Wikipedia:Phase II bug reports

Please report bugs in the Wikipedia software here. This is not the place to point out mistakes in a Wikipedia article (you can do that by simply editing that article), nor is it the place to request new software features (you can do that at Feature requests).

Add your new report at the top, with a bold title and a date. Make sure that different bugs get different titles. Or, if your problem is related to a bug already reported, add your description to that bug's section. If an issue has been resolved, move it down to the "Resolved issues" section.

Unresolved Issues

10 February 2002 Edit Conflict! with myself! and creation of new, incorrectly titled pages 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 (<b>) 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

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.

Also tried logging out, but the system won't log me out because of the cookie thing. Advice would be nice! JHK

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

Most Wanted 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.

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?

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

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. --Robert Merkel

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. ° becomes & 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

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

Capitalization problem 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

Bogus Logged IP 2002-02-09

It's really easy to log a fake IP address, see [1] 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.

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

"Orphans" page isn't completely correct. For instance, Godfrey_Reggio is not and never has been an orphan page; it was created long after the article for his documentary Koyaanisqatsi. Similar issue with other articles listed.

I've noticed that "Orphans" gets confused by whether a title contains spaces or underscores between its words. If an article is created with underscores, but all the links to it have spaces, then it is listed as an orphan. I've noticed that in the URLs, the strings "%20", "_", and "+" can be used interchangably. "Orphans" should be updated to treat all three the same.

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

"Most wanted" articles with trailing spaces 2002-02-04

A link of the form Israel (note the spaces in the link source) causes the Most Wanted page to think that an article called Kingdom_of_Israel_ (note the trainling underscore) is required. I have created a redirect to Kingdom_of_Israel to fix this particular case.

Simple searches failing with apostrophes 2002-02-04

A search for 'benfords law' failed to find the benford's law article. (I put in a redirect to fix this, but this is such a common case that this is arguably a bug.)

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

Mysterious edit conflicts

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™.

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

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

"Go back to edit some more" doesn't work

9 Nov - I cannot simply hit the back button in my browser, after I have saved a page, and make another change to the page. I do that all the time in UseModWiki, but I can't do it on PediaWiki because I get into an edit conflict with myself.
- Now you can, but after "back", you'll have to hit "reload" to correct the timestamp embedded in the HTML of the editing page. --Magnus Manske
- This is still a problem. I still get into edit conflicts w/myself. And the timestamp should come from the serverside (e.g. the script), not the browserside (i.e. the HTML).
- This is still a major bug. --The Cunctator

Parser/Editor

Last line link in list

(2002/1/29) If the last lines of an article looks like this:

* [http://www.yahoo.com/
Yahoo]

then the bottom part of the page ("Main Page | Recent Changes...") will be indented to the left and screwed up. See SandBox for an example. This only happens if all of the following are true:

we are in a list
we have an URL link
The last letter of the URL is /
The name of the link occurs on the next line
You are using IE 5.5 on Windows. Netscape 4.76 on Linux does not show the effect.

AxelBoldt

Preview of <pre> and handling of HTML entities

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

Parser generates extra whitespace

The Bipolar disorder page is full of extra whitespace - looking at the article reveals lots of <p> </p> and <pre> </pre> spans generated.

Similarly, if an otherwise emply line contains some white space, the previous parser took that as a paragraph break, while the new parser treats it as a block of indented nothing, resulting in too much space between the paragraphs.

If whitespace precedes a #, then it is taken to be a numbered list, while before it was taken as a literal # (which is the correct behavior, especially useful for programs). AxelBoldt

Parser does not escape HTML

Also, some HTML in page comments is not being escaped out - for example, put <p> 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

Bad table code can screw up layout

(2002/1/28) In the Quaternions article, the first part of the article appears at the bottom of the page, as do all the QuickBar links. --Zundark

This was caused by Bad Table Code in the article. There was no closing TR tag for the last row in the table, and an extra open TR tag after the end of the table. I've fixed the article... The parser could probably be made to be able to normalize these things, though (ie, remove table-ish tags not inside <TABLE>...</TABLE>) --Brion Vibber

Three tildes in preview

In preview the three tilde symbols (~) are not replaced with the user name. -- Jan Hidders

Parser issues with header lines

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) -- Jheijmans

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

The display of Eight queens puzzle is... less than optimal. The problem is that the leading space on a line used to disable the processing of '#': now the Python program example is damaged.

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~

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

Ampersand in URLs

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

Definitions go in separate lists

(2002/1/25) Definition lists like:

Term 1: Definition 1.
Term 2: Definition 2.

each get put in separate <dl> tags, resulting in too much spacing between them. Carey Evans

Konqueror 2.1.1 with KDE 2.1.2 cannot render any edit/add page. 2002-1-1

The text area for the body of the article is displayed correctly; however, the "summary" text field is rendered ""inside"" and over the article body text area. Also, nothing that would normally appear under the article body text area does not render at all.

That's the fault of Konqueror; tried to scroll down? I get that sometimes with the "Search" button, and scrolling down usually fixes it. Also, reduce the number of lines of the edit box in your user preferences. --Magnus Manske

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

Character entities in links

Sat Feb 2 00:23:40 UTC 2002: On list of food additives, I have additives like β-cyclodextrine. When I click on the question mark to create an article about it, I get the Main Page displayed for edit instead. Note that since & is a safe character in URI path segments, escaping it as %26 has no effect.

This is due to a bug in the code putting too many HTML escapes into the title; if it were working correctly, the %26 escape would indeed have an effect. My recommendation until this is resolved: use β-cyclodextrine ([[beta-cyclodextrine|β-cyclodextrine]]). --Brion Vibber

There's probably good arguments for actually writing "beta-cyclodextrine" in the article. However, my point about the % escape is that according to RFC 2396, there is no difference between %26 and just & in the path of the URL. --Carey

Well, there's the RFC and then there's the actual behavior of the software... PHP does not seem to consider %26 to be an ampersand for the purposes of extracting variables from the URL's *query* bit. At least my reading of the RFC agrees with it: «3.4 Query Component ... Within a query component, the characters ..."@", "&", "="... are reserved.» It's not a problem in the path, only in the query when you're e.g. editing the page. --BV

The URL rewriting to give nice URLs like http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/MainPage rather than .../wiki.phtml?MainPage makes this a bit more complicated. There's no question mark in the URL for this edit page, so Apache is probably justified in converting %26 to & internally, before processing the Alias or RewriteRule directive, or http://www.wikipedia.com/%77%69%6B%69/ wouldn't work. --Carey

(Ideally the URL would be encoded as %CE%B2-cyclodextrine, the UTF-8 encoding of GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA.)

Impossible unless the database is converted from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8. --BV

I would just write <? echo urlencode(recode("h..utf8", $title)) ?>. --Carey

Yeah, that could probably work as long as titles are normalized internally. I'll try banging the code into place... --BV

References: RFC 2396, W3C on i18n of URIs

--Carey Evans

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

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&theuser=Maveric149. --maveric149

BTW, http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.phtml?title=special:contributions&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! --maveric149

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

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.

Login and Preferences

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! J Hofmann Kemp

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. 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. --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. --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

Log in doesn't set cookie path

(2002/1/25) The Set-Cookie header returned from the log in page doesn't include a path= variable. Most browsers default to "/"; Lynx, at least, defaults to the path of the page, so login doesn't work. Carey Evans

(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. --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? -- Jheijmans

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

User Interface

Diff colors

Diff pages speak of green and yellow being the colors of respectively the changed text and the old text. This is useless to those who set their own text colours and not very nice to visually impaired people working on wikipedia. It would be handier if the main way to recognize which is which would be a text (such as: "The new text:" and "The old text:"). Of course, colours could still be used complementary, but they should not be the primary way of distinguishing the two atoms of a diff.--branko

Need more whitespace

(2002/1/25) The general layout of Wikipedia looks cluttered. It needs more whitespace to be remotely readable. --Damian Yerrick

I agree, especially at the top it's very busy. For new users, lets just have the page title in <H1>, the Wikipedia tagline, maybe Printable and Edit, then the content. --Carey Evans

I agree too - people new to Wikipedia will probably be overwhelmed by all the different links and actions at the top of the page. I suggest simplifing the top to the most necessary things and putting the rest at the bottom. Are two search boxes really necessary anyway?

Some things are not visible to new (=not logged in) users anyway, like the watchlist. --Magnus Manske

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

'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

"Upload files"

The upload files page doesn't have a image uploading policy or something like that: We should not use formats like GIF, with can cause patent problems, or like BMP. with are not optimal. I suggest PNG and JPEG.

"Watchlist"

My watchlist (for LC) says I made three changes to the page LC in 1969. I don't recall making any changes that year.

Seems like I accidentially invented a time machine ;) --Magnus Manske

"Recent Changes"

The Recent Change page has many design flaws.

When I want to list all the new changes since my last visit to the site, I can only see the most recent 100 changes. Given all the minor changes are always included, one exceeds the 100 entries limit in a few hours, if you are away for more than a day, you have serious trouble seeing the complete list. It may not be problem for the wikipediaholics who check the Recent Change page every 30 seconds, but it simply does not work for the regular users.

I tried using the max count and the age link, they also have design flaws and do not work intuitively. When I click last seven days, it shows only 100 entries that cover only half a day, (same problem as above). When I click last 2500 entries, it either fails to return anything or it covers only the last 3 days. i.e. There is no way to ask for last seven day without count limit, or a count limit but no age limit.

workaround: Since the 100 count limit can be easily reached, it becomes the limiting factor. In effect, all the links, 1 day, 2 days, 3 days, 5 days, 7 days, 14 days all give the same 100 result. To workaround this problem, you can right click on these links and copy its URL iinto the address field of the browser, change the count limit and hit ENTER.

RecentChanges regularly claims (2 Changes) if there was only one. Except for new pages, it always counts one to many. AxelBoldt

"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-existant 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-existant 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

"List only new changes" doesn't work

(2002/1/26) On special:RecentChanges, the link saying "list only new changes" consistently returns an empty list, even after waiting a while. --AxelBoldt

Right! Same here. Maybe because i'm using a +8 hours offset? --Luis Oliveira

Yes, there's a bug in the time zone handling code. I am on Central time (Server time + 2h) which I set in my user preferences and I noticed that the "List only new changes" link returns something only after I wait for 2 hours, and then only those changes that have occured two hours since I last accessed RecentChanges. AxelBoldt

Character Sets

Non-ascii in titles

(2002/1/21) -- ISO-8859-2 characters cannot be in title of article - number of international wikipedias need this ...
- I'll wait for the English script and the bomis CVS to go online, there are some people who know the character encoding things better than me... --Magnus Manske

Japanese Wikipedia marked as ISO 8859-1 2001-12-31

http://ja.wikipedia.com is illegible with IE 5.0 (Mac) because its HTTP (MIME) header includes the line

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

The charset should be changed to something appropriate (Shift_JIS or UTF8), or removed and replaced by the equivalent META tag.

On a similar note, visitors to http://www.wikipedia.com should be automatically redirected to the Wikipedia written in the language of their choice, as expressed in their browser language preferences. -- poslfit

Then how would Dutch/English bilinguals switch to the English version? en.wikipedia.com doesn't seem to have any content. --Damian Yerrick

The same problem occurs in Netscape 4.77. However, IE5 works fine. This is very similar and may be related to the problem reported at the bottom of this page. See talk:Ranma 1 for details.

Miscelaneous 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

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

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.

Wiki.phtml pages

I accidently 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 & 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

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