Quarry is using a copy of the database that doesn't match the production database - there's clearly been some kind of corruption or replication problem. It first reared its head 13 months ago, and has now come back and is active at the moment. Please can Quarry be given a "clean" version of the db to feed on?
Email issues mean I can't get on Phabricator at the moment, but hopefully someone here can get something done. I do a lot of work with red-link and other problem categories on en.wiki, particularly with these three reports : | Uncategorized categories (Quarry), Categories categorized in red-linked categories (Quarry) and Red-linked categories with incoming links (Quarry).
Obviously you would expect every category in the first query to exist - but it became clear that there were four that were "stuck"in the query that had been deleted either on 22 April 2016 or 30/Apr/16. The second query has fourteen "zombies" - some cats that were also deleted on 22 April 2016 (and so shouldn't be in the report), and some cats that do exist but have a parent category that exists (which should disqualify them from the report) - in those cases the parent category was moved to its current name on 22 April 2016. I've even tried null edits and recreating some of these zombies and then deleting them, but it doesn't affect what happens in Quarry.
It gets worse on the third query, which now has 31 zombie cats all of which are empty and so shouldn't be in the query. A couple overlap with query 2, there's some birth and date ones whose only thing in common is the removal of a CfD tag on 1 May 2016, and there's maintenance categories - one deleted on 13 May 2016, one on 4 June 16 and one deleted on both 8 June 2016 and 14 August 2016. So far, a coherent story seems to be emerging - a big problem on 22 April 16, which trickled on for a few weeks afterwards but then was fixed.
Now it's back. If you look at the third query you'll see a bunch of maintenance categories from the last week, which were mostly deleted on 2 June 2017 but there's at least one which was deleted just 13 hours ago. So whatever this corruption/replication problem is, it has clearly come back.
From my point of view, all I want is Quarry to be working on a copy of the database that actually matches the production database. However, there's also a wider issue of what is the underlying cause of all this - and does it only affect replication to the Labs copy of the database, or is there a wider problem? Worms, meet can.... Le Deluge (talk) 13:43, 4 June 2017 (UTC)