It is a generic problem, but it has particularly nasty interactions with RevisionDelete: fundamentally, it can become impossible to tell when, why or by whom a RevDel'd revision was deleted. The other manifestations of the lunacy of identifying deleted revisions by timestamp rather than revision id are not so serious, but these definitely are.
Identifying deleted revisions by id rather than timestamp is a lot of work in itself; not least of which is writing and running a script to fill in all the null values for old deleted revisions on WMF wikis. There's no point in doing that if the 'grand plan' is to move away from having an archive table altogether. But equally this is an issue which does badly need work done. Hence the question, ""what *is* the grand plan?""
--HM
-------------------------------------------------- From: "Andrew Garrett" andrew@werdn.us Sent: Tuesday, May 18, 2010 3:05 PM To: "Happy-melon" happy-melon@live.com; "Wikimedia developers" wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Deletion schema
On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 8:24 AM, Happy-melon happy-melon@live.com wrote:
There's another discussion happening at enwiki at the moment about the stalled rollout of RevisionDelete for admins; which is backed up in the chain of bugs which boils down to "our deletion mechanism is borked".
Reviewing the whole deletion mechanism was on the topic list for the last dev meetup, but AFAIK despite that event running for three times as long as it was expected to, it never got raised? I think this would be as good a time as any to do so. Do we have any clear idea or overall plan for page and revision deletion, the archive table, a page_deleted field, a deleted_page table, etc etc??
I promised to activate single-revision deletion for admins months ago, and then again after the last software update. I finally got to it tonight.
Church of Emacs points out this bug, but it looked as though it was a generic problem with our previous deletion system, and not an additional problem caused by single-revision deletion (indeed, it appears to be mitigated by the use of single-revision deletion instead of the old delete/undelete method).
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21279
-- Andrew Garrett http://werdn.us/
On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 9:21 AM, Happy-melon happy-melon@live.com wrote:
It is a generic problem, but it has particularly nasty interactions with RevisionDelete: fundamentally, it can become impossible to tell when, why or by whom a RevDel'd revision was deleted. The other manifestations of the lunacy of identifying deleted revisions by timestamp rather than revision id are not so serious, but these definitely are.
Identifying deleted revisions by id rather than timestamp is a lot of work in itself; not least of which is writing and running a script to fill in all the null values for old deleted revisions on WMF wikis. There's no point in doing that if the 'grand plan' is to move away from having an archive table altogether. But equally this is an issue which does badly need work done. Hence the question, ""what *is* the grand plan?""
--HM
Or we could just ignore[1] them.
1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technica...
OQ wrote:
Or we could just ignore[1] them. 1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technica...
I strongly disagree with brion and I hope that everyone realizes just deleting the archive table is not an option. While the archive table might have been originally designed as a temporary space to store deleted revisions, this differs greatly from the current use. Deleting 'deleted' edits would cause a major disruption on Wikimedia wikis.
That being said, I appreciate Happy-melon's initiative to carefully plan a system before implementing single features without a general concept where this is going.
IMHO we should discuss this at a Wikimania workshop. Anyone interested? In order to integrate those who can't make it to Wikimania, I suggest we create an onwiki schematic on the proposed deletion system.
I'm still not sure whether RevisionDelete is aimed at replacing the old deletion schema completely, including the archive table. Could anyone comment on that please?
Regards, Church of emacs
Ps.: BTW, a question that came to my mind: Do we wish to retain our bijective Pagename -- Page relationship? (As opposed to a model, where a new page data set is created when a user creates a wiki page. Our current model has the flaw, that we can't differentiate between two completely different articles that have the same page title (e.g. if article A is deleted and someone else writes article B with the same page title – they are treated exactly the same, even though they are logically two different sets of revisions)) I'm not suggesting we drift away from our current approach, just wanted to note it has some flaws imho.
We should start a page at mediawiki.org listing the Pros and Cons of each option.
Church of Emacs:
I'm still not sure whether RevisionDelete is aimed at replacing the old deletion schema completely, including the archive table. Could anyone comment on that please?
It's the logical evolution IMHO.
Ps.: BTW, a question that came to my mind: Do we wish to retain our bijective Pagename -- Page relationship? (As opposed to a model, where a new page data set is created when a user creates a wiki page. Our current model has the flaw, that we can't differentiate between two completely different articles that have the same page title (e.g. if article A is deleted and someone else writes article B with the same page title – they are treated exactly the same, even though they are logically two different sets of revisions)) I'm not suggesting we drift away from our current approach, just wanted to note it has some flaws imho.
They may be the same (eg. the same article recreated, page merges...) or completely different. That could be 'solved' if the parent_revs were exposed somewhere.
On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 1:39 PM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
We should start a page at mediawiki.org listing the Pros and Cons of each option.
Put it as a subpage of [[RFC]].
-Chad
Chad wrote:
On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 1:39 PM, Platonides wrote:
We should start a page at mediawiki.org listing the Pros and Cons of each option.
Put it as a subpage of [[RFC]].
-Chad
I started it at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Page_deletion
Please, collaborate to fullfill it. *Then*, comment.
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