Is this on a local test install or on one of the Wikimedia sites? IIRC we run cleanup of referenced pages through the job queue, so there may be some delay before everything gets invalidated.

Tested mainly on enwiki, but I just ran the same test on my local install (currently r99582) and observed the same behavior.

Is the job queue currently behind by ''hours'' when dealing with simple sandbox pages not linked from anywhere else?

joedecker wrote:

Speaking from my experiences on ENWIKI, there is a general feature/bug/behavior that template-inserted categories don't update until there's a null edit or better, as a rule. This impression seems confirmed to me by my reading of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NULLEDIT#Null_edit

I have been told by a knowledgable user (as I've been pursuing a BRFA for a bot to deal with the trouble this is causing a single particular maintenance category at ENWIKI) that this relates to purge, etc., not updating the "categorylinks table."

I'd be interested in knowing if that is in fact the case, if so if this is a problem that can/will be fixed, or if instead the performance implications of fixing it would be prohibitive. I can suggest/create workarounds at varying degrees of cost, but first, if this is just a general bug that's easily fixed, that'd be useful data. Thanks.

This seems related to bug 12019 ("ifexist function uses pagelinks table in lieu of better options"). Since ifexist is using the pagelinks table, I'm not sure why updates aren't working properly.

(In reply to comment #4)

This seems related to bug 12019 ("ifexist function uses pagelinks table in lieu
of better options"). Since ifexist is using the pagelinks table, I'm not sure
why updates aren't working properly.

I guess when a page is created/deleted, pages with pagelinks to it are only cleared from parser cache, but not reparsed (with linksupdate). Because traditional "pagelinks" change doesn't need linksupdate.

I found examples of this error on is.wikipedia by using Quarry on Labs. Those are:

There was an link from these page as the template "Bókaheimild" used to link the parameter "titill". In 2007 these links where removed, as the template then used the template "ekkirauður" which removes redlinks by using the parserfunction "ifexist". As these links where redlinks when they where removed in 2007, these pagelinks should not be present in the pagelinks database table.

I have just tested this on https://www.thetestwiki.org/ and found out that the same issue affects both when the #ifexist target page is deleted and when it is moved without redirect (two actions that cause a blue link to become a red one).