Topic on Project:Village Pump

Tracking Category - Help missing, Explanations needed, Phabricator?

4
HirnSpuk (talkcontribs)

Hello everyone! Coming from wb:de.

Pages that use score are expected to be in the tracking category "Score-use-category". But they only are after an edit, which isn't that big of a deal for a new wiki, but for an existing one it's inconvenient. A wild guess by me is score was used before the category existed (compare Phab:T219603). I looked at Help:Tracking_categories trying to shed some light on the problem. Just to find, that the category isn't even listed there, let alone an explanation if (that?) tracking categories are only used when a wiki-page is published. So:

  • I wasn't able to correct the help page, because of lack of deeper knowledge of mediawiki,
  • the talk page Help talk:Tracking_categories doesn't seem to be in use quite a bit, bit I think this topic is somewhat important (at least to know how to handle those situations), so I came here,
  • I'm not sure, if a task on Phabricator makes sense, because I'm suspecting everything is as it's supposed to be, just causing inconvenience as a side effect,
  • I don't expect there to be a "automated" solution to the initial problem, but at least I wanted to raise awareness.

Anyways help, if possible, would be greatly appreciated and if there's anything I can do to help, let me know. Thanks and best regards, HirnSpuk

Dinoguy1000 (talkcontribs)

I added that (and the other undocumented Ext:Score tracking category, score-deprecated-category) to Help:Tracking categories for you. Unfortunately I can't really help with the category only being added to pages after they're edited, but I would definitely recommend you file a Phabricator task about it - worst that happens is the task is declined as expected behavior (or just an issue that won't be fixed).

Ciencia Al Poder (talkcontribs)

Existing pages don't get the tracking category automatically, if the tracking category didn't exist when the page was last edited. That's expected.

To add the tracking category, all pages should be reparsed, which is a very expensive operation.

When this situation happens, the best way to deal with it is to use the standard search function to grab a list of pages using a specific tag o parser function, and then run a bot to do a null edit on all those pages.

HirnSpuk (talkcontribs)

Thanks for all the help and the insight. Then I'll restrain from using phabricator. I expected a bot would be able to do the job. Thanks again, best regards, HirnSpuk