This is an archive of past discussions about Wikipedia:Squashed bugs. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current main page.

This is an archive only of bug reports from Phase II of the Wikipedia software (used before June 20, 2002). Please see Wikipedia:Bug reports for instructions on adding bug reports for the current system.

Fixed bugs and resolved issues

The colours are all wrong as of this morning. View source on Netscape shows the BODY HTML tag has `textcolor=" TEXT" bgcolor=" BGCOLOR"' suggesting that a string hasn't been properly substituted for a variable somewhere. On my Netscape browser, it interprets the bgcolor command as dark green, making the black text difficult to read, and the blue links even harder. Changing skins makes no difference Malcolm Farmer, Thursday, May 9, 2002

Fixed as of 2002-05-14

Parser does not recognize mailto:, news:, ftp: URL scheme (2002/02/20)

The link parser seems not to recognize the mailto: URL scheme (RFC 2368). This prevents a user from creating a clickable e-mail contact point in his user page.

Actual results: Mail Damian produces no link
Expected results: a clickable link that opens the user's MUA with a new message addressed to tepples@spamcop.net

--Damian Yerrick

See Urban legend for an example of news:; what had been a working Usenet news link now shows up as [1] Malcolm Farmer
See VIM for an example of ftp:.

Fixed it in CVS. We'll have http, ftp, news, mailto. I don't remember if I added gopher as well ;) --Magnus Manske, Sunday, April 14, 2002

STATUS : Solved in CVS; working on Wikipedia as of 2002-5-14

Bangs in links in tables wreck the table Koyaanis Qatsi, Sunday, March 31, 2002

Observe: the following table is coded properly, but displays incorrectly (as you'll see in the second row, if you view source). Piping the link so the bang displays but isn't linked to corrects it:

Vivement dimanche!	Confidentially Yours	1983	W	D
Vivement dimanche!	Confidentially Yours	1983	W	D

Looks like a bug in the reject-bad-links code. I'll work on it... Brion VIBBER, Sunday, March 31, 2002

Got it. Fixed in CVS, wait for Jimbo to upgrade. Brion VIBBER, Tuesday, April 2, 2002

Has that been upgraded? It quit linking but the two rows in the table should be exactly the same except for that? Koyaanis Qatsi, Sunday, April 7, 2002

Ampersands in links surrounded by italics cause words to drop and the end italics tag to be ignored Not a common problem, I'm sure. But go to the history of talk:Osama bin Laden and you can see what I'm talking about. The ampersand in the former [[Roger & Me]] was the culprit. Koyaanis Qatsi, Sunday, April 7, 2002

Text between a pair of links sometimes omitted from displayed page

For an example of this, see the 14 April 06:28 version of the Leigh Brackett page. The three apostrophes don't put her name into bold properly; and chunks of text between some links are being omitted. The links in the edit text look perfectly normal, with no funny characters. Inserting a carriage return just before the omitted text seems to fix the problem, so it looks as if there's something odd happening in the function that parses the wiki text. Malcolm Farmer, Monday, April 15, 2002

The missing text after BAD LINKS is an old bug that was fixed a week or so ago, but the fix hasn't been installed yet. The links in question are bad because they have line breaks *in* the links! A line break is not a valid character in an article title. Brion VIBBER, Monday, April 15, 2002

I've had this problem show up a few times, and can't really be sure whether it's from the system or my own machine. Most recently it has shown up in famous women in history. On the edit page there is text between Mildred Zaharias and Margaret Thatcher, including a section heading - but when saved these two names appear together on the same line without even a space between them. Eclecticology

STATUS: DUPLICATE BUG, SEE NUMEROUS REPORTS AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE ABOUT MISSING TEXT AFTER LINKS THAT CONTAIN INVALID CHARACTERS

Thanks! Perhaps someone with more experience in these matters could start a "troubleshooting" page with step-by-step instructions for fixing this kind of bug on a page.

Fixed as of 2002-05-14.

This line:

Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/wiki-newest/work-http/wikiPage.php on line 88

appears once or more times on the very top of many pages (even before the ordinary "HTML" tag in code) . Only thing that differs is "line 88" that can be "line 86". I've seen this on MainPage, BugReport and others.

See report of same in wikipedia:Bug reports/Parser.

This is new (since late this afternoon, Pacific Time). The top of pages has this:

Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/wiki-newest/work-http/wikiPage.php on line 86

Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/wiki-newest/work-http/wikiPage.php on line 88

The "Recent Changes" page doesn't have these lines, but pages that I get to by clicking their names in the Recent Pages page do. Redirected pages have each error message twice. -- Marj Tiefert, Tuesday, May 7, 2002

Yes, I'm seeing that now too... (Note to other developers about this bug: the running version of wikiPage.php is, I believe, 1.112 from 2002-04-02. The errors are coming up in wikiPage::load() on mysql_fetch_object() and mysql_release() calls when grabbing data out of the unlinked table. Unfortunately, the developer's database access function is still disabled, so I can't test the query manually to see what's going wrong... I haven't seen any similar errors from the preceding query on the linked table.) Brion VIBBER, Tuesday, May 7, 2002

I'm getting the same error on almost all screens of the wikipedia. Yesterday it was reporting errors in lines 84 and 86 and refusing to load screens at all. Today the error has switched to line '99' with this showing up at the top of virtually every screen I got to: Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/wiki-newest/work-http/wikiPage.php on line 99 ~KJ Wed 8th May 2002

STATUS : Fixed in CVS; fixed on Wikipedia as of 2002-05-14

If an article is replaced with "Describe the new page here." the next person who accesses it will be greeted with an edit window.
Deleting all the text in an article and replacing it with "Describe the new page here.", pesents the page it as if the page NEVER had any content -- thus promting a sysop, like me, to delete the page. If a page and its history exists, then it shouldn't ever automatically show up in an edit window. maveric149

For the time being, manually add "&action=history" to the URL to see the history. The "automatic edit" was actually planned as a feature, a long, long time ago... --Magnus Manske, Saturday, April 13, 2002

Will do, thanks for the work around! maveric149

Fixed it in the developres version. ----Magnus Manske, Sunday, April 14, 2002

STATUS : Fixed in CVS; on live Wikipedia as of 2002-05-14

International links do not display in "Cologne Blue" Skin: There is no link to the other international wikis, other than in the meta tags. Change to Cologne Blue and go to say Algeria. 2002/04/08 user:Dze27

This has been fixed in CVS for several days. Jimbo, can we have an upgrade please? Brion VIBBER, Tuesday, April 9, 2002

STATUS : Fixed in CVS

working on wikipedia 2002/05/11 Dze27

Another language link bug (percent signs used for non-ascii character codes cause links to be treated as text). My fault, should be fixed soon. Brion VIBBER 2002/03/27

Was fixed a few days ago. Brion VIBBER, Saturday, April 6, 2002

Orphans page broken 28.02.2002 12.45GMT

I get this error:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /home/wiki-newest/work-http/wikiPage.php on line 613

It no longer times out. But it now lists 17426 "orphans", compared to the correct number of about 700 before the software update. The reason for this is explained in the "pages that link here" item below. It's taking a long time to fix, however. --Zundark, 2002 Mar 2

Pages that link here (2002/02/26)

The "Pages that link here" link no longer works properly. It lists only a tiny fraction of the pages which actually do link to the page in question, and often none at all. --Zundark, 2002 Feb 26

Probably this explains why the Most Wanted list doesn't look very believable - most of the links to articles are being ignored. And it may also explain why the Orphans page always times out - it probably thinks half the articles on Wikipedia are orphans. --Zundark, 2002 Feb 26

Yes, that is the reason. We introduced new separate tables for the linking information, but they were only filled with a tiny fraction of the actual links. This is mainly due to me not telling Jimbo clearly enough what he should do. I've given him new instructions now and hopefully Jimbo gets around soon to redo the procedure soon. Apologies for the inconvenience. --Jan Hidders 2002 Feb 27

This user's contributions

(3/4/2002) Contributions aren't listed if the most recent edit (not the only edit) made by the user is a minor edit.

It would be great if this bug could be solved by having a configurable Contributions page, getting to list/sort by minor edits, pages created, and pages edited. --The Cunctator

This User's Contributions does not seem to be working... 2002/03/07

Just checked a couple of User contribution links, and the changes from the past few days don't seem to be there -- thought you might like to know -- love this feature, BTW!! JHK

Mine seems to be working the same as usual. See wikipedia:PHP_script_new_features, which describes what it does (which probably isn't what you expect it to do). I complained about it on wikipedia:Feature_requests at the time, but to no effect. --Zundark, 2002 Mar 8

It seems to me that the Contributions page shows the articles only if you were the last person edited it. If someone else added something after you did, it is no longer your contribution.

This is fixed in the current version and will work after the next update. All pages that a user has made a non-minor edit to will be listed. AxelBoldt

Ampersand in URLs

(2002/1/27) URLs containing ampersands should have them escaped as an entity reference, i.e. &amp;amp; a m p ;. This seems to be the only problem stopping the pages from being technically correct HTML 4.0 transitional. --Carey Evans

Most of these should be fixed now; please give a shout if you find any stray ones left... 2002/03/01 Brion VIBBER

Can't access history of redirect pages easily

When one is redirected to another page, there is no easy way to access the revision history of the redirect page. For example, (redirected from Marseille) allows you to edit the redirect easily enough, but there's no link to click on to get to the revision history of the redirect. This makes it easy to "hide" an old article version if you want to vandalize stuff subtly. Bryan Derksen

Should be fixed. AxelBoldt

Edit conflict on re-direct to nonexistent page (2002/02/04)

Actual behavior: When I #REDIRECT to a not-yet-existent page, I get an Edit Conflict&amp;trade;.

Expected behavior: redirect to target page with "Describe the new page here." like usemod did. --Damian Yerrick

(2002/02/19) I tried Carey Evans suggestion and was able to bring up an edit box for Juggler. I changed the redirect to Juggle but every time I go to save it I get an Edit Conflict. Very frustrating. --MarkReid

This is a major bug.

This is fixed in the newest version of the code. AxelBoldt

Default number of Recent Changes lines

(2002/03/10) Along the same lines, I am unable to alter the default number of changes shown to me. I have Recent Changes set to show me 500 changes in my preferences, but this has no effect on the actually Recent Changes page, which shows me 50. --Stephen Gilbert

Fix is checked in and on the way. Brion VIBBER 2002/03/20

My new page was given the wrong title

2002/03/23: I just created the page (http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/inverse%0D%0Atransform+sampling+method) but it was given the wrong title: it was titled "Inversetransform sampling method" instead of "Inverse transform sampling method". Can someone fix this???

I moved your page to Inverse transform sampling method. How did you create the page originally? --Stephen Gilbert

I just removed the line break from the link in Uniform distribution. Will fix the software to assume you relly meant a space... Brion VIBBER 2002/03/23

Okay. Malformed link titles should now be rejected out of hand. If your link isn't a link, that means you should edit the page and fix it. (And thus, you shouldn't have any surprises when creating the page.) 2002/03/27

Cross-language linking

The cross language linking does not really work because once you click the link, you cannot do anything on the next language's wikipedia. Take for example the page of Table tennis: as soon as you click on the link to Esperanto, if you try to edit that page then Wiki.Cgi will appear as the title and this is clearly a bug. Can this be fixed soon? It should just be a simple tweak in the web server's config files. --Chuck Smith

This is now fixed on the Esperanto wiki because I slipped the fix into another patch I was giving to Jimbo. He still hasn't installed the fixes I sent him for the others, though. Send him an e-mail and bug him about it. Brion VIBBER 2002/03/02

Watch Page Links - creates new page

If you view a special:Recentchangeslinked page and then select the watch this article link at the top of the page it sends you to a new article page named Recent_changes_on_pages_linked_from_xxxx rather than adding something to your watchlist like you would expect. Trelvis

Watchlist at "History of..." I just visited the article on the anti-globalization movement. Thinking that I would be interested in watching the subject I proceded to put it on my watchlist. Erroneously, I clicked on that link when I was at the associated "History of ..." page. The bottom of my watchlist now shows that I am watching the non-existing article [History of Anti-globalization movement], but there does not appear to be a way to delete a non-existing article from the watchlist! Eclecticology

Oops! You shouldn't be able to hit "watch this page" special pages... Now fixed in CVS. (However, it would be nice to be able to watch/unwatch an article from its associated history page; I'll add that in, too.) Brion VIBBER 2002/03/21

Truncated Page

It looks like the conversion script chopped off most of the article analytic geometry. The article is now very short, ends in mid-sentence, and has no history except for the conversion by a script. It needs to be resurrected from whatever archives exist. I wonder if any other articles were similarly damaged. 2002/03/26

This doesn't seem to be due to the conversion. I checked an old version of the database from before the conversion, and the article (and all the articles in its history) were already truncated. AxelBoldt

Tarballs (2002/02/10)

The tarballs don't have the date as part of the filename, so there's no way to tell what version they are. Also, it isn't clear what the difference is between wiki.tar.gz and wiki-pl.tar.gz. The latter is 1/10 the size. Is it missing something?

The new tarball for the wikipedia database dump has a date. The international ones (wiki-pl) still don't. AxelBoldt

Searching for Otto Dix yields no results

... but if you try to create a new entry for Otto Dix, you will find an article. --

Yes, that is because there is now a minimum size for search words of four characters. Normally you would have gotten a warning about this, but the newest wikiSettings.php wasn't installed with the latest update of the software. As soon as Jimbo Wales has done that, you won't get an empty search result but a syntax error. The minimum size, by the way, is a consequence of how the MySQL fulltext index works. We are working an a workaround, but that might take a while. Jan Hidders 26 Febr. 15:32 GMT+1

View current version is broken The view current version link you get when viewing older revisions of pages doesn't work; it links to the same revision that you're viewing. --Matthew Woodcraft

Has been fixed. AxelBoldt

plural links to singular articles

(8 Mar 2002) - I thought one of the improvements was that you could use a plural word (e.g. plants) to link to an article with a singular name (e.g. plant), that is, that the final s could go within the square brackets instead of outside and that you didn't have to use the | syntax either. But this is no longer working. (Or was I dreaming that it ever did work???) -- Marj Tiefert

That's not quite how it works. You write [[plant]]s and get the equivalent of [[plant|plants]]. (That is, a link to plant that looks like plants.) This is perhaps non-obvious from the updates & changes page...? I didn't even know about this feature until a few days ago, and I've been working on the software for weeks! :P Brion VIBBER~

MAJOR Can't edit a redirected entry (2002/02/12) I cannot edit the link for Juggler. It gets redirected to Juggling. On the Juggling page I click on the (redirected from Juggler) link but end up on the same page. Could someone try this out and let me know if the problem is specific to my OS/browser combination (MS/IE6)? --MarkReid

This is still a major bug. --The Cunctator

I get the same, with Linux/Mozilla. To actually edit the page, click the "redirected..." link, then edit the URL to change "/wiki/Juggler" to "/wiki.phtml". --Carey Evans

appears to be fixed as of 2002/3/9 AxelBoldt

Fatal Error (Preferences) 2/25/02

I went to preferences to hide minor edits after somebody decided we all needed to see every bloody automated conversion. I ticked the appropriate box. Hit save. Didn't see anything happen. Hit recent changes link (in top frame, not on side) got the following:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: array_key_exists() in /home/wiki-newest/work-http/special_recentchanges.php on line 152

JHK

Tried to get to recent changes again from side bar.  same error

Seems to be related to running a different version of PHP than it was tested on. Grrr. Fix is in CVS, should be updated when Jimbo gets around to it. In the mean time, leave minor pages on. (And could you explain what you mean by "somebody decided we all needed to see every bloody automated conversion"?) -- Brion VIBBER 2002/02/25 20:49

Thanks for the fix, Brian -- I actually turned off the hide before I checked this this morning, and yes, it does work. The other was pure annoyance -- I was accessing from campus and, although they must have a fairly big pipe, they've got all kinds of security stuff that causes time-outs when trying to download large pages. The decision to show all the automated conversions on the recent changes page means that, if users actually want to see "real" changes (the kind made to content -- not in programming ;-)), they have to pull down the last couple of thousand changes (and -- and this is only my opinion, I admit -- Atlas Shrugged has way too much space devoted to it -- it took ages to just scroll through the list! We don't even have that much on the Bible, and it's probably somewhat more influential. Grrr). So...I couldn't get onto the recent changes page because it was full automated conversion log, and couldn't get rid of that because of the evil minor edits error...Maybe automated conversions could be hidden from the server side rather than from individual UIs? JHK

Ahh, now I see. Those were long gone from the default list by the time I looked at it. I have no idea why those are there, I'll ask... Brion VIBBER

page colors

What's with the new page colors? Will there be an explanation of the color coding somewhere? And PLEASE make the colors a lot lighter - they're too harsh and require too much eye-adjustment for those of us who are over 40... ;-) -- Marj Tiefert

They've already been lightened in the in-progress code (thank goodness), which with any luck Jimbo will install soon. Improvements to the interface are currently being discussed in wikipedia:Feature requests, look down towards the bottom under "Alternate designs". --Brion VIBBER

Diffs of this page missing (2002/02/02)

If you check the history or diffs of this very page, you will always get "no changes, this is the first version", even though it isn't. --AxelBoldt

This seems to have been fixed for a few days at least. --Brion VIBBER 2002/03/02

Rendering bug causes only partial display of pages with extra HTML closing tag

2002 02 25
(statement updated) Content on Talk:Beryllium was not displayable do to a bug in the software that prevents display of part of an article whenever it encounters an extra closing font tag (or any extra tag). Why is the main wikipedia being used for Alpha testing? Shouldn't this be done on the meta instead? maveric149

Nothing was deleted, there's only a small bug in the rendering code that (unfortunately) cuts visible pages off if there are too many closing HTML tags in one page. (In the case of Talk:Beryllium there was an extra </font> tag.) In other words, if the page were well-formed, you'd never see the bug; if you see this bug in any other page, please edit the page (which is all there, I swear it!) and fix the bad HTML that appears at the point where the text gets cut off. I've notified Jimbo of the problem and fixed the code, hopefully he'll install the fix soon and we can all get back to writing bad HTML and not caring. :)

For what it's worth, there is a http://beta.wikipedia.com/ which in theory should run the most current code, updated every day. But it's been a little behind in updates lately, and in my experience nobody ever looks at test servers anyway! :( --Brion VIBBER 2002/02/25 19:51

Ruby HTML codes 2/26/02

The Ruby HTML tags stopped working since wikipedia switched to the new system. When I view the source code, I notice that the tags are converted to <ruby> instead of the original <ruby>. These tags used to work before at least in Internet explorer 5.5.

Did that work under the old (pre-January) wiki software? In any case, no matter -- the ruby tags definitely ought to be allowed (particularly for the Japanese and Chinese wikipedias once they're converted and actually work). I'll add 'em if there's no objection. --Brion VIBBER

2002/03/01: They're in.

Edit conflicts with myself

I seem to be getting into regular edit conflicts with myself! I start editing a page and it throws up the edit conflict dialog, but top and bottom boxes are identical and contain only my immortal prose. a second "save" usually fixes this, except, it seems, when I am working on a redirect, when I end up in an infinite loop of edit conflicts. user:clasqm

This happened to me too. It doesn't seem to happen as much anymore, though...maybe it has been fixed? Dreamyshade (2002/1/31) seems as it has been fixed -- ChaTo

No, it has not been fixed. See Mercury/God, for example. --Zundark, 2002 Feb 3

I don't have any problem editing that page now. Can you confirm? --Brion VIBBER 2002-2-6 23:09 PST

This is fixed now, but it was still broken on Feb 3. --Zundark, 2002 Feb 22

RFC auto-linking no longer works (2002/02/09)

I seem to recall that writing, say, RFC 1519 in an article would auto-link to a repository of RFC's. This no longer seems to work.

IMHO, that's a feature, not a bug. --User:Robert Merkel

However, the loss of a feature that once existed is a regression on a feature request. Are those bugs? --Damian Yerrick

Yes. --The Cunctator

I'm arguing that the riginal feature is inappropriate for Wikipedia and should not be reinstated. --Robert Merkel

I disagree. However, the old behaviour was not quite right. The link should either point back to an authoritative RFC source (ie. the IETF site), or to an indirection page giving a list of RFC archives, allowing the user to choose. The Anome

Parser does not escape HTML

Also, some HTML in page comments is not being escaped out - for example, put &amp;lt;p&amp;gt; in a page comment, and see what happens. -- The Anome

Should be fixed in the next upgrade... --Brion VIBBER 2002/02/06 01:29 PST

The parser treats white space as significant, which is undesirable. For example, "=== Header ===" will normally produce a level three header line, but if it is followed by whitespace, it will produce a level two header line surrounded by equal signs.

Furthermore, the new parser treats equal signs as a header line even if they occur in the middle of some other text. They should only be treated as a header line if they occur on a line all by themselves. AxelBoldt

The Formula One page has some problems with the section headings (with the equals sign) -- User:Jheijmans

There are similar problems at Surreal numbers when the string "<=" is used. -- Jan Hidders

There are also issues with the processing of '==' in this example. See also Fermats little theorem for another example of layout damage caused by over-aggressive matching of pairs of '=' characters to generate markup. -- The Anome

I dont think the '====' surrounding the first word of an article works right. Maybe nobody uses this any more? It was in the how to edit a page page. Also, doing the '===' surrounding subsections works some of the time. shhhh don't hack my ip! BF *)

- (3 Febr 2002) A patch has been submitted for this, so this should all work after the next update of the software. -- Jan Hidders~

Lower case user names

Not sure how many other people are affected by this, but my "Contributions" page is totally empty. Since the changeover I have edited over 30 articles and started several new ones. You can see what I mean at http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=special:contributions&amp;theuser=Maveric149. --User:maveric149

BTW, http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=special:contributions&amp;theuser=maveric149 this works. --Chuck Smith

Yep, second link does work. The only difference is that my user name is lower case in Chucks example. I created my account with a lowercase "m", and that is how I log in - yet when I click on "This user's contributions" in my default userpage, I get zip. Thanks for the info Chuck! --User:maveric149

Fix is ready, will be installed soon. --Magnus Manske

(2002/1/1) The first letter of usernames are automatically capitalized upon submission of the "preferences" page.

If a all lowercase string is input into the "UserName" field in the preferences page, the first letter of said string is capitalized.

All page titles in Wikipedia should be capitalized. Suggest resolving INVALID. --User:Damian Yerrick

I have a similar problem - there's a user jheijmans (small j) and Jheijmans (capital J); both user pages link to the same page, but the contributions page does not - can this be merged into one user entry? -- User:Jheijmans

They are the same page; see contribution list bug above. --Magnus Manske

'New separators: Horrible'

(2002/2/7) Just noticed a black line separating page's parts. I think it's horrible, i prefer without that. Maybe we need a option for that. -- Tuxisuau

Special Pages

Most Wanted Pages not current (2002/02/10)

A third of the articles listed on special:WantedPages already exist. Clicking on the link to regenerate the page doesn't make them go away.

(2002-02-12) By now, over 70 percent of the Most Wanted pages have been filled. When I tried to refresh the page to bring in more entries, I got the following error:

(The page was last refreshed just -160980 minutes ago; please wait another 160985 minutes and try again.)

160985 minutes equals 111 days and change. Was this put in place on purpose, to keep people from refreshing the page until early June? After a while, the feature becomes absolutely useless. --Damian Yerrick

The timestamp is incorrect and needs to be fixed by someone with access to the database. --Brion VIBBER

In the meantime, it would be better to remove the "Mosted wanted" page altogether, as all the articles it lists now exist. --Zundark, 2002 Feb 20

"Most Wanted"

There appear to be a lot of articles listed in "Most wanted" which actually do exist. For example, Year in Review/Guidelines, 1, 2, 3, etc.

Just to follow up this one with a further observation, it looks like the Year in Review/Guidelines link listed in Most wanted is for Year_in_Review/Guidelines_, with a space at the end after "Guidelines." Shouldn't trailing spaces be trimmed from page titles and links?

(2002/1/26) The "Most wanted" page indicates that a whole bunch of pages want a "Year in Review/Guidelines" page, but that page already exists. Upon poking around a bit more, I found that all of the pages who supposedly had a link to the non-existent page had links with a trailing space, and this was being considered different from the link without a trailing space. For example:

Guidelines without trailing whitespace
Guidelines with trailing whitespace

(2002/1) The "wanted" page considers the second link to point to a non-existent page. At time of writing, the "most wanted" page contains a lot of Year in review pages that do actually exist. example: 12 and 17. clasqm

indeed, the 'most wanted' page is now swamped with two-digit year in review entries. Somethings up, since they do exist and are linked. --MichaelTinkler

HTML named entities not working while previewing (2002/02/09)

HTML named entities are escaped while previewing and because of that they don't work (e.g. &amp;deg; becomes &amp; d e g ;). See Jupiter for an example. --Uriyan

They're only escaped in the preview render; in the article text they remain correct, and will be shown properly after saving. Should be fixed soon... Brion VIBBER

: in page titles (2002/02/08)

In putting titles of plays into the Pulitzer Prize page, some of the letters which are capitalized on the editing page appear in the final text as being uncapitalized. The example I noticed was for Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, in which the first two capitalized A's are not capitalized in final text even though they are capitalized on the editing page (as is true on this page as well}.

Sorry, you can't use colons (:) in page titles. The colon is reserved for special pages, like special:Watchlist, talk:France, log:Uploads, etc. "angels in america" is getting put into lowercase because that's the way special pages are named, with the first part in lowercase. I recommend using Angels in America - Millennium Approaches instead to avoid this problem. (See the PHP script FAQ for more about these niggling little things.) --Brion VIBBER

Recent changes shows previous edit (2002/02/09)

Edit a page, and recent changes shows it as the previous edit; I noticed this when I'd apparently just edited a page I hadn't touched for a week; someone else had just edited it, buit it appeared in Recent changes as my previous edit, complet with summary.

Just submitted this edit, and the edit shows OK. Looks as if the sequence is actually: someone creates a new article; No problem. Someone comes along, edits the new article, which has had no revisions yet, and then recent changes reports that edit as the original creation of the article instead...

Sounds like someone created a new page that your page linked to. Known bug, fixed in CVS, fix should show up here soon. --Brion VIBBER

Unable to edit large pages )2002/02/09)

when I open to edit any of the larger pages (eg Nuclear Weapon, Wikipedia: Bug reports) I am unable to type any characters in. I can move the cursor and cut-paste but I cannot type.

What browser, what version, what operating system are you using? (If you're using Mozilla, try going into your preferences and disabling the QuickBar. There's a bug in Mozilla that makes editing a text box inside a table verrrrrrry slowwwwww.) Brion VIBBER

Timestamps for first two previous version links in a page's History are always the current time

(2002/1/27) Check the History link for this page... -- user:Derek Ross

Timestamps for previous version links in a page's History are off by one and the first two are therefore set to the current time.

Check the History link for this page... -- user:Derek Ross

Bad search results This probably has been said already somewhere by somebody, but I'll put it here. If I search for example for 'Rome', I get a lot of results, beginning with AIDS (syndROME), Alfa ROMEo and AndROMEda. while Rome, the city, would be an exact match. Could it be made that exact search results are listed first, or maybe there can an approximation measure for the matches? user:Jheijmans

The search engine does not generate any results using Netscape 3.0 and junkbuster. User:GWO

Wiki.phtml pages

I accidentally created a wiki.phtml page with IP address 130.94.122.xxx after hitting a []? link. there are a number of other examples of this: September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/wiki.phtml; English language/wiki.phtml;

Complete list of encyclopedia topics/wiki.phtml.

Performance

Love the new functionality, but I haven't been able to contribute nearly as much as I would like because the pages come up at a sub-glacial speed (very often). Have broadband &amp; fast computers at home, work and school and I have the same problem (every other webpage I go to zips and zings --- including heavily hit and often

Appears mostly fixed as of 2002/02/20. It's now much faster than Everything2. --Damian Yerrick

Character 0 vanishing (2002/02/07)

The second line of http://wikipedia.com/wiki/Geologic_timescale starts off with " 0 ". The 0 is simply disappearing in the displayed output. I put in an extra space to make the page look closer to right. I'm reasonably sure the 0 was being displayed two weeks ago.

Fixed in CVS; should work again when the software is next updated. --Brion VIBBER 2002-02-07

Bogus Logged IP (2002/02/09)

It's really easy to log a fake IP address, see [2] for example. I'm not going to just explain how here, though; anyone who knows how the previous logged IP address problem was fixed should be able to figure it out, or can email me. --Carey Evans

You don't even need to fake it, Wikipeida is logging me as 213.105.195.101, while the reality is 62.62.253.xxx.

It seems to be fixed now; presumably it now takes the correct host from X-Forwarded-For if more than one is there. --Carey

Full IP address in page history (2002/02/09)

Although the last octet of the user's IP address is xxx'ed out on Recent Changes, the page history now shows the complete IP address. --Carey Evans

Bug, or feature? --Damian Yerrick

It's changed back now, so I guess it was a bug. --Carey

(2/13/2002) The Recent Changes page is much better fast, but it's fast because it's cached. It should be fully updated with the last edits made; the current lag is pretty extreme. --The Cunctator

I'm not seeing this lag. More detail please? --Brion VIBBER

Login and Preferences

Edits when not logged in are considered "minor"? This, in my mind, is a horrible idea. I hope that's a bug, not a feature. Koyaanis Qatsi

Ack! That's the exact opposite of what it's supposed to do. Expect this to be fixed sometime soon... Brion VIBBER 2002/2/10

Cookie problems

Hey, Jimbo -- I log in, hit 'preferences' and it tells me I am not logged in. So...I'm not going to preferences for a while! JHK

I have this same problem, no matter what I hit after I log in. It doesn't seem to recognize my login. Cookies are enabled on my browser. User:RjLesch.

follow-up to above: my login worked fine when I selected the "remember my password as a cookie" option. User:RjLesch

I also run Moz 0.9.7 on Debian unstable, no problems for me. --User:David Merrill

Login problems: I can successfully log in, but as soon as I go to another page (for instance, the preference page), the system thinks I'm not logged in. --User:Robert Merkel (whose ip address starts with 144.132.75)

I get this behavior if cookies are disabled in the browser; the script prints out a "logged in successfully" message based on your username/password matching, ignoring the setting of the cookie, so the failure is silent. --Brion Vibber

My browser (Moz 0.9.7, part of Debian unstable) is set to ask for approval to store a cookie. No dialog indicating the receipt of a cookie pops up, and there's no cookies from wikipedia.com in my saved cookies. --User:Robert Merkel

I tried it on several different machines, at home and at work, using IE5.5, 6.0, Netscape (Windows), Netscape (Linux), Opera (Windows), and Konqueror, and they all work just fine with the cookies. --Magnus Manske

Here's the scenario. I had a password for my account saved to cookie with the checkbox on the log in page. I then changed my password to the old admin password (so now you techies know what my password is) and now when I try to login (again with cookies on) it says that I successfully login, but when I try to do anything, it shows that I'm not logged in! HELP!!! --User:Chuck Smith

Feb 2, 2002: On Linux/Debian with Netscape 4.76, after logging in, it forgets that I'm logged in immediately after I change to another page from the login page. This happens whether I check "Remember my password with a cookie" or not. Maybe it is related to the next bug below? AxelBoldt

Nested tables don't work (2002/02/23)

While trying to come up with a template for the table to be used in all chemical element entries, I discovered that the wikipedia software appears to deliberately break table code that should work just fine. I was attempting to create a table that had 2 columns in the top half and 6 columns in the bottom half, with the 6 column half handling its internal layout independently of the 2 column half; to this end, I created a 6-column table and nested it inside the 2-column table. It worked just fine when I tested it outside of Wikipedia. However, upon testing it in wikipedia, I got the following:

Properties

General

Name

Beryllium

Symbol

Be

Series

Alkaline Earth Metal

Group, Period, Block

2 (IIA), 2, s

3^rd ionization potential

14848.7 kJ/mol (153.893 eV)

Isotopic

iso	NA	half-life (t_1/2)	DM	DE (MeV)	DP
⁷Be	{syn.}	53.12 days	epsilon	0.862	⁷Li
⁹Be	100%	Be is stable with 4 neutrons
¹⁰Be	trace	1.51 &times;10⁶ y	beta^-	0.556	B¹⁰

It appears that the second set of &lt;table&gt; tags got escaped.

Wrong links with cross-language links (2002/02/05)

On pages with cross language links, like Table tennis, all the links on the page show as external links, even though they're to Wikipedia articles. --Carey Evans

Fixed in CVS, should be up sometime soon along with some HTML fixes and improvements to the search engine. 2002/2/14 Brion VIBBER

Javascript in generated pages

(2002/1/27) Too much HTML is let through unchallenged. For example, try the following link not to my user page, Carey Evans. HTML 2.0 plus tables should be enough for formatting Wiki pages, though I'd prefer to be able to do everything without HTML at all. --Carey Evans

This is partially fixed; non-approved HTML tags are no longer let through, but they're not checked for internal safety. Ie, I can still do the same thing using a "safe" tag. JavaScript-releated elements should definitely be removed... --Brion VIBBER 2002/02/06

Here's another example of evil javascript I found over in the Goatsec.xs article. It used to lead to the web page in question, but I've rewritten it to spare your eyeballs. Just move your mouse pointer over the link and then without clicking it move your mose pointer off of it again. http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Goatse.cx

HTML tags should not be possible in the page title

(2002/1/29) See http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=Christopher_Tolkien for example. This shows up in the recent changes, where the html is rendered if the page is edited. Can do some nasty stuff with unclosed tags. This is in konqueror 2.2, maybe the effect is somewhat different in other browsers.

Nope, it's a bug. Working on it. --Magnus Manske

Preview of &lt;pre&gt; and handling of HTML entities

(2002/1/29) The preview of a page which has HTML entities inside a &lt;pre&gt; environment differs from the rendering of the saved page. Specifically, if the page contains the text &amp; a m p ; (without the spaces) inside a &lt;pre&gt; environment, then the preview will show this as &amp; a m p ; while the saved page will render it as &amp;. This is an issue when editing the "Character Formatting" section of How to edit a page. --AxelBoldt

ISBN numbers with check digit of X (2002/02/10)

ISBN numbers with a check digit of "X" like ISBN 1-55634-399-X are not linked correctly to Pricescan - the numeric part is linked, but a space is inserted before the "X" and it is not included. --Carey Evans

Edit Conflict! with myself! and creation of new, incorrectly titled pages (2002/02/10)

When I try to redirect, I get an edit conflict BUT, just to make it interesting, I'm also somehow creating a new page. Here's what happens:

I'm logged in
I open a page (this seems to be happening only when I'm opening a page on a titled person, BTW) to edit
I copy the information in the page and then type #REDIRECT pagename
I get an edit conflict

BUT -- a new page has been created, with a funny Bpagename/b rest of pagename as the title.

Does the link to your new page have bold tags (&lt;b&gt;) in it? Knowing *exactly* which pages you're talking about would be a great help. -- Brion VIBBER

sorry Brion -- you mighe want to check the recent changes, but the ones I can think of off the top of my head are Gustavus Adolphus (AKA BGustavus Adolphus/b) and BMaximilian I/b holy Roman Emperor -- I viewed the source, and for some reason there are complete HTML tags in the code -- these appear as I've just described on the page titles. David Parker and I think Lars have re-created the pages (namespaces?) properly by adding the correct title (with underscores in the spaces) after '/' in the navigation bar. JHK

Okay, my guess at what's going on is that someone created the page from a link that turned up in the search page. The search page is horribly buggy and, among other mortal sins, puts bold tags around located search terms *before* the page extracts are wiki-interpreted, thus creating links with bold tags in them. Previously, the tags would actually slip into the page title, sometimes unnoticed. Now, the &lt; and &gt; are stripped out, the B and /B are clearly visible, and it should be noticible to the person editing the page. In the short term, please read the title when you're editing a new page! If it looks completely wrong, start over. The search page is being rewritten, so this can be fixed in the process... Brion VIBBER

This isn't good. Checking now to see if it works if i remove all content first...

Nope -- still happens -- Creates a new page which comes up correctly under search (where the bolded part shows bold), but the tags remain in the actual page title.

I'm not sure I follow. If I go to Bgustav/bus Adolphus of Sweden, I get redirected to Gustavus Adoplus of Sweden and everything looks fine. The messed-up title appears only in the URL bar, because when you follow a redirect you get the new page with the old URL. If I'm looking at the wrong thing, let me know. 2002/2/10 Brion VIBBER

Edit conflict "Text you submitted" not in edit box

(2002/2/12) On the edit conflict page, the the text you submitted should be put in an textarea box, but it's not.

DIFF corrupts the database? (2002/02/08)

The (DIFF) links seem to have several problems. I've noticed that if I click on the first (DIFF) link on either the history page for an article, or on that article's listing on my watchlist, then it refuses to show the difference. When I tried several of the diffs for one article, it actually corrupted the database, I think. As of right now, if you go to Raven_paradox, you'll see what looks like a DIFF page for an old version of the article. But if you click on "edit this page", it brings up the text for the current version of the article. Something must be inconsistent in the database right now.

Known problem, fixed in the code, fix should be online ANY SECOND NOW. Brion VIBBER

It looks like the software isn't damaging pages any more. But the damage to pages like Raven paradox remains. Will that be fixed automatically, or should we start looking for such pages to fix them by hand?

If you see such a broken page, hit "edit this page" then "save", it'll clear the page's cache and all is well. We'll try to put in a way to automatically refresh pages from time to time, but it's not set up yet. Brion VIBBER

<?echo "test";?>