Christian Semrau wrote:

Hello wikipedians all around the world!

I am Christian aka SirJective from the german WP, and want to promote some knowledge about a database flaw that can be handled by sysops.

Did you ever ask yourselves why the "What links here" page of some articles lists articles that don't link there? Or found articles listed on Special:Shortpages that are not short (at least not as short as listed on that page)? Or articles listed on Special:Lonelypages that are not orphaned?

I've been working on these kinds of problems recently. The cause usually seems to be a SELECT performed without a FOR UPDATE option. Unfortunately using more locking will cause more deadlocks and lock wait timeout errors, but hopefully with appropriate use of retry loops and other measures, these problems can be kept to a minimum.

-- Tim Starling