Save persistent page identifier

[malberts]

For:

• https://github.com/ProfessionalWiki/PersistentPageIdentifiers/issues/8
• https://github.com/ProfessionalWiki/PersistentPageIdentifiers/issues/9
• Show ID on page information (action=info)
• Unintentional side-effect of adding a persistent ID when editing an existing page without an ID

Screencast_20241112_171338.webm

[malberts]

@JeroenDeDauw I marked as draft for illustration, but I think we will need to drop the page_props approach.

I did not initially pay attention to this specific note on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Page_props_table

Note that reparsing a page causes all of its properties to be purged from this table and replaced with the new ones, so this table is not suitable for storing data that can't be regenerated during a reparse.

I ran into that issue when editing a page dropped the ID. So basically it has to resave the ID on every edit. I managed to get the current ID to resave it. But something like ?action=purge also clears the page properties. I am not sure what else might trigger a reparse. So unless we try to hunt down and work around such issues, it seems like this is fundamentally the wrong approach since our ID is something that should not be regenerated (even if that means resaving the old value).

[JeroenDeDauw]

Agree, we can't use page_props

I also think it best to specifically only generate IDs on page creation. This behavior is easier to understand.