Help talk:Purge

Namespace
Question: should this page be moved to the Wikipedia namespace? I see that some pages are in the Help space, such as Help:Starting a new page, Help:Template, etc. but would this be better in the Wikipedia space along with pages such as Article size, Redirect, Categorization, etc?  Rob e  rt  21:57, 8 October 2005 (UTC)
 * I think that would be a good idea. Courtland 03:47, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Okay, I moved it. If anyone has a problem with it, let me know.  Rob e  rt  22:51, 17 October 2005 (UTC)
 * I see no problems here. Good work! -- S iva1979 Talk to me  23:30, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm wondering if this actually belongs in mediawiki space (i.e. Purge, a page which does not exist) as it appears to be a mediawiki function and not one specific to wikipedia. For instance, see the "How do I purge cached pages?" section of the MediaWiki FAQ. User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 00:02, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

Purge tab
Can there be a tab for purging the current page on top, alongside "article", "discussion", "edit this page", etc.? Either by default or is there code for placing it in the user's CSS file? --Geopgeop 07:14, 28 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I found just that. See WikiProject User scripts/Scripts/Add purge to tabs.  See WikiProject User scripts/Scripts for instructions.  Note that you must import the code on the purge source page.  Don't copy the purge source or change that page. Will (Talk - contribs) 06:35, 12 December 2006 (UTC)


 * The above instructions, rather the info on the linked pages, really isn't clear to me. I'm interested in making a tab accessible to all users, even anonymous ones, that when clicked purges the cache for the currently displayed page. What would be the best way to accomplish this? 156.145.28.120 (talk) 19:59, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Image thumbnail purge instructions confusing
Could someone please revise/rewrite the instructions for purging images, for example, using a stepwise format (1., 2., 3., ...)? I'm having trouble getting a thumbnail to display, and I'm not sure I'm following the instructions correctly. Robert K S 19:22, 13 November 2006 (UTC)


 * I'll second that, I just wrote below:
 * this section has something I don't understand. It reads, "The solution is to request the thumbnail with an unusual URL, say by appending ?1 to the end." Q: how does one request a thumbnail, what does that mean? Pdbailey 00:36, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes, the description is confusing. What should be added where? A few examples definately would make things clearer. Shinobu 17:12, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

How to purge
The instructions say to add &action=purge to the url. This doesn't work. If you want to purge Main Page, you have to change "/wiki/Main_Page" to "/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&action=purge". Also, it tells you to add to the page. But saving it automatically refreshes the page. You should click "Preview" instead of "Save", then click the purge link, or make a just dummy edit (like adding a space) to the page. --67.121.126.160 02:53, 30 November 2006 (UTC)


 * If you enter the URL in the form  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/article  then to purge it you add
 * ?action=purge, thus:
 *  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/article?action=purge .
 * Or you can do
 *  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=article&action=purge .
 * 69.140.164.142 04:24, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Cache Auto-Purge?
Is there a way (either Wikimarkup or HTML) to code for a page to purge its cache upon (or ideally before) loading?  -RadicalOne •Contact Me•Chase My Tail 05:49, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

I was also wondering about this. I frequently update basketball team pages and I have to purge each page after editing the standings to force the standings template to update each time. --Zach Pepsin (talk) 14:29, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

How it works
"How it works" does not seem to explain why sometimes, and for days after an edit has been made, an old version of the article itself (not a subpage or template) may be displayed, only finally being updated when the cache is purged. It seems that there is more to it (and more things that can go wrong, or at least suffer from latency) than the explanation pretends. (Note that I am not talking about issues with local caching, I'm talking about Wikipedia's own caching.) 86.152.242.168 (talk) 17:51, 13 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Try both purging the article, and then bypassing your browser cache (Ctrl-F5 in Firefox). Do the purge first. --Timeshifter (talk) 13:56, 16 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks, but I already know about doing both these things. My point is not to ask for advice on procedures for rectifying the stale page problem, my point is that the "how it works" section does not seem to adequately explain why the problem occurs. 86.146.47.224 (talk) 19:23, 16 April 2010 (UTC).


 * OK. Hopefully, someone who understands it better than me can clarify that section. --Timeshifter (talk) 23:50, 16 April 2010 (UTC)
 * You can also purge a page by just clicking on "Edit" at the top of the page, and then just click on "Save". Your edit will not be displayed in the page history, but it will purge the page. See Purge for more information on how to do it that way. Thanks. / Hey Mid  (contributions) 16:12, 14 August 2010 (UTC)

Why would you want to do this?
Well, why? There should be an addition in the lead of the project page indicating the purpose of this thing. Your puzzled friend, GeorgeLouis (talk) 17:45, 7 September 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't understand the purpose of purging either. --Shovan Luessi (talk) 04:22, 6 March 2011 (UTC)

Purge is flaky?
Is there a reason why purges often don't work? Here are a couple examples...

File:Haakon7.jpg - If you click that link, you are presented with the OLD image. Click that old image and you get the NEW image. No amount of "?action=purge" seems to get the displayed image to update.

File:Hoapili_Kaauwai_and_Kiliwehi.jpg - If you click on this one, you get the NEW image. Click that new image and you get the OLD image.

WTF?

This sort of thing doesn't happen all the time, just sometimes.

Am I doing something wrong or is the Wikimedia software simply squirrely?

JBarta (talk) 23:51, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I have the same problem here with File:Vectorbundle.svg. Old Thumbnails but if you click them you get the new picture. I tried all sorts of "purge" nothing works. Why??--Svebert (talk) 17:29, 20 November 2011 (UTC)
 * ok... know everything is fine. Was it just random luck or did the additionally link from here to the picture the magic "purge"??--Svebert (talk) 17:31, 20 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Seems buggy (not flakey) to me! After making changes to low level documentation templates, only some of the articles including it get purged correctly. Others do not, even after using purge directly. Only clicking edit, then save (with no changes) does the trick. SChalice  18:02, 16 February 2012 (UTC)
 * The images mentioned, i.e. File:Haakon7.jpg File:Hoapili_Kaauwai_and_Kiliwehi.jpg File:Vectorbundle.svg are all images on commons. You need to go to the commons page before purging. The link to the commons page is in the box below the image, and is shown as "description page there". -- Red rose64 (talk) 21:04, 16 February 2012 (UTC)


 * A day after making the changes, I went to my Special:WantedTemplates and saw deleted templates that my wiki had thought had links to. I kept refreshing that page and witnessed it slowly purging the articles that needed it. Each refresh kept ticking the number down on the deleted templates.  SChalice  00:40, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Two things: (i) Special:WantedTemplates is no longer maintained: at the top it states "The following information is cached, and was last updated 18:25, 15 October 2009. ... Updates for this page are currently disabled. Data here will not presently be refreshed."; (ii) when a template is deleted - or just amended - the pages transcluding that template are not updated immediately, but must take their turn in the job queue. If there have been many template changes, the job queue can take some hours to process a task. It's not a problem with purging. -- Red rose64 (talk) 13:08, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Plain English for Template:Purge
There is a discussion about revising the language of this template at Template talk:Purge. ~ Ningauble (talk) 19:48, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

When will this be fixed?
Hi, does anyone know the current status of this bug and when it is likely to be fixed? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.176.210.14 (talk) 01:48, 14 January 2012 (UTC)

Wording in "How it wortks"
Maybe I'm reading it wrong or completely misunderstand the software, but I don't think this section is describing things properly. To my knowledge, any user of Wikipedia gets a parser-cached page if one is available. The difference for registered editors is that the cached page has to match their preferences (like default thumbnail size, etc) or else it gets re-parsed for them (and cached). But if the last editor of the page had the same prefernces as me, I would get the version cached when they looked at the page. This has to be true, because I need to use ?action=purge too, to get a page to display properly - so I'm obviously not getting a re-parsed page every time I view it.

As to the parenthetical "(Logged-in users have a choice...)", the option I see is "Disable browser page caching", is that what is meant? I read that as being about the browser cache on the individual editor's computer (i.e. automatically WP:REFRESH), not anything to do with how MediaWiki does its own caching.

Am I right on these two points? Or wa-a-ay off? Franamax (talk) 00:41, 27 January 2012 (UTC)

Twinkle friendly clock no more?
It looks like the Twinkle friendly clock no longer exists. If so, should it no longer be mentioned as a means of purging the cache? — Loadmaster (talk) 16:06, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Automated purge for all pages that are using a particular template?
Recently a template was vandalized (see this discussion). After fixing it all the pages that used it need to be purged (these pages). Doing each manually is painful. Is there a script that can help with this? - Subh83 (talk &#124; contribs) 16:36, 27 December 2013 (UTC)
 * The job queue is supposed to. But seven months ago something happened to it, and it's much slower and sometimes misses pages. -- Red rose64 (talk) 20:27, 27 December 2013 (UTC)

Trick to purging video?
The page/thumbnail is updated but when you click on the video (and this is any time not just in this particular file's case), the pop up plays the old video. It does update eventually but over a significant amount of time (so far its been 12 hours for instance). Darkwarriorblake (talk) 11:17, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Responsible recursive purging?
What would constitute irresponsible use of the recursive purge? 20 articles? a thousand? fifty thousand? The current verbiage is not only incredibly vague, it offers absolutely no guidance on how one would go about evaluating whether a particular request should or should not be made. VanIsaacWScont 06:17, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
 * It's okay, that feature doesn't work anyway. :p --joe deckertalk 22:12, 21 July 2017 (UTC)

REVISIONTIMESTAMP
The  variable shows the time of the last actual edit to the page, for example  which represents. I have found that if a WP:NULLEDIT is made, the value returned by  is the time when the WP:NULLEDIT was performed; but if you subsequently do a WP:PURGE, the value returned by   is restored to the time of the last actual edit to the page - any intervening NULLEDITs are ignored. -- Red rose64 (talk) 10:29, 7 June 2015 (UTC)

Substituting redlinks
When you use subst: with a non-existent template or page, no expansion occurs. If the template or page has later been created, editing the page with subst: without changing the text will not make a null edit, but instead substitute the created template or page. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 03:32, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Which is why all edits should be WP:PREVIEWed - especially those where you added a template or used subst:. -- Red rose64 (talk) 07:43, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

Substituting Template:Void
Adding is treated as a null edit. GeoffreyT2000 (talk) 01:47, 18 December 2015 (UTC)
 * Yes, because once the  portion is removed, there's nothing left. But having clicked the edit tab in order to add a it's far quicker to simply not type that in, and go straight to . -- Red rose64 (talk) 08:49, 18 December 2015 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 7 May 2021
In the section "Server cache" "it's turn" should read "its turn" 1.136.104.193 (talk) 17:23, 7 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes check.svg Done ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 17:32, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

Purging old revisions of an article?
I was just trying to purge an old revision of an article after having corrected a problem in a template that the old revision invokes (but the current version of the article does not). It was not effective (by dropdown or by &action=purge). Is that expected behavior? I suppose it might have been thought not worth the effort to implement since the cache of the revision will eventually drop the old interpretation. (Trying adjacent old revisions which had not been recently displayed did show that the template revision was effective for new, uncached, displays.) Should the Wikipedia page mention the restrictions? --R. S. Shaw (talk) 19:50, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Whatever revision you are viewing when you request a purge, it acts on the current revision immediately, and old revs get their purge requests put in a queue. They will be actioned eventually, but cached copies of old revs will continued to be served until the queue catches up. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 19:58, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

Question of grandly Curiosity
Here, what happens if a bot is programmed to purge [Wikipedia:SANDBOX] ?

Thanks, 88.105.125.18 (talk) 19:42, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

"Wikipedia:Ø" listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has identified a potential problem with the redirect Wikipedia:Ø and has thus listed it for discussion. This discussion will occur at Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 August 9 until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. FAdesdae378 (talk · contribs) 00:09, 9 August 2022 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 23 August 2023
Add Purge local browser cache after Y Micorsoft Edge Insert X Command + R in MacOS 47.234.198.142 (talk) 03:53, 23 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Red information icon with gradient background.svg Not done: no reason given for the proposed change. M.Bitton (talk) 11:09, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 29 April 2024
It doesn't seem like Special:Purge is mentioned anywhere on the page yet, so please add this new paragraph to the Help:Purge section:

Feel free to make the special pages wikilink plain text if it's too much. – 2804:F14:80C8:4701:F4E7:1EC8:CF9F:1541 (talk) 03:49, 29 April 2024 (UTC)


 * ✅  thetechie@enwiki  :  ~/talk/  $  00:05, 21 May 2024 (UTC)