Bug 16666 showed an instanced where page titles matching an updated 'Media' namespace name got reassigned into namespace -2 in the database by a cleanupTitles run, making them inaccessible until fixed manually.
Special and Media NSs should not be considered valid targets by these cleanup scripts; they should be given the same treatment as invalid titles or interwiki conflicts.
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement
URL: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16666
Hmm... Testing with cleanupTitles:
shortwiki 2009-01-06 23:05:59: page 1267 (Media:Joemomma) doesn't match self.
shortwiki 2009-01-06 23:05:59: DRY RUN: would rename 1267 (0,'Media:Joemomma') to (0,'Joemomma')
shortwiki 2009-01-06 23:06:47: page 1267 (Special:Joemomma) doesn't match self.
shortwiki 2009-01-06 23:06:47: DRY RUN: would rename 1267 (0,'Special:Joemomma') to (0,'Joemomma')
This is just dropping the namespace, which would probably be sub-ideal if the text was intended to be part of the original title.
Compare with current handling of a conflict with an interwiki prefix:
shortwiki 2009-01-06 23:07:26: page 1267 (Wikipedia:Joemomma) doesn't match self.
shortwiki 2009-01-06 23:07:26: DRY RUN: would rename 1267 (0,'Wikipedia:Joemomma') to (0,'Broken/wikipedia:Joemomma')
Note that namespaceDupes has different handling of that case, also including the original text:
Checking interwiki prefix: "Wikipedia"
... 1 conflicts detected:
... 1267 (0,"Wikipedia:Joemomma") -> (0,"Wikipedia-Joemomma") [[Wikipedia-Joemomma]]
Probably we should make sure that both cleanup scripts perform the same cleanup here...
namespacceDupes is at least now refusing to normalize the title record into -2 or -1 namespaces, so that's a good thing. :) Probably should let it handle them in some way, though, as is done for the interwiki case.