Thanks for following up, and sorry for the delay.
On Sep 7, 2017, at 2:41 PM, Deryck Chan
<deryckchan(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Can you quantify lots?
At least 5 templates (including the one discussed in this thread), approx 160
transclusions on yue.wp, mostly in article space. That means 0.25% of all articles.
I see,
https://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template%3AMergeto&type=…
I assume you've made similar edits on the others.
According to the discussion, zh.wp is affected by this
bug too: at least 7 templates, according to my insource search.
en.wp has at least 45 pages with this problem, including 9 templates. [[en:Template:Merge
to]] alone has 3000+ transclusions.
The source here isn't exactly the same, since it sits behind the `target`
parameter,
{{#if:{{{target|}}}| ''[[:{{NAMESPACE}}:{{{target}}}|{{{target}}}]]''|
which doesn't seem to be a common use, judging by a search,
insource:/"{{merge to"/i
[[en:Template:Original]] also uses this pattern, but doesn't appear
to be used in the main article space.
Since this change affected [[en:Template:Merge to]]
which is a trunk project copied by many other wikis, I expect a very large - probably in
the tens of thousands - total number of broken pages.
It's certainly possible but, again, we did a bunch of testing
and only found a handful of cases in our sample.
Also, this thread is the only place it has currently been surfaced
(to me :/).
My insource search string:
insource:/"[[:{{NAMESPACE}}:"/
Where do we go from here?
We can revert the change and add comments to the effect that this is
acceptable syntax, mentioning this use case, and then go fix up other
title parsing implementations.
We can suggest edits to the affected templates we find referencing
this thread (and hopefully changes to trunks will propagate out).
I'm partial to the latter.