ConwayLife.com

Trying to move Pre-pulsar shuttle 29 to p29 pre-pulsar shuttle per a tiki bar discussion and both 77topaz and me who have tried it have gotten this error:
None of the other pages I moved had this issue. I thought it might be because there was already a redirect at that new location, but deleting it didn't fix the issue. Someone on the MediaWiki Discord server pointed me to this support desk topic discussing this: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:V0tny3da8oekkm2o

Okay so yesterday I ran into this same issue while trying to move some file pages (since the pnames for the patterns were changed a while ago) in order to fix the file links, e.g. for Special:MovePage/File:123p271.gif I'm trying to move it to 123p27.1.gif to match the 123P27.1 article.

I don't think the extra period is the problem because i made a test image named periodtest.1.gif and it worked fine; it's just that moving these pages seems to always result in an error.

@Nathaniel: It looks like something about the old revisions from before MediaWiki 1.19 being dealt with in 1.33 is causing the issue. Before October the last time we updated was in 2014, and this issue looks like it only started cropping up in 2018, hence why it only appeared for us after we updated in late 2019. Meanwhile the images I'm trying to move were mostly all made way back in 2009, well before 1.19 came out.

Luckily the discussion topic I linked to in the first post in this thread suggests running a repopulation script which may fix the issue with page moving by bringing all the old revisions to be fully compatible with the newer version of MediaWiki: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:P ... onSha1.php

(I'm not sure why the "dummy text" solution worked though; I'd rather not have to do that because that would make the process several times more tedious for me. I thought for a second it was because now the new revision was made in the new MediaWiki version, but that doesn't explain the deal with Pre-pulsar shuttle 29 from last month; before trying to move it I had already edited the page a few days earlier)

Ian07 wrote: ↑

January 5th, 2020, 8:11 pm

Luckily the discussion topic I linked to in the first post in this thread suggests running a repopulation script which may fix the issue with page moving by bringing all the old revisions to be fully compatible with the newer version of MediaWiki: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:P ... onSha1.php

Unfortunately I've already run that maintenance script (even with the --force option) and it doesn't seem to have fixed these problems. :/ Still not sure how to fix these problems or why MediaWiki's update script didn't properly update the database.

I asked about this on the MediaWiki Discord server. They linked to this thread where the user seems to have had the same issue with populateRevisionSha1.php failing to fix it, and also proposed a few solutions. The first is to try running populateContentTables.php prior to running populateRevisionSha1.php. If that still doesn't work, there's another method involving SQL which is unfortunately beyond my understanding of MediaWiki, but you can read about it here: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?t ... zquqle7vi9

Ian07 wrote: ↑

January 5th, 2020, 8:11 pm

(I'm not sure why the "dummy text" solution worked though; I'd rather not have to do that because that would make the process several times more tedious for me. I thought for a second it was because now the new revision was made in the new MediaWiki version, but that doesn't explain the deal with Pre-pulsar shuttle 29 from last month; before trying to move it I had already edited the page a few days earlier)

Well, my experiments show that "dummy edit" works for File pages. I made an empty edit to it whose only purpose was to write a summary, and then it became movable. Not sure about main space pages, though.

EDIT (two weeks later): it doesn't work for the Pi wave, because there is an associated talk. The move is successful if the talk page is ignored.

I believe this has been the case for several years now.

The trick seems to be this: go to the file page, click "edit", and then click "save changes" without actually making any changes. I think you should then be able to move the file.