Last modified: 2014-01-03 20:21:52 UTC
The Redirect Fixer modified a completely unrelated article for no reason we can understand. Here is the situation: 1. Article "Blackberry" exists 2. Redirect "Blackberry tip" points to "Blackberry" 3. A user moves "Blackberry" to "BlackBerry" with a capital "B". 4. The Redirect Fixer updates "Blackberry tip" to point to "BlackBerry". This is correct. 5. [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?
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).
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.