[Mediawiki-api] Invalid page titles returned from queries

[Roan Kattouw]

Russell Blau schreef:
> "Roan Kattouw" <roan.kattouw at home.nl> said:
>   
>> Carl Beckhorn schreef:
>>     
>>> It's already known among the developers that there can be obsolete
>>> entries in the page table. One of these at the moment is pageid 414115
>>> on enwiki, the article [[/.]], which has an illegal title. 
>>> Unsurprisingly,
>>> when that page was last edited, it was a redirect to [[Slashdot]].
>>>
>>>       
>> That's the database's fault, not the API's. If this causes trouble,
>> someone should write a maintenance script to delete these ghost pages.
>>     
>
> Well, I'm the one who posted about this on enwiki, and was told in no 
> uncertain terms by Tim Starling that it's the API's fault, not the 
> database's.
>   
Even the big guys make a mistake here and there (although they do so 
less frequently), they're human too. The point here is that the UI has 
exactly the same flaw ([[Special:Whatlinkshere/Slashdot]]) also links to 
[[/.]], which, when clicked, displays an invalid title error). The fact 
that these titles are still in the DB is not the API's fault (nor the 
UI's, BTW).
> The problem is that if the invalid title retrieved from one query is used in 
> the titles= parameter of another query, the API returns a Bad Title error on 
> the entire query (even if there are 50 titles |'ed together).
That's bug 13390 [1], only very distinctly related to this issue.
> Some possible 
> solutions to this, in no particular order:
>
> 1)  delete the damn page entry from the database
>   
That should happen. Someone (not me, I suck at that) should write a 
maintenance script for that.
> 2)  change the API so that, if there is a bad title in the titles= 
> parameter, it still returns the query result for all the valid titles.
>   
That's what I'm gonna do when I fix bug 13390 (it's on my TODO list).
> 3)  change the API so that it doesn't return the invalid page entry in the 
> first place (probably not such a good idea, now that I think about it)
>
>   
Exactly.

Roan Kattouw (Catrope)

[1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13390