Wikipedia:Special pages bug reports

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This page lists bugs reported in special pages (interactive pages in the special: namespace). Pages should be listed by their name in the default skin.

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

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"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?

minor edits hide the major edits (2002/04/12)

When I turn off the minor edits in the preference, I would expect the most recent major edit would take its place.

For example, the history shows that an article was edited (major) at 1pm, and the same article was edited again (minor) at 1:02pm. In the Recent Change page, both the 1pm and 1:02pm edits become invisible if the preference is set to hide minor edits.

Edit this page

See Editing.

History

See History.

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.

Very few web browsers support MNG (the animated version of PNG). Mozilla does, but Microsoft Internet Explorer (>90% of users) doesn't. What format should we use for animations? --Damian Yerrick

Also, we probably have no need for .exe or .mp3 files--do we?

WAV is not optimal, and MP3 has patent problems. Use Ogg Vorbis instead. --Damian Yerrick

New pages

I just got a set of SQL error messages, and one meaningless line of content, dated 31 December 1969, from the "New Pages" page. Here's the output:

Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/wiki-newest/work-http/wikiUser.php on line 150

Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/wiki-newest/work-http/wikiUser.php on line 157

Warning: Cannot add header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/wiki-newest/work-http/wikiUser.php:150) in /home/wiki-newest/work-http/wiki.phtml on line 84

Warning: Cannot add header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/wiki-newest/work-http/wikiUser.php:150) in /home/wiki-newest/work-http/wiki.phtml on line 86 New pages 162.83.143.161 Log in | Help Main Page Main Page | Recent Changes | Random Page | Special Pages

These are the last 100 new pages on Wikipedia in the last 3 days. View the last 50 | 100 | 250 | 500 | 1000 | 2500 | 5000 changes; View the last 1 | 2 | 3 | 5 | 7 | 14 days Legend : M=Minor edit ; N=New article.

Wednesday, December 31, 1969

   * (diff) ; 15:59 . . .

[end quoted output] Current time is 9:00 p.m., EDT, on 29 April 2002 (I think that's 6 p.m. server time, but I'm not sure.) Vicki Rosenzweig

Orphans

"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.

Also, pages that could be usefully listed as Orphans are not, e.g., "Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication" is not listed, presumably becaused "SWIFT" redirects to it. However nothing links to SWIFT and it looks like redirections are not counted as Orphans.

This should be fixed if the proposed Islands page (showing all pages unreachable from Main Page) is implemented.

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.

Existing page linked from Most Wanted

On the Most Wanted-page a link to Unit interval is listed, but the article already exists. -- JeLuF

Stub articles

I've run into a couple of odd problems while browsing through the stub articles pages. Firstly, there's an article with bold tags in its title that is messing up the table on

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/special%3AShortPages&startat=241&showLinksThere=0

The article in question is displayed as 241(16 chars) [[devotchka|Bdevotchka/b]], if people have been cleaning up stub articles since I posted this it may be earlier in the listing. Its row in the table appears to be mixed in with the subsequent row in the table, and afterward the columns of the table are misaligned. It also destroys the link at the bottom of the table leading to the next larger set of short articles.

Found another example: 385(27 chars) [[Upload/loa1[1].jpg|Upload/loa11.jpg]] also screws up the table, and doesn't appear to exist.

I have deleted the articles in question (relics of long-fixed search page and title bugs), so it should be gone from the list now. The table screwup problem is due to a more recent bug (see top of this page) with links with bad titles, which has been fixed in the code but not yet installed. Brion VIBBER

Secondly, there are a whole bunch of articles listed as having a length of 27 characters which don't appear to exist at all. For some examples, see here:

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/special%3AShortPages&startat=321&showLinksThere=0

When I click on these links, I go straight into edit mode as if they were new. I believe that the 27 characters the stub finder claims these articles to have are "Describe the new page here." Bryan Derksen

That seems to be a feature: a page that somebody saved without actually editing anything (and thus containing only the new-page message) comes up in edit mode. On the other hand, we probably shouldn't actually save a page that contains only the new-page message. Brion VIBBER, Saturday, April 6, 2002

My 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 accidentally invented a time machine ;) --Magnus Manske

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