In this case, I want to trigger an action that normally occurs on page save. We have an extension that writes the externallinks table. We made a change to the extension and now many entries in externallinks are wrong. A null edit in each article would cause its external links to be corrected in the externallinks table.
I tried running maintenance/refreshLinks.php, but it doesn't complete because some extensions (used by articles) are throwing errors.
I could also do a SQL update on the externallinks table, modifying the URLs (el_to values) directly. It works, but I'd rather have MediaWiki modify the data than me.
DanB
-----Original Message----- I assume you want to achieve something more specific than editing an article with a null edit.
What do you want to do here? Purge cache? Update page_touched? Something else?