Wikipedia bugs

UNCONFIRMED

NEW

Case sensitivity Links that do not work:

OK - this is weird. I fixed the American football link in Johnny Unitas, it forwards to the new page, but it will not show up as a link.

Right now (April 4, 2001), you have to use the same upper/lowercase letters in free links as the target page. (The first letter can be lowercase, but all the others must match.) This means that [American Football]? (capital-F Football) will not currently match American football (lowercase f). This is considered a bug, and it will be fixed in 0.92 (sometime in April 2001). --CliffordAdams (ID 1675. I am not a free man--I am a number!)

Example: Nitroglycerine. Compare the source with the appearance. Is something wrong. (At the time i make this complaint, there is no such article. This may matter.)

This is intentional. The first letter of all pages (and the first letter of subpages) should be capitalized, and the wiki should force capitalization if it is entered in lowercase. Unfortunately, the 0.90 version has a few ways that lowercase pages can slip in--they are fixed in 0.92. (All pages will be capitalized when the conversion occurs.) --CliffordAdams

Is REDIRECT lowerCase? one of these, since I've had the odd bother with this (as opposed to REDIRECT LowerCase?)

I assumed the site was junk and didn't bother looking at it again for months. You really should fix this ASAP. Who knows how many potential participants have been lost. I'd recommend more care with initial user entry into the site; that's make or break time.

JB 20010811

Still a problem, October 31, 2001

• Possible bug to be fixed. Look at data compression. The link at the bottom to Arithmetic coding, looks like there is no article there yet, but you click on the question mark and you get the actual article to edit. (This now appears to be fixed?)
  • This is a caching problem; to make the link appear simply edit the page and save. Any edit which does not merely add or remove a space will work; some people convert the spaces in a link to underscores, but I think that trick is to be avoided because then the term does not show up in a search. I like to add the html code for a space ( ) somewhere, as it doesn't change anything in the text.

On Wikipedians, the link to Wikipedians/New Zealand shows up as [/New Zealand]?, even though the page exists - try clicking on the question mark. --Carey Evans

OK, I see there's something about this on Wikipedia Announcements.

FIXED

www.wikipedia.org is broken Hello, I just paid my first visit to www.wikipedia.org and all the links are broken. An Apache config error no doubt; on www.wikipedia.com they work fine. -- [Reinier Post]?

This problem is still present (Friday 2001-08-17); I seem to recall it's been happening for at least 2 weeks. I didn't even know there were two URLs; I'd assumed the entire site was broken. Please, please, fix this problem (or just make wikipedia.org a plain redirect to wikipedia.com).

Redirects and canonized names: (fixed for next release)

I think maybe the redirect might not be canonizing capitalization. See for instance Computer games, which when I looked at it pointed to computer game and went to that page - not to Computer game, which it should have.

At this time (March 31, 2001) the canonization code is very incomplete on Wikipedia. This is one of the unhandled cases. The fix for this and several other cases is in the development UseModWiki code, which I hope to release (as 0.92) by mid-late April 2001 (C.E. :-). See Wiki Canonization for more details. --CliffordAdams

INVALID

Lowercase name titles?
http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?carnel -- is this a bug? How did this come about? --KQ

Someone probably typed it in specifically in the address line.

WONTFIX

WORKSFORME

It works for me; I've just edited it twice. Have you tried it in other browsers? Maybe a question for CliffordAdams. --KQ

ENHANCEMENT

— instead of -- Wikipedia should replace ASCII dash ("--") with – ("–") or — ("—") 11Sep01

Just a thought. I already do it when I compose articles. I think this would be a simple change to UseModWiki.

While I'm on that subject – is this the right page for UseModWiki enhancement requests? If not, then this page should point vistors to the appropriate URL. <>< tbc

When you search for a word, and it is in the Encyplopedia listings (A-Z)you don't find it. Is this a bug in the wiki search?

issue with #REDIRECT When previewing, #REDIRECT [[A.D.]] didn't work for A.D (showed up as a numbered list), but after the page was created, it did. This makes it hard to verify one's use of #REDIRECT.

Here's another example of a redirect showing up as a numbered list: FoodAndDrinks

• REDIRECT commands show up as a numbered list any time a #REDIRECT leads to another #REDIRECT page. For instance, [[FoodAndDrinks]] was redirected to [[Food And Drinks]], which was in turn redirected to [[Food and drink]]. Changing the first one to lead to the current location (the last one, instead of the middle one) solves the problem. This feature was probably implemented to prevent the server overtaxing itself with loops set up unintentionally (or intentionally). --KQ

I found some nifty software that converts TeX equations into real HTML like this:

Unfortunately, as you can see, the wiki software seems to be munging the HTML so that things don't come out right. Also, as you can see, the results have the potential to be FAR nicer than the hand-typed alternatives.

I don't get it. It seems to display fine for me (using IE5 on Windows)...

Me too. I'm using Opera 5 on Windows 98. It is right-aligned, though. -- Dave McKee?

Does anybody understand what is happening and how to fix it? Having the ability to insert real equations using HTML only would be a god-send on many topics.

---

Is this more to your liking?

I don't know if you would call this a bug..but it sure is an [Identity Crisis] because I am not CliffordAdams.. Not to mention an authorship problem...CliffordAdams.

I don't see a problem. --Napoleon Bonaparte :-)

I dont know if its a problem of canonization but I typed 'Städte in Deutschland', and this created 'Städte In Deutschland' and didn't link to it. I had to relink it with Städte In Deutschland. (In capitalized) StefanRybo

I have "Show Random Page Link" set in my preferences, but the link shows up on same pages and not in others. I can't find any pattern; it seems to be missing about a third of the time.

This is related to the caching problems above. The caching code is extremely simple--it just prints a complete HTML page saved by a prior user. If the first user (who generated the cached copy of the page) didn't have the random-page option on, the cached copy will not contain the random-page link. Hopefully this behavior will be improved in a future release. --CliffordAdams

A workaround for me has been to add the random page to Favorites (MS Explorer) --StefanRybo

In the last two days, I've had three pages display with no "HomePage | Recent Changes | Preferences | Random Page You can edit this page right now! It's a free, community project" at the top. The pages open with the title of the article, which you can click on to find occurrences of that word in other articles, followed immediately by the article's text. The pages that have displayed like this so far are Abdul Alhazred/Talk on June 5 at ~8:18a.m. Wikiserver time, Mathijs on June 6 at ~6:35 a.m. Wikitime, and Abdul Alhazred/Talk again at the same time. Just wondering what's going on. It may not be a serious problem but it's clearly a bug. --Koyaanis Qatsi

It happened again today, June 13, at ~1:40 pm wikitime on the Explorers page. I've since alphabetized that page and the headers have reappeared, so I'm guessing it's some sort of caching problem. But I did try the page in Netscape, IE, and Opera before editing it, and all three showed the same page, so it's not browser-specific or a caching problem on my end. --KQ

Also it's happened to Vesalius, Boerhaave, Mondino, and Dejima Thurs June 28 8:59 a.m. wikiserver time--four of the five pages added between 7:30 and 8:00 that morning by Mathijs--what kind of configuration error in the server might cause that? If you edit the page and save, the error corrects itself. I haven't done it yet. But Siebold shows up fine. Go figure. --KQ

This is probably the same kind of problem explained above in the "No Random Page Link" section. --CliffordAdams

You can edit this page right now! It's a free, community project This line is missing in the German version on top of the page. Maybe its better for people to have it on top - esspecially in this build up phase. Or have set up preferences wrong?? --StefanRybo

It's also there on "History of..." pages, and search result pages, where it is also not functional. --LDC

• I'd like my cookies and preferences to start working again. Can anyone explain why they don't? Did anything get changed over the weekend 10th/11th March? -- Gareth Owen
  • No relevant changes occurred over that weekend as far as I (CliffordAdams) know. Since the user-ids use cookies, the login feature wouldn't help your problem. (There is a mostly-undocumented/unsupported login function. It will be announced more widely when it is documented and better supported.) --CliffordAdams

But again, I'm not sure if this is a deal with Linux/Unix? in general, or just a buggy way that Opera 5 under Linux deals with the difference. Any ideas? It's getting rather annoying.

HomePage and various other places state that Wikipedia is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License. This is not true for at least the following pages: GNU General Public License, GNU Free Documentation License. This should be fixed ASAP, the question is how:

(a) replace these pages by external references, or

(b) modify the license notice to carry the exceptions.

License notice
On a related note, the license notice should be clear about invariant sections and cover text. I recommend replacing "Wikipedia is covered by GNU/FDL" and similar texts by a reference to Wikipedia Copyright. I put an example there, which is of course open to debate.

Search doesn't work from the revision history page. 5Sep01

Minor formatting bug when viewing older versions of articles
There's no pipe between "Recieve an article a day!" and "Edit revision x of this page":

"HomePage | Wikipedia commentary | Recent Changes | Preferences | Random Page | Receive an article a day!Edit revision 22 of this page | View other revisions | View current revision"

This happens only with MS Explorer, not with Navigator.

It happens only on some pages, very rarely, not on others.

The problem mysteriously appears and disappears. --LMS

This is the same bug as my "Can't edit Naming conventions/Talk?" above. I think you will find that you will see the same thing with that page, just as I now see it with the Global warming page. Another interesting symptom: once you get the "action" page, press the "back" button to return the uneditable page, then press "Recent Changes"--you'll be taken the the Wiki page "Recent"! Pressing the Recent Changes link there will then work. This seems to be a bug introduced with free links. --LDC

Software error: Could not get editing lock at /home/wiki-es/work-http/wiki.cgi line 3237.

and the address 'bomis-coders-l@bomis.com', where we are asked to send the details, is reported to have permanent fatal errors.

I hope it helps! --Ardicia

I don't receive a cookie from wikipedia (AFAICT, it's just not sending me one when I look at the site), and thus can't set preferences. I'm using Mozilla 0.9.4 on Debian unstable. Any idea what's going on? Robert Merkel

I've stumbled onto a bug while writing the tree rotation page. My ascii art binary trees use / and \ characters, but if a \ character is the last character on a line it escapes the newline. This takes place inside of <pre> tags, so the newline is important to the formatting. I worked around the bug by putting &nbsp; after each \ character, but I'd think it should work without those.

On an unrelated topic, is it possible to put java applets into the Wiki? There are some extremely good, Free applets demonstrating Algorithms and data structures (such as the reference on tree rotation).... --BlckKnght

Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, bomis-coders-l@bomis.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument? to handle the request.

I have also seen that error a few times in the last few days. It doesn't seem to last more than five minutes at a time. --- Jagged

It was because there was a newline between 'inertial' and 'frame'. Not all whitespace is equal, it seems. -- DrBob

I just noticed that most of the text of the french wiki has been translated. Wonderful ! But... Accents are missing...

for example : the text 'Afficher les dernires modifications partir de ' that appears on the RecentChanges page should be 'Afficher les dernières modifications partir de ' .

All the é, è, ê disappear.

By the way, you would make my day if you could also find a way to change the date format : the English write October 31 2001 but the French write 31 octobre 2001 (with the first letter of the month in lowercase)

Buzz.