Last modified: 2008-09-16 17:08:53 UTC
I have been importing some pages via transwiki from meta into MW.org - here are the steps I take when the page title needs changing: 1) Import using Special:Import into the appropriate namespace 2) Move to the correct page title. 3) Delete redirect created by the page move. I have found that when I perform the delete in step 3, it deletes the destination of the move, not the source. I don't know if this is a caching issue or a bug - it presumably has nothing to do with the import, but with the delete shortly after the move. The first time I assumed I just made a mistake, but the second time I took more care, refreshed the page so that the two pages showed up correctly at the appropriate URLs, made sure I was on the redirect page and performed the delete, but the target of the redirect was deleted, not the redirect itself. The deletion log (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Log/delete) shows that, indeed, the redirect page is the one that was deleted, BUT that the content of the page was not updated in the DB from before the page was moved. It seems that the DB writes are being delayed, so that the delete page is reading the old version of the page and using this as the source of the delete. This may be just be a temporary network problem, but the side-effects are quite drastic!
Should be fixed in r40920