Topic on Project:Support desk

I'm a new member and I've recently starting doing some phpwiki editing. I'd appreciate some assistance with a dilemma I've been having. I'm using MediaWiki, according to the image in the bottom left of my Wiki.

As for the backstory, I'm working as a moderator for an online text game, and my primary role is to update the Wiki, which is the subject of my dilemma. The page I'm currently working on (which you'll find below) is a simple alphabetical list category page, with essentially nothing on it; rather, other pages have tags that revert to the 'category page' and thus they appear on the list in supposed alphabetical order. The tag I use is as follows:

[[Category:Units (Lightning)|Template:PageName]]

The above tag goes on other 'unit' pages, and the title of those unit pages appear on the list I'm working on. So, backstory over. Now begins the problem.

There are unit titles appearing on the list that I don't want to appear. So, naturally, I went into those unit pages, and deleted the tag from the page. Problem solved, right? No. Instead of disappearing off the list like they were supposed to, they moved from their appropriate spot alphabetically and appeared in the MIDDLE of the list for no apparent reason. After checking (and re-checking) the unit pages for ANY TAGS whatsoever, I could find no explanation for why they are appearing on my list. You'll notice, on the list itself, that 'Assassin' and 'Minor Elemental' appear out-of-order (second column, middle). Those are the titles I attempted to delete. And, because the list itself has...essentially nothing on it to delete, I can't simply edit the list and delete it. This is my problem.I've tried deleting the unit pages, and they still appear on the list. When I re-add the tag found above, they resume existing on the list in their CORRECT alphabetical spot, but other than that, there is literally no way I've found to remove them from this list.

I tried clearing the cache with ?action=purge, but this hasn't worked as far as I can readily ascertain. I was told, by an experienced friend, that the cache is filled with old data, and this is why this problem is occurring, but outside of trying the purge, I received no other suggestions, other than doing a dummy edit to update the page (which I did, unsuccessfully).

I would appreciate all the help I can get. The link is below. Thank you so much in advance.

http://wiki.the-reincarnation.org/index.php/Category:Units_%28Lightning%29

This is the version, as far as I can tell:

Installed software

MediaWiki - 1.16.0

PHP - 5.3.10-1 ubuntu - 3.19 (apache2handler

MySQL - 5.5.22-0ubuntu1-log

The software you run (version 1.16) has dozens of open security issues. Please do run supported versions: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download

You have 2 pages with the same title on the wiki (but different page IDs):

Page ID 11409, namespace 0, title Lightning:Minor Elemental (this one has the category)

http://wiki.the-reincarnation.org/api.php?action=query&prop=info|revisions|categories&rvprop=ids|timestamp|flags|comment|user|content&rvlimit=10&rvdir=newer&pageids=11409&format=jsonfm

Page ID 12324, namespace 406, title Lightning:Minor Elemental (this one is not, and is the page you're editing)

http://wiki.the-reincarnation.org/api.php?action=query&prop=info|revisions|categories&rvprop=ids|timestamp|flags|comment|user|content&rvlimit=50&rvdir=newer&pageids=12324&format=jsonfm

Apparently, you added the Lightning: namespace when there were existing pages with Lightning: in the title? You'll need to run Manual:namespaceDupes.php to fix this mess...

Thank you so much. Could you please shed some light on how you found this page? And, perhaps how to go about running the maintenance script? As in, what would I need to do in order to proceed with the namespaceDupes?

I first checked for categories on the page:

http://wiki.the-reincarnation.org/api.php?action=query&prop=info|categories&titles=Lightning:Minor%20Elemental&format=jsonfm

and then for what pages were on that category:

http://wiki.the-reincarnation.org/api.php?action=query&list=categorymembers&cmtitle=Category:Units%20%28Lightning%29&cmlimit=max&format=jsonfm

Which then noticed that the page id's were different

As per namespaceDupes.php, it will rename titles adding a prefix or suffix to the page name, so you can decide what to do with them. Try the script first without the --fix parameters to see what would do, and if the actions it performs are right, run it again with the --fix option.

But the best option IMHO would be to use the --merge option, which will attempt to merge the page histories of both to the correct name. Sadly, this option was added for MediaWiki 1.25 and you are running 1.16...

About the prefix or suffix, once moved, you could manually merge histories by deleting the page with the correct name, renaming the fixed page to the correct name, deleting, and then restoring all revisions. This could be tedious if there are many pages.

And, the best way to go about accomplishing the namespaceDupe would be to use PuTTy after being granted privilege to run maintenance scripts, correct?

Or is the manner in which I accomplish this different according to my version? I'm following these directives:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Maintenance_scripts#Configuration

I truly appreciate all the assistance. I wish there was some way to access the actual duplicate pages (since there aren't too many I need to remove the tags from), but alas, it seems not.

Yes, you need shell access to run the maintenance script. If not, you still could run some of them using Extension:Maintenance and Extension:MaintenanceShell, or setting a cron job that in turn calls the script with the appropriate parameters (some hostings may allow this even if they don't provide shell access).

You need to fix those inaccessible pages because they'll generate noise in other parts of the wiki, like backlinks to pages, etc.