The $wgCiteRemoveSyntheticRefsUnsafe feature flag is part of our migration away from "synthetic refs", and enabling it on the beta cluster will allow us to have a shared place to review use cases that still rely on the older mechanism. A drawback is that some sub-reference use cases will no longer work on the beta cluster, until we complete the migration.
Demo: visit https://en.wikipedia.beta.wmcloud.org/wiki/CiteDetailsTests?useparsoid=1 and inspecting the HTML will show no synthetic refs.
| Subject | Author | Repo | Branch | Lines +/- | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| [beta] Kill synthetic refs with feature flag | Awight | operations/mediawiki-config | master | +2 -0 |
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Duplicate | None | T411856 [Epic] Avoid unintended content loss due the usage of synthetic ldr's | |||
| Resolved | None | T397501 [Epic] Fix issues with {{reflist}} or missing references lists and main+details sub-references | |||
| Resolved | None | T421055 Disable synthetic list-defined ref logic on the beta cluster |
Change #1260614 had a related patch set uploaded (by Awight; author: Awight):
[operations/mediawiki-config@master] [beta] Kill synthetic refs with feature flag
Change #1260614 merged by jenkins-bot:
[operations/mediawiki-config@master] [beta] Kill synthetic refs with feature flag
Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2026-03-25T13:20:51Z] <awight@deploy2002> Started scap sync-world: Backport for [[gerrit:1260614|[beta] Kill synthetic refs with feature flag (T421055)]], [[gerrit:1251193|idwiki: Remove unused user groups on Indonesian Wikipedia (T419105)]], [[gerrit:1251200|ptwiki: Enable block action for the abuse filter (T419312)]], [[gerrit:1256748|ptwiki: Add suppressredirect to autoreviewer and rollbacker user groups (T420704)]]
Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2026-03-25T13:23:05Z] <awight@deploy2002> codenamenoreste, awight, gerrit-patch-uploader: Backport for [[gerrit:1260614|[beta] Kill synthetic refs with feature flag (T421055)]], [[gerrit:1251193|idwiki: Remove unused user groups on Indonesian Wikipedia (T419105)]], [[gerrit:1251200|ptwiki: Enable block action for the abuse filter (T419312)]], [[gerrit:1256748|ptwiki: Add suppressredirect to autoreviewer and rollbacker user groups (T420704)]
Mentioned in SAL (#wikimedia-operations) [2026-03-25T13:32:24Z] <awight@deploy2002> Finished scap sync-world: Backport for [[gerrit:1260614|[beta] Kill synthetic refs with feature flag (T421055)]], [[gerrit:1251193|idwiki: Remove unused user groups on Indonesian Wikipedia (T419105)]], [[gerrit:1251200|ptwiki: Enable block action for the abuse filter (T419312)]], [[gerrit:1256748|ptwiki: Add suppressredirect to autoreviewer and rollbacker user groups (T420704)]] (duration: 11m 33s)