I suppose because of global user pages, Babel AutoCreate creates many empty categories, like huwikisource:Kategória:User ca or huwikisource:Kategória:User pt. I’m getting tired of cleaning them up without any progress, because it recreates the categories I’ve just deleted.
Description
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Details
| Subject | Repo | Branch | Lines +/- | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Do category creation during LinksUpdate hook rather than during parse | mediawiki/extensions/Babel | master | +109 -83 |
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Resolved | Pppery | T184941 Babel AutoCreate creating empty categories (already on page preview) | |||
| Declined | None | T209719 Create and deploy a kill switch for Babel AutoCreate |
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I just deleted a dozen of these categories created this week. Can you please do something about it?
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Half a dozen categories, again. I don’t want to block the bot, I want it to not malfunction.
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@MarcoAurelio wrote:
@Tacsipacsi Block the bot if it causes trouble. It seems the only solution for now.
Not sure if I can submit a Global Ban request aganist this bot or not, since this bot did a large scale of fires and furies to categorization systems globally.
This comment was removed by stjn.
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Another 11 empty categories created recently on cswiki
Let's block it. Better to have red categories (can be created by the community once needed) than many empty categories outside category tree
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I don't think a global ban would be the appropriate venue. It'd be easier to configure and deploy a kill switch for the extension bot so we can disable it for Wikimedia Production for now. Note that given that this is a "system" account it might not be affected by CentralAuth locks, so I'm not sure I should attempt to do one.
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Both categories linked in the description contain pages. Can someone explain what is nature of the empty categories and what is the actual problem?
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When you watch Special:Unused categories on any project for a while, you notice every month there are new categories titled as "User xy". These categories have no users inside and also are not categorized. Two issues nobody likes. And every month 10 (on cswiki) categories are created this way by bot, noone knows why. They are just popping up and occupy space in the Unused categories list. That's why some projects block the bot, others are not sure what to do with it.
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I confirm the creation of a category is immediately triggered just when a preview is done with a {{#babel:xx}} code on a page. I experienced this behavior of WP:FR. The creation should be done only when a page is saved with such a code.
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This should have been fixed in T42159 (September 2012), but apparently either it wasn’t, or it regressed. Looking at the code, this thing didn’t change much in Babel in the last almost ten years, so it may be a core thing.
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I think the root cause of this is that Babel is creating categories for API action=stashedit requests, which has nothing to do with the parser per se, so retagging.
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I have an idea for a patch to fix this, if my understanding of the cause is right. I probably won't get around to finalizing it and posting it to Gerrit until sometime next week, or when my other patches to the extension are merged.
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Change 882241 had a related patch set uploaded (by Pppery; author: Pppery):
[mediawiki/extensions/Babel@master] Do category creation during LinksUpdate hook rather than during parse
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Change 882241 merged by jenkins-bot:
[mediawiki/extensions/Babel@master] Do category creation during LinksUpdate hook rather than during parse