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(not written yet) in the title attribute of links to non-existing pages
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Description

The addition of (not written yet) breaks multitude of scripts and bots and should be removed until consensus has been aqquired to have that string in the title.


Version: unspecified
Severity: normal

Details

Reference
bz13111

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Lowest.Nov 21 2014, 10:05 PM
bzimport added a project: MediaWiki-Parser.
bzimport set Reference to bz13111.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

Bryan.TongMinh wrote:

(changed title)

Some more clarification: the title attribute of the <a> tag is frequently used by scripts to determine the pagename the link is pointing to, and those will break.

ayg wrote:

Reopening. This fix should not stay in trunk. Any bot that relies on title is relying on incidental functionality that no one ever guaranteed would be stable, and it's the bot that should be fixed. href is the correct attribute to rely on for this. If you need to resolve redirects, you can use the proper API we provide for things like this.

(In reply to comment #3)

Reopening. This fix should not stay in trunk. Any bot that relies on title is
relying on incidental functionality that no one ever guaranteed would be
stable, and it's the bot that should be fixed. href is the correct attribute
to rely on for this. If you need to resolve redirects, you can use the proper
API we provide for things like this.

As long the urls are not fully consistent (sometimes with title attribute, sometimes without), it's better that at least something is simple and static.

Concur with Simetrical. MediaWiki's USER interface should be designed, first and foremost, to service the needs of users. We have an API interface for bots to use. Those bots that use the standard user interface for tasks which the API interface can handle adequately should not expect any special consideration. Having somebody revert a patch by a senior developer without discussion counts as "special consideration" in my book, especially when very simple fixes can be applied to the bot code to parse and normalise a title contained about ten characters later in the HTML code.

I would support a WONTFIX resolution.

Carl, can you give a list of broken bots? Maybe we can help to fix the open source ones.

(In reply to comment #7)

Carl, can you give a list of broken bots? Maybe we can help to fix the open
source ones.

Some pywikipedia bots was broken (see welcome.py on pywikipedia repo). Of course, all these bots must use API (I agree with Andrew), but we should give some time so JavaScript developers may rewrite their scripts.

ayg wrote:

The reversion was reverted in r31218 by VasilievVV, with the observation that it can be disabled on sites that don't want it by changing [[MediaWiki:Red-link-title]] to "$1". Resolving WONTFIX.