Hi all -
We've noticed that periodically the contents of WD will change quite significantly from time to time, and then change back again, without it being reflected in the change history of the affected items. Here's an example from last weekend.
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q998698 (John Kerr - British composer and musician)
At one point he seems to have had this assertion in our local stand-alone copy of WD:
GIVEN_NAME:Roberto está bien guapo
This assertion is now gone, and there is no record of it in the revision history for this Q number.
This would be explainable if this proved to be a case of vandalism or something and the https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Rollback was invoked, PROVIDED the rollback operation also rolls back the revision history.
Questions:
* Is is indeed the case that rollbacks also roll back the revision history?
* Is there some other place we could look that records such rollbacks?
Thanks,
Eric Scott
On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 5:01 PM, Eric Scott eric.d.scott@att.net wrote:
Hi all -
We've noticed that periodically the contents of WD will change quite significantly from time to time, and then change back again, without it being reflected in the change history of the affected items. Here's an example from last weekend.
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q998698 (John Kerr - British composer and musician)
At one point he seems to have had this assertion in our local stand-alone copy of WD:
GIVEN_NAME:Roberto está bien guapo
This assertion is now gone, and there is no record of it in the revision history for this Q number.
This would be explainable if this proved to be a case of vandalism or something and the https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Rollback was invoked, PROVIDED the rollback operation also rolls back the revision history.
Questions:
Is is indeed the case that rollbacks also roll back the revision history?
Is there some other place we could look that records such rollbacks?
Hi Erik,
Rollbacks and undos do get recorded in the revision history of an item as a regular edit. Here is a rollback I just did on the sandbox item: https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q4115189&diff=529556595&o... Not sure what is causing the issue you saw.
Cheers Lydia
Am 31.07.2017 um 17:01 schrieb Eric Scott:
- Is is indeed the case that rollbacks also roll back the revision history?
No. All edits are visible in the page history, including rollback, revert, restore, undo, etc. The only kind of edit that is not recorded is a "null edit" - an edit that changes nothing compared to the previous version (so it's not actually an edit). This is sometimes used to rebuild cached derived data.
- Is there some other place we could look that records such rollbacks?
No. The page history is authoritative. It reflects all changes to the page content. If you could find a way to trigger this kind of behavior, that would be a HUGE bug. Let us know.
Note that for wikitext content, this doesn't mean that it contains all changes to the visible rendering: when a transcluded template is changed, this changes the rendering, but is not visible in the page's history (but it is instead visible in the template's history). However, no transclusion mechanism exists for Wikidata entities.
My apologies. I was looking at the wrong Q-number for revision. The pertinent Q-number to check here was https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q4925477&action=history (The name "John"). My mistake.
On 07/31/2017 08:37 AM, Daniel Kinzler wrote:
Am 31.07.2017 um 17:01 schrieb Eric Scott:
- Is is indeed the case that rollbacks also roll back the revision history?
No. All edits are visible in the page history, including rollback, revert, restore, undo, etc. The only kind of edit that is not recorded is a "null edit"
- an edit that changes nothing compared to the previous version (so it's not
actually an edit). This is sometimes used to rebuild cached derived data.
- Is there some other place we could look that records such rollbacks?
No. The page history is authoritative. It reflects all changes to the page content. If you could find a way to trigger this kind of behavior, that would be a HUGE bug. Let us know.
Note that for wikitext content, this doesn't mean that it contains all changes to the visible rendering: when a transcluded template is changed, this changes the rendering, but is not visible in the page's history (but it is instead visible in the template's history). However, no transclusion mechanism exists for Wikidata entities.
This pattern — where someone vandalises a label of a given name item, thus making many entries for people with that name appear incorrect — is quite common. I frequently revert multiple such cases per day. My suspicion is that it's usually done by someone thinking that they're only changing a single entry, and not realising just how disruptive it's likely to be (in the case above,*everyone* called John!)
In some ways the extremely large scope is useful, in that it's more likely that someone will spot the problem quickly, but it's definitely not uncommon for such a change to remain live for 12 hours or more, and sometimes multiple days, before someone reverts it.
Tony
On 31 July 2017 at 18:01, Eric Scott eric.d.scott@att.net wrote:
My apologies. I was looking at the wrong Q-number for revision. The pertinent Q-number to check here was https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q4925477&action=history (The name "John"). My mistake.
On 07/31/2017 08:37 AM, Daniel Kinzler wrote:
Am 31.07.2017 um 17:01 schrieb Eric Scott:
- Is is indeed the case that rollbacks also roll back the revision
history?
No. All edits are visible in the page history, including rollback, revert, restore, undo, etc. The only kind of edit that is not recorded is a "null edit"
- an edit that changes nothing compared to the previous version (so it's
not actually an edit). This is sometimes used to rebuild cached derived data.
- Is there some other place we could look that records such rollbacks?
No. The page history is authoritative. It reflects all changes to the page content. If you could find a way to trigger this kind of behavior, that would be a HUGE bug. Let us know.
Note that for wikitext content, this doesn't mean that it contains all changes to the visible rendering: when a transcluded template is changed, this changes the rendering, but is not visible in the page's history (but it is instead visible in the template's history). However, no transclusion mechanism exists for Wikidata entities.
Wikidata-tech mailing list Wikidata-tech@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-tech
wikidata-tech@lists.wikimedia.org