Last modified: 2014-07-12 02:40:43 UTC
We need some way of knowing how long it takes for template changes to be reflected in the index.
I will give a concrete example of this problem. The Citation/CS1 Lua module on English WP, which is the foundation for heavily-used citation templates like {{cite web}} and {{cite journal}}, was updated on 30 March 2014. The changes included the creation of a new citation error category, Category:CS1 errors: authorlink. Between 30 March and today, a few hundred articles have trickled into that category as articles were processed (by a back-end null edit or something; the job queue?). I have fixed them every day or two as they popped up in the category. The most recent one to appear was corrected on 9 July 2014, shortly after it appeared in the category. As you can see in the date of the previous edit before my edit (link below), some sort of reindexing or job queue put the article in the category, not an erroneous edit by an editor. There were other new categories and error types created in this revision. They have behaved in the same way, with a large chunk of articles popping into the category in the first week or so, then a continual trickle for months. As recently as six months ago, these changes propagated in less than 60 days, which is still ridiculously long, but now it's more than 50% longer. Anything you can do to make that propagation faster will be appreciated. (Another editor reports that until about a year ago, this propagation would happen in less than one day.) This is the most recent one to pop up, on 9 July 2014, 101 days after the module update: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bilbar_Puppet_Theatre&diff=616327407&oldid=582936286 There is a discussion at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29#Recategorizing_articles_when_templates_are_changed_is_taking_about_90_days_currently That discussion will be archived in a month or so, after which it will be findable in the Village Pump (technical) archives.
