Some time ago @Lydia_Pintscher and I looked into usages of Special:ItemDisambiguation (before it was turned off).
While the special page seems to get a lot of hits from spam bots (30k+ a day), I was only able to find two actual requests to it for May 15 (which I chose randomly as example).
We should look into this further and probably remove the special page for good.
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Resolved | PRODUCTION ERROR | Addshore | T195520 Multiple projects reporting Cannot access the database: No working replica DB server | ||
| Open | None | T96040 Wikibase special pages (tracking) | |||
| Open | None | T195754 Re-enable Special:ItemDisambiguation | |||
| Open | None | T196935 Evaluate Special:ItemDisambiguation usages |
See also https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T195755#4258676 for where the "spam" is coming from.
Just for completeness, I'm copying the comment I added in T195754:
This usage is very helpful when adding statements whose values are common words or expressions. In those cases the entity suggester list is quite long and one has to keep clicking to show more, never knowing where it ends. I'd actually prefer if, instead of dynamically loading more items (or in addition to that option), there would be a way to go directly to the Special:ItemDisambiguation from the entity suggester list.
Another way I used the Special:ItemDisambiguation was to review possible existing items before creating a new one (since often they have a label but no description, making it hard to figure out at a glance whether they might be duplicates or not).