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.
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.
The same is true for the UI: if you go to Special:Whatlinkshere/Slashdot, you'll see that [[/.]] is listed (and linked), but clicking the link turns up an error message.
Strangely, I can get the content of that page using a generator query [2]
That's because generators are based on page IDs: list=backlinks passes a list of page IDs to prop=revisions internally.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)