Page MenuHomePhabricator

Temp accounts can't create pages in the 'Draft:' namespace on English Wikipedia
Closed, ResolvedPublicBUG REPORT

Description

As reported here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#c-~2025-31118-76-20251105220000-Page_creation_disabled_in_DRAFTspace_for_temp_accounts? temp accounts can't create pages in the 'Draft:' namespace on English Wikipedia. Users who are logged out (not using a temp account yet) seemingly can, although I haven't tried beyond loading the edit form.

image.png (1×1 px, 167 KB)
image.png (1×1 px, 154 KB)

I think permitting the creation of pages in the 'Draft:' namespace, while forbidding all other namespaces, is a part of the MediaWiki-extensions-ArticleCreationWorkflow extension.

Event Timeline

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald Transcript

Yes, that looks like it to me also. Probably should check isTemp() also.

Might need unbreak now for this one.

If I'm reading this right, this means that before the bug, IPs and non-autoconfirmed users (<10 edits & <4 days) on enwiki could create articles (in draftspace). After this bug, they cannot. We're probably missing out on a lot of page creations a day, giving a bad experience to these newbies, and not following our local policy on this.

Novem_Linguae changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Bug Report".Nov 6 2025, 12:47 AM
Novem_Linguae added a project: Regression.

Change #1202359 had a related patch set uploaded (by Novem Linguae; author: Novem Linguae):

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] let temporary accounts edit enwiki draft namespace

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1202359

…or it could be caused by the hook defined directly in configuration here: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/operations/mediawiki-config/+/c901262a58781743f53ea8792c9de2c5467a4d9e/wmf-config/CommonSettings.php#2669

Checking $user->isAnon() is suspicious.

Looks like a check on fawiki is prudent to see if they are affected as well.

Oh, I didn't even see Matmarex's comment. Wish I had seen it. Would have saved me some code searching.

I'll backport the above patch in 12 hours if I'm awake during that backport window. Anyone else should feel free to backport it for me.

I have landed on the same solution. Will be happy to queue it for the UTC morning window in 6 hours and follow up from there.

Based on this data, the impact of this on enwiki is about 76 less pages created per day.

SD0001 triaged this task as Unbreak Now! priority.Nov 6 2025, 3:45 AM

Only about 43 per day - we're losing the pages that would have been created by ips, but registered non-autoconfirmed users were still creating drafts on 11/5 after the temp-account rollout.

Change #1202359 merged by jenkins-bot:

[operations/mediawiki-config@master] Allow temporary accounts to create in fawiki/enwiki Draft namespace

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1202359

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2025-11-06T08:03:34Z] <kharlan@deploy2002> Started scap sync-world: Backport for [[gerrit:1202359|Allow temporary accounts to create in fawiki/enwiki Draft namespace (T409366)]]

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2025-11-06T08:06:02Z] <kharlan@deploy2002> kharlan, novemlinguae: Backport for [[gerrit:1202359|Allow temporary accounts to create in fawiki/enwiki Draft namespace (T409366)]] synced to the testservers (see https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mwdebug). Changes can now be verified there.

Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2025-11-06T08:13:41Z] <kharlan@deploy2002> Finished scap sync-world: Backport for [[gerrit:1202359|Allow temporary accounts to create in fawiki/enwiki Draft namespace (T409366)]] (duration: 10m 07s)

Tested in production. should be fine now for both enwiki and fawiki.

Robertsky claimed this task.