Wikipedia talk:Bug reports and feature requests/Archive 1

message: bugzilla:1269
I edited a section in Neverwinter Nights and clicked the button to save the page, but I got the "Can't connect to database sever" error. When I got back and tried to save again, the page was saved so it contained ONLY the content of the section I edited. So I had to revert the page to get the full content. BTW, the revision I tried to save the first time WAS saved, although the error was reported. When i saved it the other time, the text was lost.  --Arny 06:02, 2 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I think I have seen a related problem -- somebody edited MBTA accessibility on 05:14, 13 November 2005 68.160.178.62, intending to add "Subway and commuter rail - Reconstruction of State Street has started", but this resulted in truncation of several sections below that, including the Red Line subsection of Subway and commuter rail.  I found that if you attempt to edit the previous revision (02:34, 10 November 2005 134.174.110.5) as the whole article (and this is the version that user 68.160.178.62 would have been editing from), the deleted content is already missing in the Edit window.  (And the article is long enough that if you really just wanted to edit something in the middle, you might easily not notice.)  I had to go to the revision before that (02:33, 10 November 2005 134.174.110.5) to avoid this problem.  Something in the 02:34, 10 November 2005 134.174.110.5 revision causes the editor to mess up, but I can't think of what it would be, since both that revision and the previous one are ones that I edited, and the only change between them was to add a note about elevators being out of service.  I plan to create an account and report this on MediaZilla.  134.174.110.5 18:00, 25 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Editing a section saves only that section, and removes the rest of the article

message: ;Failure to register a new account. The system suggested too many accounts had been created from the same IP. A problem at schools and other shared IPs.
I tried to create a new account.  It said that there were too many new account requests and that no new accounts were being processed at the present time.  That's lame.  I came back every once in a while to try again.  Finally, the message changed:  It told me I had created more than 10 accounts and was being blocked, temporarily, from creating any more.  I never succeeded at creating any accounts.  I think I tried maybe three user names in total, none of them were created, I can't log in as any of them, and now I can't create an account.
I suppose this goes to the root problem of Wiki's:  They're too easy to vandalize.  As a result, you've had to put in some sort of security, but you put in place mechanisms that are subject to denial-of-service attacks and, in the end, locked out legitimate users (or would-be users).
:This probably lies in the fact that account creation from the same IP is limited to a fixed number per day/week/month. This prevents vandalism by bots, but also prevents some people on shared IPs and at schools to register at all. -- Ec5618 19:11, 28 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Account creation limit

message: ==Problem displaying special characters: caron diacritic==
Can a programmer help me with this?  Vowel diacritics with carons (such as ǔ, as in the pinyin article) are showing up for me when viewing WP pages as empty square boxes.  However, on an edit screen I can see them fine, and on other websites like http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/read.shtml I can also see them fine.  If I use a Unicode command, like this:  (shows up like this: ǔ), I can also see it fine.  This tells me that there's something different/wrong with the way WP has its display set up, at least for Internet Explorer.  I am using IE 6.0 and have my encoding set to Unicode UTF-8.  I've asked about this on pinyin but received no real help after a few months' time.  If you fix this, can you please write to me on my "talk" page?  Thanks very much,  Badagnani 02:41, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Is anyone reading this?  Badagnani 06:50, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Can someone please help with this?  Have I reported this in the wrong place?  Badagnani 14:29, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Unaddressed issues

message: Can a programmer help me with this?  Vowel diacritics with carons (such as ǔ, as in the pinyin article) are showing up for me when viewing WP pages as empty square boxes.  However, on an edit screen I can see them fine, and on other websites like http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/read.shtml I can also see them fine.  If I use a Unicode command, like this:  (shows up like this: ǔ), I can also see it fine.  This tells me that there's something different/wrong with the way WP has its display set up, at least for Internet Explorer.  I am using IE 6.0 and have my encoding set to Unicode UTF-8.  I've asked about this on pinyin but received no real help after a few months' time.  If you fix this, can you please write to me on my "talk" page?  Thanks very much,  Badagnani 02:41, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Is anyone reading this?  Badagnani 06:50, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Can someone please help with this?  Have I reported this in the wrong place?  Badagnani 14:29, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Problem displaying special characters: caron diacritic

message: ;An edit conflict resulted in the merging of two posts. Thus vandalism seemed to originate from another editor.
Probably at the same time that I posted a comment to a Talk page, another, anonimous editor posted an insulting comment to a third editor who he identified with his real name, in violation with Wikipedia rules... and the two posts became one with my name on it! Happily the other removed it soon after, but this is a very serious flaw.
It may be related to me editing the whole page, while the other editor edited a section:  http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Henri_Poincar%C3%A9&diff=prev&oldid=35681281 Harald88 17:23, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: False signature due to edit conflict: erroneous page merger

message: ;Adding older articles to your watchlist doesn't visibly work.
# Add an article that hasn't been edited in the last month to your watchlist.
# Check your watchlist. Even selecting 'Show all' whill not show the article. The article does show up under 'display and edit the complete list', or when the article is subsequently modified.
This is especially a problem for people who use their watchlist as a list of favourite articles. -- Ec5618 17:13, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Watchlists don't show older articles

message: ;Several editors refuse to register with bugzilla, for fear of spammers
*FWIW, I stopped entering Wikipedia bugs when the tracking system switched to one that displays 'spammer-scrapable' email addresses. Niteowlneils 2005-06-28 04:39:38 (UTC)
** Get a temporary email address. —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
***Kind of destroys the point of being notified when someone responds to your bug report. --Phil | Talk June 30, 2005 17:09 (UTC)
** See bugzilla:148. --Zigger «º» June 28, 2005 17:54 (UTC)
** I'm not sure how hard it would be in the MediaWiki environment, but what about rendering email addresses as images if ImageMagick is present?  There is more info here: http://www.spsu.edu/cs/faculty/bbrown/papers/web_and_email.html
***It would probably be relatively easy to generate an image (either on the fly or when the message is saved) out of an e-mail adress. However that would force people to write it off manualy if they actualy want to send an e-mail. Personaly I use a slightly obscurified JavaScript to "cloak" my e-mail adress. In a browser with JavaScript eneabled the mailto: link looks just like any other, but for a webcrawler looking for mailto: links in the source there won't be any. A very "smart" crawler could naturaly run the script or figure it out some other way, but then again a boot could be using an OCR plugin to "read" text in images too. Granted JavaScript can be turned off, but then so can images. In this case though the "best" solutiuon might be to simply use the same technique used in the Wikipedia itself. Hide users e-mail adress, and have people use an on-site web form to "relay" e-mails to each other. --Sherool 4 July 2005 14:24 (UTC)
**I, myself, refuse to do any sort of munging, obscuring, or other obfuscation of e-mail addresses on any site I maintain or any posting I make to online forums, newsgroups, and the like, even though this results in my getting tons of spam.  I have both philosophical and aesthetic objections to the whole concept of intentionally rendering information either incorrect or inaccessible; all of the various techniques used in that area do some combination of making the address less accessible (e.g., not working without scripting or images enabled, not copy-and-paste-able, requiring manual editing or retyping), not technically correct (as when it's "munged" by adding bogus crap in the middle), or ugly and jarring (as when it's in a graphic in a font that differs from the user's configuration for normal text display).  Even the commonplace tactic of spelling out addresses like "blah at foo dot com" looks ugly and silly to me. *Dan* July 4, 2005 15:28 (UTC)
*** Point is, there's no real need to show those E-mail addresses in Bugzilla. Curiously, this problem has been on Bugzilla's buglist since 2002 in one way or another, but as yet remains unsolved. Aliter 4 July 2005 21:06 (UTC)
**Despite the recieved wisdom, I am not sure that having a publically available email address on the internet actually leads to spam. I say this as somebody with a couple of email addresses that have been languishing unmolested in the www-accessable wilds for several years. Now answering spam mails- thats a different matter altogether!!--Fergie 17:38, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Bugzilla shows spammable emailaddresses

message: ;'Random article' shouldn't show stubs or disambiguation pages.
:When you click on the 'Random article' link on the navigation box it should not bring back a disambiguation page, a stub article, or any other article of little use. imho :)
I like to browse wikipedia with the RANDOM ARTICLE button, but a large proportion of the articles are three-sentence stubs. It takes me a long time to actually get to a page that's really nice to read, full of information. Can you modify this button to bring people to a random article that is greater than, say, 4K of text? --Michael, 20 July 2005
:Please file this on BugZilla if still interested. Rob Church (talk) 01:54, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Random article shouldn't show stubs

message: ;h1-h4 codes are generating tocs
Using  and the likes to make headings without generating entries in the table of contents is broken, and now does generate headings.  I'm not positive this was functioning correctly in 1.4, but this diff makes me think it was.  Even if this is an intended change, there should be a way to keep headings out of the ToC.  (Not filed at bugzilla because there's a good chance I'm missing something obvious.)  -- Norvy (talk) 08:18, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: H1 created headers shouldn't appear in the TOC=

message: ;When an article is renamed new talk page is no longer watched.
I had Hubbert peak on my watchlist, when it was renamed to Hubbert peak theory the new article title was added to my watchlist but not the new title's talk page. So currently I receive the "unwatch" tab at the top for the article, but get the "watch" tab for the talk page, doesn't make sense. Perhaps this obfuscation was by design? zen master T 20:19, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: No status or fix for this? In case you care and this "bug" wasn't by design there are actually two separate bugs here: first, when an article is retitled/moved it completely disappears from your watchlist until someone edits it at its new location. Second, the new title's talk page is not automatically watched (but the new article itself is) so any future discussion after an article is renamed/moved will be missed (very convenient). zen master T 18:18, 23 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It seems that this page is dead. We might as well learn to live with all the fricking bugs that are all over the place, since no one apparently cares. I guess this was just the designated place for the people to vent or something.Tommstein 16:25, 24 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Articles that are moved should appear on Watchlists

message: ;Edit conflict unnecessarily includes entire page to edit
It's a performance and difficulty of editing bug when the edit conflict page unnecessarily includes the entire page being edited when it probably can, in most if not all cases, include just the sub section that was trying to be edited (assuming a new sub section wasn't created). zen master T 14:10, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: A known and reported issue. Rob Church (talk) 01:55, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: bugzilla:4745. Interestingly, the bug was reported here before it was reported at Bugzilla. More the reason just to replace this page with a short document telling users how to use Bugzilla. — Ambush Commander(Talk) 23:00, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Mediawiki software is more than sufficient for handling bug reports if it can handle an encyclopedia. Some record of bugs that affect Wikipedia users should be listed on Wikipedia because of: searchability, in case the bug is specific to Wikipedia, to decrease layers of indirection (hoops users have to jump through), to gauge how many people are affected by the bug to possibly fix it before the Mediawiki developers get around to it, to have a bug status page so all users know it has been reported (without having to go venture off and search another site). Other people have noted the fact that bugzilla gives away your email address which separately isn't good.  zen master T 01:51, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Edit conflicts needn't show the entire page

message: Not sure if this is a bug, but I googled an article Sir Robert Bell, and the result returned was the article and the second result was a posting from user Talk: Cambridge Bay Weather? Is wiki user talk supposed to be posted on the search engines? http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sir+robert+bell, I respectfully ask if you could look in to this. (RRLB)
:Google indexes most of Wikipedia; it ignores the parts we tell it not to, such as those in our robots.txt file. It's useful to have the talk namespaces indexed. If you don't want it showing up on the Internet, on search engines, mirrors, etc. then don't publish it on the Internet. Rob Church (talk) 17:37, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Google shouldn't track Talk pages

message: Would be nice if the editing tool offered a basic spell check facility - I usually end up copying and pasting any text back and forth from another editor just to check spelling.  I'm actually surprised how good the spelling generally is throughout wikipedia (given how atrocious it is across much of the Internet!), and this feature would surely help to maintain and even improve that standard.--Wizofaus 23:17, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: BugZilla. Rob Church (talk) 01:57, 30 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Request for a spell checker

message: Thought this thing was quashed. I sig as Martial Law and I get this mess.123.090.234.7805:25, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Sock bug