There was recently a brief discussion on the enwiki technical village
pump about the following issue, where Tim Starling suggested this should
be fixed in the API [1]. I want to mention it here before filing a bug.
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]].
If I fetch the list of backlinks to [[Slashdot]] using the API, I get
that page among the results. If I then try to fetch the page content for
it (using action=query and prop=revisions) the API returns a bad title
error ('invalidtitle'). This is of course a bad situation for people
using the API.
Strangely, I can get the content of that page using a generator query [2].
- Carl
1.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technic…
2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&generator=backlinks&…
The parameters are:
( 'action' => 'query',
'generator' => 'backlinks',
'titles' => 'Slashdot',
'gblfilterredir'=> 'redirects',
'prop' => 'revisions',
'rvprop' => 'ids|user|comment|content' );