On Mon, Mar 3, 2008 at 2:06 PM, Lukasz Bolikowski l.bolikowski@icm.edu.pl wrote:
I've noticed that SQL dumps of the redirect tables often contain less entries than they should. The problem applies to both large and small wikis.
This is because it didn't always exist. Legacy redirects (that have not been changed in the last . . . maybe year?) will have page.page_is_redirect set to indicate that they're a redirect. The old way then just parsed the text of the page for a target.
It's possible to fix this using maintenance/refreshLinks.php, but nobody's done it on Wikimedia wikis, apparently. It would be a pretty big operation on the large ones, of course, but I don't think it should be unmanageable at all, assuming the script is sane and only tries parsing pages with page_is_redirect but no redirect table row. You'd have to ask someone with shell access to do it.