL: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=User:Whatamidoing_(WMF)&diff=914307&oldid=904077
All kinds of other things too, see also bug 52036 and bug 60830. I think we need a tracking bug for this or a large WONTFIX.
Perhaps we should have a special process for redirects that handles 100% blanking, or at least inquires or warns about it. (You might want cats for redirects, but probably not a default sort key).
(In reply to Bartosz Dziewoński from comment #1)
All kinds of other things too, see also bug 52036 and bug 60830. I think we
need a tracking bug for this or a large WONTFIX.
I've merged bug 52036 and bug 60830 into their respective causes (both of those are things we will fix with those corrections), and narrowed this to just be about meta-data – things that don't display because they never create any content.
On this one I'm minded to WONTFIX, but I could be argued around. What are the reasons for letting people remove content they can't see with select-all?
I'm not sure that select-all is the right way to remove them, but there should be some way to remove them, and a way to find out that they are present.
(In reply to James Forrester from comment #3)
On this one I'm minded to WONTFIX, but I could be argued around. What are
the reasons for letting people remove content they can't see with select-all?
As WhatamIdoing says, redirecting, for example for merging. This may be achieved using some special scenario. (And hey, blanking must point at something special in any case.)
Copying here the description from bug 67200 which was closed as dupe:
Deleting the text from the article and converting it to a redirect page still leaves all the categories in it, as well as Other Stuff such as magic words and invisible templates.
This is a regression in comparison to the source editor, where the editor could just delete everything and be sure that categories, magic words, invisible templates and everything else is gone.
Just redirecting an article shouldn't necessarily remove everything, because it's actually possible that the editor wants to leave the article in a category. Some projects, including enwiki, have categories, templates etc. in redirect pages. But probably some kind of a warning should be shown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=edit&oldid=665564885 is the most interesting version of this that I've seen for a while. It kept parts of a subst'd template.