Wikipedia:History bug reports

'''This is an archive only of bug reports from Phase II of the Wikipedia software (used before June 20, 2002). Please see Bug reports for instructions on adding bug reports for the current system.'''

return to Bug reports/Phase II

Changes do not appear in article 2002/05/10 I made substantial changes to the article for Earth and though they appear in the most recent diffs, they do not appear in the article. It doesn't look like normal counter-editing (which would show in the diffs, right?). I tried deleting my browser's history files, and there was still no effect.


 * Known cache problems. Edit and resave the page to clear the old cached version, or wait until Jimbo clears all the old cached pages. Brion VIBBER, Saturday, May 11, 2002

+ or _ The &action=history for http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/adrenal+gland refers to a number of http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Adrenal_gland pages. Are these pages the same?


 * Yes, those are the same. The "+" is just a URL-encoding for a space, which is canonically changed to "_" for the internal database. The first letter is always capitalized internally so that a link at the beginning of a sentence and in the middle will not go to different pages. Brion VIBBER, Saturday, May 11, 2002

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


 * Currently, a - or + will appear next to a deleted or added line. So the bug is not in diff but rather in the documentation.  Anyone want to fix it? --Damian Yerrick

Zero disappearing from diffs

The numeral "0" doesn't show up in the text of a diff when it comes immediately after a bracketing delimiter ("(", "[", "{"). See the history of unit interval for examples of each of these.  In the HTML source of the diff file, the "0" simply isn't there.  The problem doesn't happen with other numerals.  -- Toby Bartels (2002/04/17)


 * There's a fun "feature" in PHP whereby the string "0" is sometimes considered to be equal to the empty string "" because, as far as I can tell, a numerical comparison is being used. This sounds suspiciously like an instance of that problem; I'll look into it... Brion VIBBER, Wednesday, April 17, 2002

Here's another bug that I suspect is related. A less than symbol ("&lt;") that's the beginning of an HTML tag will sometimes be displayed in the diff as "&amp;lt;" instead of "&lt;". This again occurs after a bracketing delimiter. As for &gt;, an analogous effect occurs before a bracketing delimiter. For an example of this, see the diff for my edit today of ring ideal. -- Toby Bartels again (2002/05/05)

PS: I did a little experimenting -- see the history of user:Toby Bartels/sandbox -- and found it amazingly difficult to reproduce the effect. I could reproduce it with "0" only when the "0" was in red, and couldn't manage to reproduce it with "&lt;" and "&gt;" at all under a general condition. Take a look, if this might help.

Diff crashes on Separation_axioms

The latest (08:29 today) diff on this page returns the result:


 * Line 188:


 * Fatal error:
 * Maximum execution
 * time of 30 seconds
 * exceeded in /home/wiki-
 * newest/work-
 * http/difflib.php on
 * line 267


 * &lt;table border="1"&gt;

This seems to be coming from the PHP script. Other diffs from earlier histories of that page are OK. &mdash; Toby Bartels, Wednesday, June 12, 2002

Update: I've just made an edit to the article. The diff for my new edit shows up fine, but the 08:29 diff still fails. (The only difference is that it's now line 258 instead of line 267.)

History of vote pages misses many edits

I suppose that the intended behaviour was not to mark in the history automatic votes, only hand edits. Fair enough; only hand edits have useful commentary in the Summary. Unfortunately, what actually happens is that the history records only the edits immediately before the hand edits. If the hand edit is followed by an automatic vote, then it doesn't show up in the history; an automatic vote followed by a hand edit does. Especially when the Summary of a hand edit explains why something was removed from a list, this is problematic. &mdash; Toby Bartels, Tuesday, June 25, 2002