On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 1:06 AM, Platonides platonides@gmail.com wrote:
Merlijn van Deen wrote:
Hello to both the wikitech and pywikipedia lists -- please keep both informed when replying. Thanks.
A few days ago, we - the pywikipedia developers - received alarming reports of interwiki bots removing content from pages. This does not seem to happen often, and we have not been able to reproduce the conditions in which this happens.
However, the common denominator is the fact it seems to be happening only on the wikipedia's that run MediaWiki 1.18 wikis. As such, I think this topic might be relevant for wikitech-l, too. In addition, there is no-one in the pywikipedia team with a clear idea of why this is happening. As such, we would appreciate any ideas.
- What happens?
Essentially, the interwiki bot does its job, retrieves the graph and determines the correct interwiki links.
Does it use the page content to retrieve the interwiki links? Or is it retrieved eg. by doing a different query to the API?
The interwiki links are retrieved from page content. The page content has been received through a call to Special:Export.
I.e. would receiving no content (from the bot POV) produce that behavior?
Yes, the only reasonable explanation seems to be that the bot interprets what it gets from the server as an empty page.