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 in the proper section, with a bold title and a date in (yyyy/mm/dd) numeric format. 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 over to the "wikipedia:Squashed Bugs" page. PLEASE DO THIS.

I can't log in.

I created a new user with username novalis. I can log in, but whenever I follow any link from the login page, I am not logged in. I get the following cookies when I log on:

WikiUserID=939

WikiLoggedIn=yes

Neither seem to have domain or path information (So, I'm using konqeror to test this, and I don't trust its reporting). They appear to expire in about ten minutes, but that's not what's causing the bug. I get the same bug in Galeon and Konqueror and Lynx and Links, so it's probably not client-side.

3/14/2002

I've seen the same thing; for me it went away when I checked "Save password in a cookie" at login time (which of course I don't want to do on a public PC). AxelBoldt

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!! J Hofmann Kemp

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

Edit replaced entire text of a Talk page 2/26/02

I just attempted to edit the Talk page on the article, Masculism. It brought me to a blank screen in which I wrote my comment. I previewed it, and hit the save button. I didn't think anything of the fact that there was nothing else except my text shown, until afterwards. Mine was the only comment remaining. Rgamble

Linking error 2/25/02

Oregon consititution had several articles with multiple spaces in them - so the link was Article II (two spaces before this) title here instead of Article II title here and the link resolves to different locations. Rob Salzman

Mysterious edit conflicts

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

We're working on it. :(

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

14 Feb I add the name Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov to Major figures of World War Two on the World_War_II page, hit save and scroll down to check it is there, it isn't, I hit refresh and I get a edit conflict.

See the bug below. The above is probably a dupe.

"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

Clicking on link in Recent changes takes me to edit box for that link

2/19/02 6:27 ish PST. Clicked on Boleslav II Smialy in Recent Changes to see what Mr. Parker had done with the article. Got the edit box for the article, which contained a redirect to an appropriately titled page. Tried to save it as I found it, got an edit conflict. Repeatedly tried to remove what "I" had added to the lower box, and then save, got continued edit conflicts., Finally just backed out. JHK

Parser/Editor

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:.

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

(2002/3/2) Right now, I see the bug also in Netscape. An example is at the bottom of Duverger's Law. AxelBoldt

That page renders correctly for me on Mozilla 0.9.8 & Netscape 4.78 (Linux). The example in wikipedia:Sandbox still leaves an indent on the following page contents (which is due to a bug in the wiki-to-html rendering code), but not in the link bar at the bottom (which is now separated by a div tag, so there shouldn't be any interference). Brion VIBBER 2002/03/02

Parser generates extra whitespace

The Bipolar disorder page is full of extra whitespace - looking at the article reveals lots of &amp;lt;p&amp;gt; &amp;lt;/p&amp;gt; and &amp;lt;pre&amp;gt; &amp;lt;/pre&amp;gt; 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

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 &amp;lt;TABLE&amp;gt;...&amp;lt;/TABLE&amp;gt;) --Brion Vibber

Three tildes in preview

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

Three tildes shouldn't be replaced in pre, nowiki

The ~ is not uncommon in ASCII art such as in Stimulated emission, and should be left intact inside pre and nowiki areas. Brion VIBBER 2002/03/12

Parser issues with header lines

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.

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

Definitions go in separate lists

(2002/1/25) Definition lists like:

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

each get put in separate &amp;lt;dl&amp;gt; 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

Character entities in links

Sat Feb 2 00:23:40 UTC 2002: On list of food additives, I have additives like [[&amp;beta;-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 &amp; 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 &amp;beta;-cyclodextrine ([[beta-cyclodextrine|&amp;beta;-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 &amp; 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 ..."@", "&amp;", "="... 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 &amp; 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 &amp;lt;? echo urlencode(recode("h..utf8", $title)) ?&amp;gt;. --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

Impossible to edit Feature Requests

(2002/03/16) I cannot seem to add anything to Feature requests. It refuses to allow any editing and returns an error beep. I can edit this and other pages. Vignaux

What browser are you using? Excactly when do you get the "error beep"? I can edit Feature requests just fine. AxelBoldt

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

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

(2002/02/20) Actually, it looks like Mozilla defaults to the path to the page. When I wrote the report above, this was "" (for /wiki.phtml); now it's "/wiki". This means that special:userLogout doesn't work for anyone who logged in before the path was changed, because it doesn't touch the cookie with path "". --Carey Evans

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 &amp;lt;H1&amp;gt;, 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

Special Pages

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

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

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

"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

"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.

"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.

"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

(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

"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

minor edits showing up even if turned off (2002/03/05)

And with bad links and dates?

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.

The Japanese wikipedia now puts out "x-sjis" in its headers, Shift-JIS is allowed in page titles, and it is more or less usable. However, some characters are being mysteriously screwed up (katakana RU for instance); please test and report if you can figure out exactly what's going on. 2002-03-01 Brion VIBBER

Found it, the darn Perl CGI module was at fault with bad defaults for escaping characters. Sent fix to Jimbo. 2002-03-01 Brion VIBBER

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.

Miscellaneous Problems

Date/Time Error on My Watchlist 2/26/02

I just clicked on the "my Watchlist" link, and went to the right place (a good thing), but all of the watchlist changes are now listed under 2/25/02, 15:51 (not a good thing, since yesterday they were sorted by day and time!). Thought you might want to know! JHK

This isn't a bug in "my watchlist". The problem is that the timestamp on every article got changed (which also added a few thousand pages to Recent Changes). --Zundark, 2002 Feb 26

This was my fault. With the introduction of the new database schema we introduced a new column that had to be filled with a new value. I forgot that setting this value automatically updates the timestamp of the article. So this is not a bug in the software but in the procedure for moving to the new database schema. -- Jan Hidders 2002 Feb 26

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.)

Related: account creation fails when password contains a n apostrophe (2002/02/27)

Searches also fail with hyphens (2002/02/12)

Probably related to the apostrophe above; a search on 'Kraft-Ebbing', 'Bulwer-Lytton' or 'Sacher-Masoch' comes up blank, in spite of there being articles on all these people; a search for 'Lytton' though, does come up with the correct page, so the problem appears to be the non-aphanumeric character. Malcolm Farmer

Searches now reject hyphens (2002/03/05)

I re-ran the search for a term with a hyphen: I tried looking for "Bain-marie" and instead of coming up blank as previously, the search now returns:

Sorry, your boolean search query contains the following errors:  
 "bain"  [!! SYNTAX ERROR: illegal symbol '-'; ignored] 
  AND "marie"

Malcolm Farmer

This is not a bug, it's a feature: before, the search failed silently, now it tells you why it fails. See wikipedia:Searching. 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?

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.

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

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

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