New subject: One-time run of maintenance scripts to fix years-old utter brokeness

27 Jan 2012

There are several maintenance scripts waiting to be run on many wikis 
since years ago: 
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=29782&hide_res…
The biggest offenders are:
* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16112 which breaks tons 
of special pages;
* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33253 which makes the 
article count on those wikis completely broken after the count method 
change.

The fact that we could/should find a perfect and permanent solution for 
those problems doesn't mean that we shouldn't improve the situation 
given that we can.
The fact that we can't run them every month as we once did doesn't mean 
that we shouldn't run them say every 5 years (which would be an 
improvement) or after big changes (such as the count method).
Even the longest scripts of that sort, when run by pdhanda some months 
ago, took only some days for all wikis and didn't do any damage.

Nemo