Forum:Ghost Category and Broken Category Found!!


 * Case 1 - Ghost Category

Take a look at Category:Article management template (Note that the word "templat e " doesn't have a "s"). You should see two pages listing in this category.

Now look at Template:Outdated & Template:Stub. Their category is Category:Article management templates (It has a "s" at the end!).

Why do those two templates listed in the ghost category, but not in the actual category (Category:Article management templates &#91;link&#93;)? Any clues?


 * Case 2 - Broken Category

It's similar to the above (probably caused by the same bug or problem). Category:Local template has been added to Template:Documentation/docname but that template isn't shown in the Category:Local template page. I have no ideas what's going wrong!

Does anyone get any clues? --MyBrute Resource Center@Ronga 21:57, 13 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I usully purge the server cache of pages that i really need to update faster.
 * Templates, categories, images, almost all things, wont necessairly update right away since all wikis page are cached on the server so it has less work to do. And you can add to this the local cache of your browser.
 * But in that case, i'm almost sure it has something to do with server side caching. And categories moslty never update right away. It might happen it the night and be ok the next day.
 * But if one is in a hurry for them to update, theres a few tricks to know.
 * First, i try to go on each page and add ?action=purge at the end of the URL then pressing Enter will ask the server cache to be refreshed.
 * But it doesn't always work for categories pages.
 * That is when i do a "null edit" on them. That is, clicking edit then save without changing anything.
 * But if the server is really overloading, even this will fail.
 * When all my tricks fails, i just go do something else, then to sleep and it's ok when i return. — TulipVorlax 01:49, 14 May 2009 (UTC)


 * It seems i was right. I made a null edit on one of the templates (not the doc sub page!) and now there's only one page left on the "ghost category". — TulipVorlax 02:01, 14 May 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your reply. It seems this is the cause of the problem. I have thought about server caching problems. The reason why I still ask is because there are some entries which are updated instantly, some not. That's sort of weird. Anyway it's all solved now. BTW I couldn't find you have made any edit on any of the templates. Perhaps I miss something. --MyBrute Resource Center@Ronga 16:09, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * A null edit consist in editing an article and saving it without any modification. MediaWiki detects that no change was made and no edit is shown in the history. But it does a refresh of all links/templates/categories used in the page, so it's useful for that. --Ciencia Al Poder (talk) -WikiDex 18:07, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Yep! You are very right. Thank you for your answers. Wonderful trick about the null edit. Cheers. --MyBrute Resource Center@Ronga 18:48, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Another test
I have edited and changed Template:Stub to put all stub articles into a new category called Category:Article stub.

Currently there are still 29 articles in the old category (link).

I wonder if the server will update automatically or I have to make a null edit of each article. --MyBrute Resource Center@Ronga 21:18, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * There is a jobque (something like that) you can see it on the statics page, that does 1 process per a given number of page views (and in some wikis this gets force/done at certain hours by an automatic scrip). With time all this pages will become updated and the categories will move from one cat to another... but if you are desperate, you can always use the null edit to 'force' the update of that info --