Project:Support desk

My wiki is missing a bunch of pages. I think it's specifically the pages that only had one revision. Possibly only if that revision was very old.

Here's an example page: https://www.qbwiki.com/wiki/St._Anne%27s . It says there's no text in this page, but the page, revision, and text tables all seem to have the right data.

Other observations:

• The page header has "Read", "Edit", and "View History" tabs, as opposed to a page that really doesn't exist, which only has "Create"
• Editing the page displays

The revision #0 of the page named "St. Anne's" does not exist.

This is usually caused by following an outdated history link to a page that has been deleted. Details can be found in the deletion log.

(but the deletion log doesn't show anything)

• When I try to save an edit, I am told there is an edit conflict ("Someone else has changed this page since you started editing it.")
• I can delete the page and then re-create it
• I fiddled around with the PHP code to see where the error text was coming from. It's Article.php line 436, in the fetchRevisionRecord() method:

// $this->mRevision might already be fetched by getOldIDFromRequest()
if ( !$this->mRevision ) {
	if ( !$oldid ) {
		$this->mRevision = $this->mPage->getRevision();

		if ( !$this->mRevision ) {
			wfDebug( __METHOD__ . " failed to find page data for title " .
				$this->getTitle()->getPrefixedText() . "\n" );

			// Just for sanity, output for this case is done by showMissingArticle().
			$this->fetchResult = Status::newFatal( 'noarticletext' );
			$this->applyContentOverride( $this->makeFetchErrorContent() );
			return null;
		}
	…

But I don't know enough about how MediaWiki works (or PHP in general, really) to figure out what's going wrong.

This problem likely started after an upgrade that I struggled with. Unfortunately, I didn't notice this problem until long after the upgrade, and when I finished the upgrade I had thought everything turned out okay, so I don't remember exactly what went wrong.

The upshot is that there are a bunch of pages (this was just one example) whose contents exist in the database but can't be accessed through the website. I'm not sure even how to systematically identify such pages. I suspect some rows or values are just missing from some table(s), but I have no clue which or how to find out.

Thoughts?

Do you have backups from before the upgrade?

It is most likely that either the actor or comments migration has gone wrong. MediaWiki does a LEFT JOIN on those tables so missing entries in there will cause those revisions/pages to appear as missing.

If it is about comments, see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T249904.

If it is about actors, I had the following trick:

1. identify the user names for those revisions
2. Create proper users for them, e.g. `User::newSystemUser( '...', [ 'steal' => true ] );`
3. Run database queries UPDATE revision SET rev_user = 0 where rev_user_name = '...'; (and similar for all affected tables, mostly logging, archive and recentchanges)
4. Run php maintenance/cleanupUsersWithNoId.php

But you need backups to do this in case the rev_user and equivalent fields are already dropped. I guess it's possible to do it afterwards by updating the rev_actor and equivalent fields too, but I have not done that myself.

I do have backups from before the upgrade, but the upgrade was about a year ago so restoring from the backup isn't viable.

Thanks for pointing me at revision_comment_temp and revision_actor_temp. It looks like the problem is the latter—this query returns 164 rows:

SELECT * FROM revision WHERE rev_id NOT IN (SELECT revactor_rev FROM revision_actor_temp)

Do you agree with that reasoning? (Some of the corresponding pages do exist, but the revisions seem to be missing when I view the history through the web interface.)

The rev_user_text column contains the username, so that should address your step 1, right? Are you able to elaborate on step 2 (how do I do that? what's the steal thing?) and 3 (which tables are affected?)? Thanks so much!

I'd suggest running `php maintenance/migrateActors.php --force` to observe if there are errors. If there is, you should get list of usernames that match the rev_user_text of those rows. You could try running cleanupUsersWithNoId.php first or maybe even findMissingActors.php (if you have it) to see if is sufficient.

But if they don't work, my step 2 basically creates and user and actor for the name. The issue may be that there is no used account for the name, so actor cannot be created. Step 3 removes broken references to user ids which do not exist, so that cleanupUsersWithNoId can process it. The relevant tables and names should be printed out by the migrateActors script.

Thanks. migrateActors produced a bunch of messages like this:

User name "X" is usable, cannot create an anonymous actor for it. Run maintenance/cleanupUsersWithNoId.php to fix this situation.

cleanupUsersWithNoId produced a bunch of output but didn't seem to actually do anything.

I don't know how to actually do your step 2. It looks like PHP code I'm supposed to run, but I don't know how to run custom code within the MediaWiki environment.

I don't have findMissingActors.

There is shell.php and eval.php under maintenance, both allow you to run that code interactively.

Thanks. I had to fight with shell.php pretty hard to get PsySH to work, but I think everything works now, including the solution of my original problem. I appreciate your help.

I had a very similar problem and this thread was very helpful, thank you. I was able to resolve with this SQL:

INSERT INTO revision_actor_temp (revactor_rev, revactor_actor, revactor_timestamp, revactor_page) SELECT rev_id, 1 as actor, rev_timestamp, rev_page FROM revision WHERE rev_id NOT IN (SELECT revactor_rev FROM revision_actor_temp);

I was not concerned with correctly matching up the actors (and indeed think this data is lost), so replaced all of them with actor 1 (Administrator on my wiki). All of the page revisions are now accessible again. The missing actors were old now non-existent users that must have been lost in the 1.31 to 1.35 migration somewhere.

I should add I needed to run php maintenance/update.php afterwards as well.

thank you for this! the sql statement saved my wiki :-)

The SQL statement above also fixed issues on our wiki's.

The solution posted by 81.174.133.236 only works, however, on file pages the connection of the files to their pages is not reinstated. This means the files are not shown on the wiki. Reuploading with the same name is not possible either.

Note that I went from 1.25 to 1.31, to 1.32, to 1.33, 1.34 and now to 1.35. Needless to say that migrateActorswithNoId.php was useless to run. It detected the actors but did not clean them.

Going the rebuildImages.php path does not help, and neither the cleanupUsersWithNoId.php/migrateActors.php path.

I am clueless as to how to mitigate this. Looks to me like I may have run into this which I will still have to investigate. Edit: No, I do not think this is the issue.

You may try to use this version of cleanupUsersWithNoId.php for MediaWiki 1.35 that fixes other corner-cases that the original script did not fix.

Thanks for the pointer to your patched version of the script "cleanupUsersWithNoId.php." You are a hero! In the case of the current wiki I worked on, it was a lifesaver. Let me share my experience:

Going directly from MW 1.31 to MW 1.35 and applying the script on MW 1.35 after running "update.php" did not work. The wiki was in a disastrous condition after the upgrade and is no longer usable. This outcome is expected since the script had nothing to work on in the MW 1.35 database.

Going from MW 1.31 to MW 1.32, then to MW 1.33, using the patched script you linked to on 1.33 after running "update.php," did work. For some reason, the wiki was still unusable in version MW 1.33; however, upgrading to MW 1.34 with "update.php" and from there to MW 1.35 with "update.php" mitigated the issues emerging on the wiki. As a result, the wiki is working fine as it appears to me (still pending user feedback). This way, I could prevent massive issues, including this one, from occurring if I used core software. I am still determining why the wiki is broken in version 1.33, but it is probably another story.

Directly going from MW 1.31 to MW 1.35 is not recommended for wikis, with issues surfacing after the upgrade. Do it branch by branch and apply the patched script to MW 1.33. Going from MW 1.31 via MW 1.32, MW 1.33, and MW 1.34 to MW 1.35 using the script "cleanupUsersWithNoId.php" provided by core will also not work. The result will be a disaster. On the way, "update.php" will complain for MW 1.33 to MW 1.35 that you need to run "cleanupUsersWithNoId.php," however, it will ultimately do nothing.

Hi, I would like to share my experience here since I've been struggling with updating my MW from 1.31 onwards. Originally, I wanted to go from MW 1.31 to 1.32 and then 1.33 some time ago. As 1.33 broke my wiki due to the known actor nightmare (cleanupUsersWithNoId.php does not help), I decided to postpone the update.

Now, I gave everything another shot and followed the instructions posted by @Kghbln.

1) MW 1.31 to MW 1.32 using update.php

2) MW 1.32 to MW 1.33 using the enhanced version of cleanupUsersWithNoId.php by @Ciencia Al Poder first and only then executing update.php

3) MW 1.33 to MW 1.34 using update.php

4) MW 1.34 to MW 1.35 using update.php

Afterwards, my wiki was working fine on MW 1.35. As 1.39 is already out, I decided to continue the update process. To be on the safe side, I performed the update for each version separately (1.36 -> 1.37 -> 1.38 -> 1.39). Everything works fine now under PHP 7.4, my next step is going to push the PHP version to 8.1 but that's not related to this issue.

Btw, the query posted by 81.174.133.236 was not necessary as the enhanced script took care of everything.

Another issue I had facing this update was the removal of Manual:$wgDBmysql5. My database was still using latin1 collations and everything was working fine with $wgDBmysql5 = true; until this setting was removed in MW 1.33. Therefore, I had to adjust my DB accordingly to avoid encoding issues with special characters (some hints are given on the talk page of the setting, also see Topic:Wqktznc6b8nyc29g).

I really would like to thank @Ciencia Al Poder and @Kghbln and everyone involved for sharing the script and their paths for the update!

Say, I appear to have this issue in my wiki. However, I'm unable to use the above solution as my wiki has already been upgraded a few times (currently on 1.41), and I don't think I have access to the older versions anymore.

migrateActors.php --force shows 0 errors currently.

I also note that if I look at the history of a problematic page, I can see, for example, three users with edits. All appear in the list of users, and have other unaffected pages.

Any suggestions on how I might dig myself out of this?

Did you try to run the above SQL statement? That worked for us.

Yes, it errors out as there is no "revision_actor_temp"

There's no fix once your wiki database has been upgraded to later versions. The information of those old users is gone. Forever. There are only actor ids now. You'll have to manually select those actor ids and replace them by whatever other actor id that may be the best replacement for them.

Hmm, well, unfortunately I'm not even sure how to find the old actor IDs. Currently despite being able to see old revisions, I can't find the page in the database, but I may be not searching correctly. I'm certainly no expert on how the database is structured.

OK, so I think I have a better idea how to fix things now.

I did some reading up on the mediawiki manual that describes the structure of the database. It now made sense that I didn't have a "revision_actor_temp", as that was only around v1.3.1 – v1.3.8, and I've already upgraded past that.

I have been able to identify a few problem pages just by coming across them browsing my wiki. I'm using phpMyAdmn tool at part of the cPanel set up for my instance. Selecting my database and searching for an exmaple page title let me find the page record, and in that, find the page ID number.

The, searching the revision field only (by selecting it and using the search tool), I was able to search for all revision entries for that page ID number. The very last/latest revision had an rev_actor ID of "0". When I had been looking at the list of revisions in the wiki, it shows them up to that point.

After backing up my database (in case I mess things up), I edited the rev_actor ID for that one revision from "0" to "1" (the ID of the main admin account). Now that revision appears with the name of the main admin account as having done the revision, and the page appears normally in the wiki.

Now I certainly can just have folks report when they run into one of these pages, and fix them as I come across them. However, my question is: Is there a legitimate use of the rev_actor ID being "0", or is that most assuredly an indication of a problem with the page? I could easily find/replace them, but I see about 2.5K entries that have a rev_actor ID of "0" currently. The wiki doesn't have anonymous edits, by the way - or at least I though so, I can historically see some edits just have IP addresses, as I look at entries that contain the null ID.

Further searching (and some exporting and deduping search results) has given me a list of about 1000 pages/categories etc to check.

I'm finding in many cases there are pages that work, but have one or more rev_actor IDs in their edit history. These don't show in the history unless I modify it from "0", then I can see them. I'm assuming that aside from skipping steps in the view of the history, they would only be an issue if one were to attempt to revert to them (or possibly around them), but I'm probably going to fix them in any case.

So, would doing the following work?

UPDATE `revision`

SET `rev_actor` = 1

WHERE `rev_actor` = 0

I have a template where I need to loop through multiple anonymous parameters.

{{My template
 | Cats
 | Dogs
}}

The template uses the variables in different places, so I cannot use

{{My template | Cats }}
{{My template | Dogs }}

How can I create a template that doesn't add all cases of {{{1}}}…{{{99}}}?

__NOTOC____NOEDITSECTION__<!-- 
 -->{{#vardefine:mode|{{{mode|full}}}}}<!--
 -->{{#ifeq:{{{1}}}|||{{#vardefine:1|{{{1}}}}}}}<!--
 -->{{#ifeq:{{{2}}}|||{{#vardefine:2|{{{2}}}}}}}<!-- 
 -->{{#ifeq:{{#var:mode}}|full|
== Magic ==

<ul>
{{#if:{{#var:1}}
 |Magic stuff with {{#var:1}}
}}
{{#if:{{#var:2}}
 |Magic stuff with {{#var:2}}
}}
</ul>

== Templates ==

}}
{{#if:{{#var:1}}
 | {{Other template/{{#var:1}}}}
}}

{{#if:{{#var:2}}
 | {{Other template/{{#var:2}}}}
}}

Is it only possible with Extensions like Extension:Loops and Extension:LoopFunctions?

It sounds like you'd do better with Extension:Scribunto, so you could either construct the entire template in Lua, or create a function that'd check for the param's existence (e.g. via frame:getParent()).

I wonder what extensions are recommended atm if you need comments or a forum.

On Structured Discussions I read that the project ended in November 2023 and everyone is advised to archive their discussion (what the?). Is there a follow-up? On the other hand this very support desk uses exactly this?

What should I use if I start a wiki nowaydays and want future-proof comments under article pages instead of talk pages?

• Extension:Comments looks very old.
• What will mediawiki.org use?

Structured discussion is dead, I wouldn't use it. I'd argue it is impossible to maintain for 3rd parties, with a lot of exceptions and interventions that differ from how we do things in MW.

Everything Wikimedia will eventually switch to using DiscussionTools.

Thanks. Let's hope this will be supported longer than Flow.

@Subfader: Out of general curiosity, exactly what is the problem with Comments? As the maintainer and primary developer of it since 2011, I'd be curious to know. :) Its User Interface is pretty stable and definitely not using the latest fancy design things, but it gets the job done. (I'll admit, though, that OOUI did end up lasting for several years longer than it did, but that, too, is being phased out and I'm sure that the successor will also be sunset in favor of a newer, shinier gadget, give it some time. Not using these sort of frameworks comes with the unexpected benefit of your code working regardless, if you can tolerate a somewhat "dated" looking UI.)

For the record: the initial version was written circa 2006 (!) and as it (like other social tools originating from ArmchairGM which enable new content types, like Extension:FanBoxes, Extension:LinkFilter, Extension:Video, ...) predates MediaWiki's ContentHandler system by many years, it does things in a way which isn't ideal, yet it's surprisingly functional and shockingly robust (in my biased opinion), because even major core changes aren't likely to disrupt this little extension which does things in its own way.

Some people argue that "no recent code commits" (or something similar) equals to a dead project. I largely disagree; while it may mean that the end-user should exercise a bit of caution and carefully test things etc., not all MediaWiki developers are huge fans of "move fast and break stuff", which, alas, seems to be all too common these days. Sure, it bumps up a repository's commit count a lot, but what for, and at what cost?

Now, as for Comments' actual architectural shortcomings...while the comments are associated with a(n existing wiki) page, they are indeed in other ways separate, they are not regular wiki page content or anything. So implementing a history interface (phab:T156736) or the ability to undelete previously deleted comments (phab:T127595) is very tricky, to say the least, and I for one would be very surprised (but in a positive way!) to see those implemented before Comments turns 20 years old in 2026.

Sorry, not old as outdated code but interface-wise. From the screenshots it looks like forum discussions from early 2000s.

Do you know of sites that use it which you could link or mail me?

In over 15 years I went from ArticleComments to some forum extension I forget and then Flow. Each time I was forced to throw away all old comments and posts. Not funny when you try to run a community. This timed I prefer some more LTS.

Merhaba güvenlik konseyi almadan önce sezonluk birlik açılacak deniliyor ama 2 defa aldım ve biraz önce aldım açılmadı lütfen bunu düzeltin

You are most likely in the wrong place. This is the support forum for the Mediawiki software.

In the timeless skin, there was originally a link svg in the upper right corner of the inserted link text, but it was not displayed

Dear Wikimedia Support Team,

content strikken

[edited by administrator]

@Srigurukripa this is a support desk for the software and not a general appeals platform. So not only are you in the WRONG place, you added your comment to a random other thread, using an alternate account from your actual account. Please don't. -- User:TheDJ

@TheDJ can you please tell me from where I can get support. can you please help by providing me support desk link of Wikipedia.

Hmm.. Can anybody please help me with this problem. I will be very thankful.

@Kohana240: to clarify you mean the little square with an arrow pointing out of it, icon that comes after external links. E.g. like like this ?

If your wiki is public, a link to it would be helpful.

soka.cafe is the link

The external link icon is supposed to be located at https://soka.cafe/skins/Timeless/resources/images/ext-link.svg - however i think the short url setup is intercepting the url and treating it as an article, preventing MediaWiki from loading the icon. What url MediaWiki uses for this is controlled by $wgStylePath.

p.s. I love the customization of the Timeless skin, it is very pretty.

Hello, everyone.

The default data type for property value is “page”. Property name::property value.

Can I also use a Template instead of a page as data type or isn’t this recommended?

It’s just because it thought it may be a good idea to organize templates with the help of SMW. I didn’t fin lad any information on this topic. Only which data types exist.

https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:List_of_datatypes

Thank you very much for your help Ben

Hello,

I have upgraded to MediaWiki 1.39.7 with the following components:

I have been getting errors from the web browser such as "The connection was reset" when I try to edit and save pages with somewhat long titles (about 30 characters). Note that the titles are in the Greek alphabet, so I do not know if this plays a role regarding the size of character encoding. From what I read online, the maximum size for a page title is 255 bytes.

Also sometimes when saving is successful, I get lines of the form "<<<<<<< /private/var/tmp/merge-old-6jssyq" incorporated into the page's contents.

Note that I did not have problems of this sort with older versions of MediaWiki (or MySQL). I also do not have any problems with pages that have shorter page titles.

Any help on the matter is appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

> I get lines of the form "<<<<<<< /private/var/tmp/merge-old-6jssyq" incorporated into the page's contents

This sounds like you have a git merge conflict in a file of your mediawiki installation.

Thank you @TheDJ

Could you explain how git is involved in this error please? Aren't characters "<<<<<<<<" and ">>>>>>>>" used more widely and not only in git?

Btw, this type of lines appears in the source of a wiki page, when I am editing a section of the page.

merge-old is what was triggering me. That is the prefix for the filenames that git uses when encountering two conflicting versions.

Greek characters are 2 bytes each. 30 character greek title = 60 bytes. So its probably not a length issue.

It could also be something going wrong with edit conflict merging which also uses diff3 (and uses the merge-old-xxxxx convention), but i've never heard that happening before. See also manual:$wgDiff3

Can you check your php error log.

Thank you. I checked /var/log/apache2/error.log

and I get

[Thu Jul 11 08:52:19.418457 2024] [core:notice] [pid 137] AH00052: child pid 21546 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

[Thu Jul 11 08:52:19.418818 2024] [core:notice] [pid 137] AH00052: child pid 21052 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

Also I have the following values in LocalSettings.php

## Shared memory settings

$wgMainCacheType    = CACHE_NONE;

$wgMemCachedServers = array();

Thank you in advance.

Debugging php segfaults can be pretty difficult if you arent familiar with php internals. Normally i suggest updating your version of php to see if that helps.

Thank you. Shall I update to PHP 8.1?

Its worth a shot.

Hello,

I wanted to analyze data about edits on Wikipedia, so I downloaded the data dump with full history. But going through the xml, I managed to find all the revisions, edits and their comments, but tags assigned to the edits are nowhere to be found. Where are they in the dump or do I have to get them somewhere separately?

There is a separate file called change_tag.sql.gz with this information that you can download from the dump site.