Wikipedia:Phase II bug reports

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. Some even older bugs are archived at wikipedia:Squashed bugs.

Table of contents 1 Proper sections 2 Uncategorized bugs 3 Titles and Labels 4 User Interface 5 Miscellaneous Problems 5.1 Performance

Proper sections

• Logging in
• Editing
• Parser and formatting
• History and diffs
• Searching
• Special pages
• Internationalization (character set issues, etc.)

Uncategorized bugs

---

Clitic comes up as an old version

2002-05-09 phma

The Clitic page shows as an old version. If you hit "Edit", the current version shows in the edit box.

Extremophile is also showing up as an old version, and with a diff showing that it is new, when it has been edited several times.

Page caching has recently been reactivated after a couple of months disabled, but the old page cache wasn't cleared. Some pages may thus show the old cached versions; this should be fixed pretty soon. In the meantime, editing and immediately saving a page should re-cache it with the current version. Brion VIBBER, Thursday, May 9, 2002

Yes, this is still happening a lot. It's nasty -- can we turn off caching until we are sure it is 100% reliable? The Anome, Monday, May 20, 2002

This is already fixed. Jimbo, please upgrade us to the latest CVS version and clear the page cache (which should always be done when the software is upgraded so that pages misrendered by old bugs can be corrected automatically.) And no, Anome, we can't just turn everything off until we're sure it's 100% reliable -- then there would be no Wikipedia at all! :) Brion VIBBER, Monday, May 20, 2002

---

May 12 2002

I am still getting this problem on many pages, if the pages show at all.

May 8, 2002:

---

User contribs link doesn't work on user page that starts with a lowercase letter
Looks like the lowercase user name contribs bug is back - check out Maveric149's contributions (http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/special:contributions&theuser=Maveric149) and maveric149's contributions (http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=special:contributions&theuser=maveric149) --maveric149, Wednesday, April 3, 2002

Titles and Labels

Titles of Pages

(2002/1/26) The HTML titles of history pages all read ":encyclopedia article from Wikipedia". Furthermore, articles in the talk: and special: namespaces shouldn't be labeled as "encyclopedia articles". --AxelBoldt

(2002/1/28 Cosmetic) special: and wikipedia: pages have title "... - encyclopedia article from Wikipedia". They should not be indexed by search engines or should be indexed with a different page title. This is to "brand" "encyclopedia article from wikipedia" as a source of useful information -- ChaTo

Fixed it. --Magnus Manske, Sunday, April 14, 2002

 STATUS : Solved in CVS

---

April 1 2002: HTML titles

This is more a semantic bug than software bug. The software renders every page with the the title "[page name]: encyclopedia article from Wikipedia". The problem is not every page is actually an encyclopedia article. I recommend that the title remain for pages in the article space (except for the front page), and change it for all other namespaces. --Stephen Gilbert

How about saying 'X: from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia' for the other pages?

User Interface

Link underlining

(2002/1/25) External links and different namespaces should still be underlined, or there's nothing to indicate to new users that they are actually clickable. Carey Evans

(2002-02-09) Now all 'normal' links are forced to be underlined (with the following):

  a { text-decoration: underline; }

This is overriding my browser's configured default, which is to display links without underlines. Can't this line just be omitted? -- Matthew Woodcraft

Usability Report

(2002/1/31) I've written a small Usability Report for Wikipedia pointing out some usability problems. -- ChaTo

---

Miscellaneous Problems

Two different articles with same title

(2002/1/28) Churches Uniting In Christ has two different articles with the same URL and title. If you type in the URl, you get one article, but if you search for the title, it gives you two different ones... Dreamyshade

---

Table based layout

More generally, though, the new layout leaves me nonplussed (sorry guys - I know it was probably a lot of work), and worse, putting it into tables creates several varieties of problems:

• It renders *much* slower, esp. on big pages. (This with an Athlon 900!)
• In my experience, tables won't render in Netscape 4 unless the whole page loads - so no cancelling partway through a long page.
• Tables make it harder to do things like select text and parse page structure with a script.

-J

It should be relatively easy to change the thing to use CSS instead of tables. For an example of CSS and markup that produces a layout similar to this (content area + right side navbar) and works on IE 4-6 and Mozilla, look at http://pineight.com/ --DY

Each page should have a separator between the article and the bottom navbar. Currently, the article is flowing right into the navbar, which is very difficult to read.

There appears to be neat separation with bars all over the place when I view things with IE. But at home, with Mozilla, everything flows together, and is very difficult to get a grip on. GayCommunist P.S. Oh, and that "insert my username as signature" automagically doesn't appear to work, at least not in preview.

---

Capitalisation

Look at the entry for model organism. The reference to e. coli 0157:H7 doesn't display with the E capitalised. However, when you try to edit the page to fix this, the E is apparently capitalised.

You can't use colons (:) in regular page titles; if you try to create that page, it will not be allowed. Colons are reserved for separating a namespace (talk:, wikipedia:, log:, user: etc) from a page name. It is a little odd that the link is being shown in the article with changed capitalisation, however. But really, the link should not even be recognised as a link if it's an invalid page (as "e. coli 157" is not a valid namespace), this should be fixed. Brion VIBBER 2002/03/14

---

Performance

2002-05-30
Wikipedia is down from about 4:40 to 6:00 server time every day. Any sort of access gets a timeout, and there are no changes during that time. -phma

I am not sure if this is the place (if not, just point me on to the right one) but the performance of Wikipedia has seemed to degrade continuously over the past week or two. This is especially true of many of the special pages ClaudeMuncey, Thursday, March 28, 2002

2002/04/23 - Performance has been awful for at least a week. What can be done to speed up the system???? Even with a high-speed link, it takes over 1 minute for any page change. kjgraham

2002/04/24 - There have been some HUGE performance problems with me over the last couple weeks. Over the last week, it seems the server has been down(to my connection @least) from when I get home @ 3:00PM EST to about 5:45. I cannot access the frontpage or any other page. Also, many of the searches are screwing up. Maybe 3/4 of the "most wanted" pageloads fail on any given day. Is the server experiancing any obvious problems? One suspect thing: The Most Wanted, Orphans, etc pages seem to load extra-worse. Are these pages being compiled dynamically for each person viewing them? It would make much more sense, given the load, to compile things like the most popular page at an interval, like every 30 seconds or something, and then load that version of the page. -Squalish

2002/04/24 - For the last few days, Wikipedia has been slower than Everything2, a site notorious for lag. --Damian Yerrick (a date-challenged user)

Date-challenged? When I set the date two days in the future, I was only predicting the time it would take Wikipedia to finally commit the changes to this article ;-) Fixed. --Damian Yerrick

---

2002/05/18 - Links don't always seen to be appearing. I created a number of articles on counties in New York State, and they do not show up as links in the New York article. They appear just like all the yet-to-be-done county links. But they are there. (See Allegany County, New York, for example!) -- BRG

By editing and saving the New York article, the links appeared. This even though no change was made in the edit. -- BRG

---

troubles with slashes in article names

Not sure where to categorize this one, so I'll put it here for now. There appears to be a bug with how Wikipedia handles articles with slashes in their titles. I discovered this while on a rampage deleting 0-length and "describe new article here" articles; when you try to delete an article with a slash in the title, you get a 404 after clicking on the confirmation link. When I changed the URL-encoded slash from %2F into a / in the URL, however, the deletion proceeded normally.

Possibly an Apache configuration problem; I'm not quite sure what's up with it, but changes already in CVS conveniently work around it by calling the script name directly instead of relying on the URL rewriting with the pseudo-directory /wiki/. Brion VIBBER, Saturday, May 18, 2002

Furthermore, the automatically-generated Talk link from a page with a slash in the title leads to its "parent" aritcle's talk page rather than one for that specific article. For example, check ou the talk link in George Orwell/Shooting an Elephant[?]; it leads to Talk:George Orwell instead of Talk:George Orwell/Shooting an Elephant[?]. --Bryan Derksen, Saturday, May 18, 2002

Hey, that's not supposed to happen! Grrr. Brion VIBBER, Saturday, May 18, 2002

---

ISBN ghost link

2002/07/05

I entered a reference to the below book in the knot article. When the 'Save' returned it had turned the ISBN into a link sending the user to:

http://www.pricescan.com/books/bookDetail.asp?isbn=0921335474

The link is not generated by the text of the article. It appears the Wiki software is generating the link. If this is a default setting I would propose http://www.isbn.org/standards/home/index.asp as a better option. If this is a bug can it be remedied?

All The Knots You Need
Lee,R.S.
Algrove Publishing
ISBN 0-921335-47-4

Booo....

Satsun

Yes, this ISBN linking feature is expected behaviour. Look at the other ISBN in the article, which I have fixed, to see how it's supposed to work. I don't see how a link to isbn.org is useful, since as far as I can tell, there's no way to look up an individual book there. Pricescan.com, while of a commercial flavour, gives you access to all the information that you need to find a book. Unfortunately, that site doesn't have every book — that's why your link leads to an error. — Toby Bartels, Saturday, July 6, 2002

---

I have twice had problems editing wikipedia articles using the Opera browser (5.0.498) on Mac OSX (10.1.5). It seems not able to handle long articles, truncating them drastically and annoying the heck out of whoever typed all that stuff in in the first place. The problem is made worse because I, at least, am not in the habit of using Preview to compare what is produced to the previous version because I am really only checking the changes I put in intentionally. Nor do I customarily run a Diff after the article is saved. I am reluctantly dropping Opera despite its other virtues. One Opera virtue I will miss: it clicks when a page completes loading, very useful when wikipedia is in molasses mode, allowing me to multiprocess off somewhere while "Awaiting document from wikipedia" I've also reported this problem to Opera.Ortolan88, Thursday, July 11, 2002

This is a problem with many browsers on the Macintosh platform, and appears to be due to a limitation in the MacOS text edit widget (only 32k of text allowed, any more is truncated). Mozilla (http://mozilla.org/) implements its own widgets and should not be limited by this. (Netscape 6/7 (http://netscape.com/) should be the same, being a derivative of Mozilla). --Brion VIBBER, Sunday, July 14, 2002

---

when I click on the date July 14, 2002 on the tool bar, I get a "parameter is incorrect" message..., Sunday, July 14, 2002

I thought we already took that feature out? (It was very unpopular; the last thing we need is an article for every day in history! :) The simple solution: go into the preferences and change the "skin" to the improved Cologne Blue interface. Nasty link-of-the-day is definitely gone there, and in general the site is more attractive. --Brion VIBBER, Sunday, July 14, 2002

ok. Thanks. But I prefer not to switch to cologne blue until I have no more choice. Though it's MUCH nicer, the color of the links is too pale, I don't see very well and it's rather tiring to my opinion. Worse, the navigator doesn't appreciate at all the dynamic links of the tool bar, the police is all wrong, small and distorted. On the fr.wiki I can't use Netscape at all, because it refuses links with accentuated letters...something to do with encoding, but I didnot find the solution. I guess Netscape is really on its way out...--ant.
btw, we are done with the homepage translation

I suspect that this is because the link is to July 14, 2002, rather than to July%2014,%202002 or July+14,+2002, as it should be. Netscape, at least in its earlier incarnations (I don't know about now), can't handle this, for example. — Toby Bartels, Sunday, July 14, 2002

true. It does link to a blank page to be filled on Opera. So that's a netscape issue (4.7) -- ant