Thanks everyone for your input.

The issue that made me ask my question actually arose from en.wp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review#Coix_lacryma-jobi_va...

Basically, someone forked an article and various people (rightly) repointed some subtopic redirects to the new article. Then the fork got deleted, and other editors and admins quickly deleted all those redirects without looking at the page history or incoming links, creating lots of redlinks overnight. But one cannot search deleted page history, so there's no way to find out what redirects should be restored to the old article.

The same problem can happen on any MediaWiki site, so I wondered if a relevant search function existed.

Part of the problem lies with Twinkle, which deletes broken redirects with one click without checking page history, encouraging this kind of reckless deletion. I have raised this issue at the Twinkle repository: https://github.com/azatoth/twinkle/issues/591

Thanks for all your help. Deryck

On Thu, 18 Apr 2019 at 18:45, Nick Wilson (Quiddity) nwilson@wikimedia.org wrote:

Hi Deryck,

It might help if you provide us with any of the other known aspects, e.g. topic-area, last known time of existence, etc.

If I was looking, my first step with just the current info, would probably be to open the Special:Log/delete at the relevant wiki, expand it to 500 entries, and try a few ctrl-F searches to narrow down the time-frame. E.g. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&offset=&lim...

Separately, there might also be clues in the description of https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T109561 (for using Special:Undelete to searching deleted page titles, with some fuzzy-matching now available)

HTH, Quiddity

On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 10:16 AM Vi to vituzzu.wiki@gmail.com wrote:

...

AFAIK nope, you can just search for title prefixes.

Vito

Il giorno gio 18 apr 2019 alle ore 16:23 Deryck Chan < deryckchan@gmail.com> ha scritto:

...

Hello ambassadors.

I can't find relevant info in the documentation so I've come to ask here

• Is it possible to run a keyword search in deleted page content?

I've got this situation where a few pages were deleted by mistake, and redirects to those pages were speedily deleted by other admins. Now there are no searchable traces of what redirects we should restore, and admins don't know where in the deletion log to look. Any advice?

Deryck _______________________________________________ Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list Wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors

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