As I recall, there was a period where merging didn't work. If these items were created during that window, people may have merged the links by hand and left the empty items hanging. Can you check if they have similar creation dates (I guess number range should give an indication)

On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 2:29 AM, Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi!

> My recent tests produced lists of empty or almost empty items, meaning
> that they have no sitelinks, no statements, no label (almost empty), and
> sometimes no descriptions or aliases either (empty). Many of the empty
> ones seem to be redirects now, but not all (e.g. Q18482644).
>
> Maybe somebody would like to check what is going on in each case. It
> seems like in most cases, a merge has emptied the item and a redirect
> should be placed now.

Some of them are redirects. Some of them are very strange items: with
description of "Wikimedia category" and no labels or links. I suspect it
is leftover from some bug. Check out here: http://tinyurl.com/ot47amh

I'll try to see if there are other patterns there.
--
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev@wikimedia.org

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