Hi.
Is there a policy or guideline about the level to which Wikimedia wikis care
about data integrity? There are a few specific cases I'm talking about:
* edits or other logged actions with a wrong timestamp;
* incomplete user renames (contributions split between two accounts);
* weird entries in various *links tables (categorylinks, pagelinks, etc.);
* weird entries in various non-links tables (page, user, etc.); and
* revisions with weird user_id (page import bug, I think?).
This has come up in the context of some old Bugzilla bugs about edits with
the wrong timestamp. There's been some recent activity to mark at least some
of these old bugs as "wontfix". And perhaps this makes sense, given that
some of them are very old and it may be quite likely that nobody will ever
go back and tweak the old revision timestamps.
But I'm left wondering if there's anything concrete in this area to guide
the other Bugzilla bugs, such as the bugs about botched user renames or
*links tables having orphaned or invalid entries. And to some degree,
there's a human component too, I suppose. An edit with a bad timestamp isn't
a big deal; breaking a user's account simply because they have a lot of
edits is a much bigger deal. So there's some level of triaging to be done.
I see a lot of these issues as falling under general "database integrity".
Is there a page on
MediaWiki.org or Meta-Wiki that discusses this particular
issue?
I believe <https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16660> ("Database
table cleanup (tracking)") is the relevant tracking bug for most of what I'm
describing.
MZMcBride