Useless waiting time when creating new Wikibase items from OpenRefine

[wetneb]

When uploading a batch of new items to Wikibase from OpenRefine, we have a long initial waiting time which is a spurious exponential backoff on an operation that does not fetch any items.

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. First, create a project with a Wikibase schema which does not edit any existing Wikibase items, only creates new ones
2. Then, upload the project to Wikibase

Current Results

Observe the long waiting time before any edit is made (0% progress)

Expected Behavior

Immediate creation of new items.

Versions

• Operating System: Linux
• Browser Version: Firefox
• JRE or JDK Version: 11
• OpenRefine: master (3.6-SNAPSHOT)