> What is the proper way to make an empty edit of an existing article programmatically, in a maintenance script?

I'd look at maintenance/edit.php if I were you :)

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikibot/touch.py is regularly used to make millions null edits, don't bother inventing something else.

It seems touch.py should be updated to make use of forcelinkupdate, forcerecursivelinkupdate and generator parameters of api.php?action=purge, to reduce traffic. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Purge

There're still cases / some bugs where *links tables can't be updated automatically. touch.py and similar techniques work as a workaround.

I'm the original poster -- here is my real-world use case where a null edit is required. My wiki has a custom parser tag, (say) <foobar>. Many articles include it in their wikitext. We modified the code for <foobar> to add a feature: autocategorizing. It automatically categorizes any article that contains it (say, in "Category:Articles containing the foobar tag"). After this code change is deployed, if you visit an article Blat that previously contained <foobar>, you will see it is properly categorized at the bottom. However, if you visit the category page for "Articles containing the foobar tag", it is missing Blat (and tons of other articles). If you perform a null edit on Blat, it then shows up on the category page. Purging Blat (action=purge) does not have this effect. DanB _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 12:36 AM, Daniel Barrett &lt;danb(a)vistaprint.com wrote: >> We modified the code for <foobar> to add a feature: autocategorizing. >>[Now] if you visit an article Blat that >> previously contained <foobar>, you will see it is properly categorized >> at the bottom. However, if you visit the category page for "Articles >> containing the foobar tag", it is missing Blat (and tons of other

Liangent wrote: Thanks, but I ran refreshLinks.php and it didn't update the category page

DanB _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l