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{{FULLPAGENAME}} on Sidebar shows completely random link
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Description

Hi, this just been reported today. In Indonesian language projects (wiki, wikt, ws, wb) we have share-links in the sidebar, to easily share content to major social media websites. Currently, the code misbehaved: what supposed to be the page name (called through variable {{FULLPAGENAME}}) now render strange and random page.

Take a look, for example in id.wikt: https://id.wiktionary.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Sidebar, I've added two lines of code to show what {{FULLPAGENAME}} or {{PAGENAME}} it now displays. Then go to random page and see the sidebar. It's "Istimewa:Masuk log" (login page) at the time of this writing. It might be different when you look at it, but it is not the page name of the page (the expected result).

This behaviour also observed in id.ws, id.wb, and id.wiki, and each shows random and sometimes strange choice of links, which I can't explain the correlation. The changes occur whenever I edit the MediaWiki:Sidebar, and several seconds after that (when I refreshed) it changes again, then usually it persist until I edit the page again.

Some of the example of what {{FULLPAGENAME}} chose to display (all in id.wiki except otherwise mentioned):

  • Istimewa:Pencarian (=search page)
  • Pembicaraan Pengguna (some randome user talk page)
    aneh.png (140×502 px, 3 KB)
  • Brittany Snow
  • Istimewa:Perubahan terkait/<some random article> (=related changes)
  • Pasmacytoma
  • Istimewa:Pencarian (again)

all the above happened during the time I did some tests on id.wiki's MediaWiki:Sidebar (I finally made the share-links into a gadget, due to be deployed tomorrow)

  • Istimewa:Masuk log (=login page) on id.wikt
  • Al-Qur'an/Al-A'la on id.ws
  • Istimewa:Catatan/Parrama_ramadhan (=log of a random user) on id.wb

even during one time, when I edited the id.wikt's MediaWiki:Sidebar, for the first couple second, this is what it displayed

aneh4.png (707×623 px, 15 KB)
(the whole content of [1])
(after I took the screenshot, I didn't do any further edit on the sidebar, refreshed the page, and it displayed "Masuk log" on every page instead)

Some colleague had suggested today's roll-out[2] have something to do with the bug, but since there's no detail available[3] I can't make sure what the problem was.

[1] https://id.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Sidebar&action=edit&oldid=781021
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/2015/45
[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki_1.27/wmf.5&oldid=1917063

Event Timeline

Bennylin raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.
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Same as with the sitenotice: T22870

The sidebar is cached and not reparsed for each page so you cannot use page variable or time variable

Maybe to reduce confusion, when sidebar cache is on, we should explicitly set the message title to MediaWiki:Sidebar.

Same as with the sitenotice: T22870

The sidebar is cached and not reparsed for each page so you cannot use page variable or time variable

That would explain it. But when was the change? It seems to be recent one.

Bawolff: That would help a lot of admins.

Maybe to reduce confusion, when sidebar cache is on, we should explicitly set the message title to MediaWiki:Sidebar.

Done with https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/298197/

Due to caching this bug seems invalid, for non-wmf wikis it is possible to disable sidebar cache