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Misleading or bogus change notices per e-mail
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Description

These pages are on my watchlist:
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Manual%3ALanguage
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Translatewiki.net
I edited the English originals of both of them recently.
Today, on September 10th, 2015, two e-mail notifications arrived in my mailbox:

  • 1:

Dear Purodha,

The MediaWiki page Manual:Language has been changed on 10 October 2015 by
Shirayuki, see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Language for the
current revision.

Editor's summary: -

Contact the editor:
mail: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:EmailUser/Shirayuki
wiki: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Shirayuki

There will be no other notifications in case of further activity unless
you visit this page while logged in. You could also reset the
notification flags for all your watched pages on your watchlist.

Your friendly MediaWiki notification system

To change your email notification settings, visit
[... remainder truncated ...]

  • 2

[Almost identical, only referring to the other page]

Opposed to the usual messages of this kind, they do not give me links to the actual changes, not to all changes since these ones. Looking at the page histories, I found no mention of user Shirayukis edits. Looking further, I found no edits to any of these pages, including talk pages, translations, subpages, etc. by Shirayuki in his contributions:
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?limit=500&tagfilter=&title=Special%3AContributions&contribs=user&target=Shirayuki&namespace=&associated=1&year=2015&month=10

Now, I do not have a clue what might have triggered these e-mail, and where to look further to fix the problem.

Related Objects

Event Timeline

Purodha raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.
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Purodha removed a subscriber: matmarex.

Change 969145 had a related patch set uploaded (by Bartosz Dziewoński; author: Midgard):

[mediawiki/core@master] mail: Link to page log if not to a diff

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/969145

matmarex changed the task status from Stalled to In Progress.Nov 12 2023, 7:26 AM

Change 969145 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/core@master] mail: Link to page log if not to a diff

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/969145

matmarex removed a project: Patch-For-Review.

After this change, watchlist email notifications which are not associated with an edit (and don't have a diff link) will include a link to Special:Log for the affected page. This should make them significantly less misleading and bogus-looking. For example:

Testwiki page Test has been changed by User

Dear Matma Rex,

The Testwiki page Test has been changed on 13 November 2023 by User,
see http://localhost/wiki/Test for the current revision.

To view the log of this page, see
http://localhost/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=Test

However, as you can see above, the email subject is still the same as the one for page edits. We have a separate bug report about that: T44457: Email notification does not distinguish most log actions from edits.

(In addition to the notifications from the Translate extension, this bug also affected some uncommon log types from MediaWiki core – I could reproduce the problem with page protection and user rights changes, and they also include a link to Special:Log now.)

@Midgard Thank you for working on this! As you can see by all the duplicate bug reports above, this was a really annoying issue for a lot of people.