Wikipedia:NULLEDIT

For updating a page display, any purge methods do the job, but for categories and backlinks a null edit explained below is required, and other methods don't work. Update of images is explained in a section below.

The page to purge is the one that transcludes, not the page that gets transcluded. Purge consumes a small amount of additional processing power to rebuild the page.

To change the text shown on the purge tab added by the preference "Add a "Purge" option to the top of the page, which purges the page's cache", add the following to (or create the file using it):

The 'p' in the third line sets the text shown on the tab to the lowercase letter p. Change this to whatever you prefer ('purge', 'purge page', etc).

Note that this will not work with URLs of the form , for which a slightly different form is required: .

It may be easiest to make the URL by clicking "edit" or "view source" tab of the page, and changing the last portion of the URL's query string from action=edit to action=purge (anything in the URL that appears after action=edit can be deleted).

This kind of URL is used to make the links and templates outlined in the Just by clicking a link section above.

If a category or backlink page isn't showing linked articles known to exist, the page may be purged (refreshed) and will then show all properly linked articles.

A null edit purges the target page (including category and backlink pages) if the page can be edited:

With a null edit, nothing is saved, and no edit is recorded. If you leave text in the edit summary, it will be discarded. Adding new blank lines only to the end of the page is also usually a null edit. Trailing blank lines are largely ignored. Section edits, however, sometimes result in changes, and get saved.

A page move or protection counts as a null edit as well, although an edit is recorded in the page history.

Do not confuse null edit with dummy edit. A dummy edit does modify the source, even though slightly.

The behaviour of null edits changed around July 2013. Null edits previously added all pages which transcluded the page to the job queue to be reparsed. Now a null edit will reparse the page edited just as it always has (and therefore fix category membership and such), but it will no longer queue every transcluding page for reparse too.

A new "forcerecursivelinkupdate" parameter was added to the API's action=purge to get the old behavior if necessary. So action=purge&forcerecursivelinkupdate=1 in the URL (see below) will get the old behaviour. Only use this responsibly.

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