Wikivoyage talk:Maintenance panel/Ghost articles

What exactly is a ghost article? Ikan Kekek (talk) 21:24, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

User:Traveler100 identified the phenomenon and I named it that, but neither of us knows why it occurs. They aren't really articles of course, but represent the varying number by which NUMBEROFARTICLES overestimates the real number of articles. I have wondered if perhaps NUMBEROFARTICLES just has a hard time keeping up when we delete articles, but I have no way to investigate or test that. Lately I think that's not it though, because a lot have been deleted lately, yet the number has only changed by 1 in the last couple of weeks... Texugo (talk) 21:37, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

IMO it is the site_stats table being counted wrongly (the staffs should run initSiteStats.php somehow (see also bugzilla:57788)). See this sql query that will get you exactly the # of ghost articles (except if there's a categorized redirect):

SELECT ss_good_articles - COUNT(DISTINCT page_id)
FROM page
INNER JOIN site_stats
ON ss_row_id > 0
WHERE page_namespace = 0
AND page_is_redirect = 0;

--Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 04:45, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

I don't know how to use an sql query here. Is there a way to use it directly in the maintenance panel? as a lua module? anything? Texugo (talk) 01:52, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

I hope that is possible, but unfortunately not. No solution found in mw:Extension:Scribunto/Lua_reference_manual. Anyone who can access the database directly or access the database replica (such as from labs) can query the information (and update this page manually or by bot). See page source for an example from labs (consuming too much space). --Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 09:26, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

Also if you want to, I've created a script (https://tools.wmflabs.org/yifeibot/ghosts.py). Feel free to use. --Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 10:31, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Excellent! I have added a link to this page. Thanks a lot! Texugo (talk) 10:39, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

:) --Zhuyifei1999 (talk) 11:27, 5 December 2013 (UTC)