Wikipedia talk:Bug reports and feature requests/Archive 1

Archive 1

Archive 2

Archive 3

Untitled

Reporting bugs for MediaWiki (the software that runs Wikipedia) is a process that occurs mostly in Bugzilla. Posting bugs and problems on the wiki is unlikely to recieve developer attention, so it is worth learning how to use Bugzilla to submit and comment on bugs. Please see Wikipedia:How to report a bug for more detailed instructions.

Please do not post issues on this page.

All bugs should be reported on the bug tracker. Thank you.

Old issues

Clicking 'save' produces a file download dialog

bugzilla:4475

• According to Rob Church, at bugzilla:

You haven't enabled external editing, perchance? This would be rectified by changing your preferences (under editing options, "use external editor by default" or similar). As I'm 90% convinced that's what this is, I'm going to resolve WORKSFORME, but reopen if that's not the case.

Whenever I click on on the button edit this page a pop up comes up. it asks to me download a file and when i download and open, it opens in internet explorer. following is the content that I can see. [Process] Type=Edit text Engine=MediaWiki Script=http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php Server=http://en.wikipedia.org Path=/w Special namespace=Special [File] Extension=wiki URL=http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tonga_%28Carriage%29&action=edit&internaledit=true

However I can edit anything which has some option of edit in the page. I have upgraded my internet explorer and have tried using it on other computers also but facing the same issues. I have tried it with fire fox also but there also I am getting the same issue. --Aravind Parvatikar 13:12, 26 December 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia is slow today *sigh*. But a more serious problem is, why do I keep being asked to 'Save Download' when I try to edit some (but only some) pages? Oldhamlet 20:25, 9 September 2005 (UTC)

An update to the above: I have found that the bug seems to occur when I am logged-in, but not when I am logged-out. Does this mean I've been blocked?

'Edit'-link edits wrong section

bugzilla:2607

I've tried editing the entry for Disscociation and it jumped to editing the Useful References section. When I changed the link from "section=1" to "section=0", I was able to edit the right section, so it's the link that's wrong.

I've experienced the situation where clicking on a section "edit link", edits wrong section. See for example this page. It has three "sections", the first section being a table. Clicking on the first "section edit link" for the table brings up an edit window for "section two", clicking on the second "section edit link" brings up an edit window for "section three", clicking on the third "section edit link" brings up a blank edit window. Paul August ☎ June 29, 2005 16:06 (UTC)

the same thing happens when one or more section headers are inside html <!-- --> comments. Thryduulf 5 July 2005 12:32 (UTC)

I'm not getting section edit links at all. -- Jmabel | Talk 01:18, August 17, 2005 (UTC)

-Addition: I agree! For many of the sections, there is no edit button and the closest one if the one for the seciton below. The design of the edit buttons is POOR and their location should be changed so that they are indusive to what section they are for. In additon, first sections NEVER have an edit button, making it difficult for users who don't know to change the section number to 0 to edit the section at all.

The [Edit] link that appears at the bottom-right of each section (as distinct from the "Edit this page" tab at the top of each page) has the incorrect URL. The ...&section=NN variable in the URL appears to require a zero-based number, not 1-based as it currently is. When I click on a section to edit it I end up editing the _following_ section. It's impossible to edit the first section without hand-editing the URL. I am using Firefox v1.0 on Linux.

Editing a section saves only that section, and removes the rest of the article

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)

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)

Account creation limit

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)

Failure to stay logged in

bugzilla:2590

Logging in bounces repeatedly. This problem seems to affect a rather large number of editors.

Thank you for your attention to this. I was editing the article Juma Mohammed Abdul Latif Al Dossary and the talk page Talk:Juma Mohammed Abdul Latif Al Dossary and I was repeatedly blocked. At first I didn't notice and kept posting as 209.178.164.237, but even though I kep logging in, the edit page kept bouncing me out. Thanks! 209.178.164.237 17:13, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

• Just did it again! 209.178.164.237 17:15, 5 November 2005 (UTC)
  • I logged in twice again and got bounced out. Thanks Joaquin Murietta 17:17, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

That happens to me all the time too, mainly during the day, to the point that I've all but stopped editing during the day.Tommstein 18:56, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

On this (quite extensively shared IP address) nobody can remain logged in for more than a page click. 217.33.74.20 28 June 2005 07:51 (UTC)

• Same here... and in my case, I'm only signing as this IP address because every time I log in under my registered name, I get logged out a few screens later. What's going on?--141.156.178.155 28 June 2005 20:51 (UTC)
  • I too have been having this trouble, especially annoying as it interferes with admin powers, although it seems to have cleared up now. Rje June 28, 2005 23:49 (UTC)

• • • Nope. I had this problem five minutes ago. --84.153.163.14 30 June 2005 23:15 (UTC)

I've had this problem off and on during my whole tenure at WP, but not in a while--until after the update, when ist started happening almost constantly. I finally gave up and wwent into my browser and deleted all my cookies. I haven't had the problem since, but I don't know what other sites Ill now have to reset my prefs for. Elf | Talk 1 July 2005 00:10 (UTC)

• Having this problem as of right now. Clearing cookies doesn't help (Firefox 1.0.6). Most of my contributions wind up anonymous. Cleduc 03:52, 5 August 2005 (UTC)

• Hello my name is Vonkje and I cannot stay logged on for more than three minutes, even though I have a static IP that has been working for 3 years and a standard install of IE6.0. When I try logging in again I get the message that I need cookies enabled ... rubbish!!!. This happened on and off for the past 3 months. The workararound was to close and reopen my browser. Now that does not work. What's more, dumping my cookies never worked. 209.42.38.71 18:39, 9 August 2005 (UTC)

BTW this is the misleading error message I have been getting: Wikipedia uses cookies to log in users. You have cookies disabled. Please enable them and try again. 209.42.38.71 16:52, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

• This problem is back again. All night the amount of time that a log-in was kept seems to have been decreasing until the loged-in state now disappears almost immediately after logged in. When I first signed on tonight, the log-in seemed to last about 10 minutes. Now when I log in, it shows I've logged in, but if I do anything after that I show as being logged out. 4.232.141.154 09:26, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

• This multiple log in requirement is a real pain. It appears from this section that the issue of having to log in to virtually every page has been persistant for quite some time. Many of the other bugs reported above, such as "loss of watch list data" is directly related to this log in problem. Please move this bug up on your priority list. I would normally sign and date this input with my log in name (David.c.h); however as I am once again on a "Create account / Log in)" page even after logging in on three other pages I will just sign this with "--67.160.66.59 16:50, 20 October 2005 (UTC)"

Summary: Multiple log-in and edit-submit problems!

Details: First, I noticed that when clicking on "submit," I am re-directed to a web page that says I must be logged in to modify my watchlist. I WAS logged in!! However, even AFTER I logged in and started surfing in en.Wikipedia.org, I was later directed to pages that still had the "log in" link -as if I were not logged in. Now, I did look to see if my bugs were reported, and I admit that I saw other bug reports for the latter problem (showing the log-in link even after logging in), however, I saw absolutely no other bug reports that showed a problem like my initial problem, which, after I submitted an edit, then redirected me to a page that asked me to log in. Oh, one other problem: Even AFTER I submit an edit when logged in, sometimes I see where I was not logged in -in other words, it displays my IP address instead of my User name, User:GordonWatts (en.Wilipedia.org) That is, the software says I am not logged in even when I am.

Steps to Reproduce: 1. Only sometimes when I submit an edit am I redirected to the page that says I must be logged in to modify watchlist. 2. Only sometimes are my edits shown as IP addresses, but other times, it shows my user name -if I submit it real quick. (Indicates I log out real fast!) 3. EVERY time when I log in and then navigate it asks me to log in again. (This is apparently reproducible.)

Actual Results: Numbers 1 and 2 sometimes work as expected. #3 has messed up every time (I only checked 2 or 3 times, I think.)

Expected Results: 1. It should not redirect me to funny pages regarding my watchlist (whether or not I'm logged in) if I submit an edit. 2. When I submit an edit, it should show User:GordonWatts 3. After I navigate, it should indicate I am logged IN, not LOGGED OUT! PS: Sorry for shouting; I get a little frustrated here, no offense intended.

Additional Information: I am Gordon Wayne Watts, en.Wikipedia, User:GordonWatts, formerly known as UserGordonWattsDotCom, who got his user name changes to be less self-promoting, lol.

UPDATE: I accidentally submitted this to the Bugzilla of the Mozilla Foundation, not of Wikipedia, but their email directed me here. I think the problem went away on its own (did I have a hard time holding current cookies?), but I shall report it all the same.

Cheers!--GordonWatts 00:13, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

• I'm actually having a similar problem: I can log in and go to look at my watchlist, or edit a page, and I'm no longer logged in. That is, even if I immediately click on watchlist, I am redirected to a page saying user:<IP ADDRESS> has no watchlist. If I edit a page, the edit is recorded as having been done by <IP ADDRESS>. The only way to prevent this is if I log in, immediately go into my preferences, and select the box next to "Remember across sessions" and save. This happens every time I log into Wikipedia now though it did not used to happen a month ago. No browser, filewall, or internet setting have changed. semiconscious (talk · home) 22:16, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

I logged into Wikipedia and keep getting logged off without me doing it. All of a sudden, I notice I'm "logged off", usually because the "minor change" box isn't there when I edit something. I had noticed it before, but thought it was just me, but it's done it three times in the past ten minutes. Rt66lt

Danger: This can lead to false accusations of sockpuppetry. See Re.:Sockpuppet Bug.

I've had this before, and it just struck again. Martial Law 09:29, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Unaddressed issues

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: {{Unicode|ǔ}} (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)

Is anyone reading this? Badagnani 06:50, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Can someone please help with this? Have I reported this in the wrong place? Badagnani 14:29, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

False signature due to edit conflict: erroneous page merger

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)

Watchlists don't show older articles

Adding older articles to your watchlist doesn't visibly work.

1. Add an article that hasn't been edited in the last month to your watchlist.
2. 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)

That is by design. The watchlist is designed to allow you to see something comparable to recent changes for a smaller subset of pages which interest you. An article which hasn't been edited for a little while will not show up, because there are no corresponding recent changes for it. Rob Church (talk) 01:49, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Feature requests

Account capitalisation/self-deletion

Object to autocapitalisation of new users, and suggest account deletion option.

I notice some users on Wiki have full names like 'John Edwards' where the first letter of both names are capitalized. But when you create a new user, it seems to auto-capitalize your first letter only such as 'John edwards' - this seems like a bug to me. I now have a profile which I would like to interlink with some other wiki pages, but I don't like how my name is displayed, it's incorrect, with the 1st letter of my surname in lowercase.

An option to delete your own user would be adviseable too.

Known issue. -- Ec5618 22:32, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Addendum from user forestie January 24th, 2006: the problem seems a bit more severe, since I have first created an account using the english version from Wikipedia, (username: forestie) and this account works, but when I am logged, reading an article and I want to switch to french (my mother tongue), I can actually read the corresponding article in french but I am automatically disconnected from my session. If I try to login directly in the french version of Wikipedia, I cannot, since I correctly enter 'forestie' as my username, along with my password, but the system insists on telling me that the user 'Forestie' (notice the first capital) does not exist. So I am completely unable to login in the french Wikipedia!

The simpler issue first; we will not be providing a feature for users to delete their own accounts.

To the first point; usernames must be valid titles too, and the same check is used when normalising both. As a result, we force the first letter to be capitalised, but don't touch the rest.

To the third; at present, you need to create an account in each wiki; we don't yet have a single sign-on mechanism in place, although it is being worked on. I've queried the database, and the user Forestie doesn't exist on the French Wikipedia at present. Rob Church (talk) 01:53, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Bugzilla shows spammable emailaddresses

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)
  • It would force people to type it manually? Require manual retyping? Are you kidding?? Please tell me you're joking. If someone doesn't want to type a few characters, they don't really want to email me. If anyone is unwilling to type a few characters to reach me, then let's just say I don't hold out great hope for the message they would send if they did. You would have done better to point out that an image is not accessible to the visually impaired. And, Fergie, I can only assume your email is protected by world-class spam-fighting software. I never respond to spam, but I've got an address that gets dozens of spams a day. Way to blame the victim, there. --DavidConrad 05:50, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Capitalizing the first letter of the handle would undermine external authentication since some legacy databases are not normalized like WIKI.

Random article shouldn't show stubs

'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)

H1 created headers shouldn't appear in the TOC=

h1-h4 codes are generating tocs

Using <h4> 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)

• I noticed this, too, and mentioned it at Template talk:Sharedip#TOC problems. -- Gyrofrog (talk) 22:28, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
  • Now at Bugzilla:2956. -- Norvy (talk) 04:56, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
  • Not a bug, that's a bug fix. Headings go in the table of contents; that's what makes them headings. --10:09, July 31, 2005 (UTC) (this comment appears to be by brion from the history don't know what wen't wrong with his sig)
    • Well its a major change in the behaviour that breaks the assumptions made by existing pages and does not add any new functionality. Sometimes it can be usefull to keep certain headings out of the TOC and it would be nice to be able to do this wihout having to build a TOC by hand or resort to formatting the headings you don't wan't in the toc with complex html markup Plugwash 11:44, 31 July 2005 (UTC)

Articles that are moved should appear on Watchlists

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)

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)

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)

Edit conflicts needn't show the entire page

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)

A known and reported issue. Rob Church (talk) 01:55, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

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)

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)

Google shouldn't track Talk pages

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)

Request to add another bar, under the languages bar

I have had a discussion about nav boxes. I want them and a admin with a bot have been removing them, in the discussion that followed I came up with the idea of having relevant articles in a list in the left most column below the "in other languages" box, I see that it is possible to make a template that contains other language links and if that template is used on a page, that page will get the languages, so now I wonder if there is anyway that we can implement a new box in the left hand column which would contain navigational links. Then make a template that contains the info for these links and therefore add the template to a many pages and get the all the same links in the box (preferable exluding the page itself :-) ). What I want this for is that each shark article should have links to all other shark articles but if we look at the Navigational_templates there seams to be a lot other examples also. Stefan 13:34, August 1, 2005 (UTC)

editintro= should display when editing existing pages

Using links, it is now possible to create links such as this one:[1] which allow one to add a new section to a page. Unfortunately, it only works partly: the editintro is useless in links to edit existing pages. In fact, the above link should use Wikipedia:Reference desk/How to ask as an explanatory text above the edit box, but it does not. The same link does work if it points to a nonexistant page:[2].

Explanatory text would be a great way to remind users of the rules on pages such as the WP:RD and WP:HD. -- Ec5618 16:14, 3 December 2005 (UTC)

Bump. As far as I see it, my request is quite simple, and should be relatively easy to implement. Could someone please help or direct me to someone who can?

Following a redlink leads to an edit window, headed with MediaWiki:Noarticletext, while editing an existing page has no header. I'm requestion that the system be expanded so that even existing pages can be headed, so that [3] would show the Ant article as a header, above the edit field.

This way, the Reference Desk and Help desk can be streamlined, as I mentioned before. It might also be useful for other pages, such as semiprotected pages. Some pages currently contain commented-out warning text, so that any editor must read it. Perhaps what I am proposing could make that work-around unnecessary.

Please. -- Ec5618 22:06, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Please read the instructions in the big box at the top of this page, where it says to file bugs and feature requests on BugZilla and go do it there. Thanks. Rob Church (talk) 01:56, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Reduce vandalism: New layer of editors: mature/immature

There is a bug in the viewing of articles (missing feature) which makes the wikipedia particularly prone to spam and deliberate vandalisation.

It seems to me the strength of the wikipedia is the editors. Particularly the well established editors with many good edits.

The other strength of the wikipedia is the users (these are people who aren't logged in). These make the wikipedia useful, and attract new editors to the wiki. These users need to see well established article versions, that have had a chance to be viewed and corrected by editors, and repaired as appropriate.

The main problem we have is low-edit editors. These users tend to 'test edit'/vandalise the wikipedia and this appears immediately to the users; but many of them also do good edits.

We need a mechanism for stopping the edits from low-edit editors from immediately appearing to the users.

My suggestion is an ad-hoc review process in keeping with the current 'esprit d'wikipedia'

I think that the wikipedia should follow the following rules:

An 'immature editor' is defined as any editor that has made less than 200 edits. A mature editor has made 200 or more.

No raw edit from an immature editor will be displayed within less than 1 day. (Exception: users at the same IP address will have the article displayed immediately to avoid confusion after edits); also changelists and editing is unaffected.

Modification within a day by another immature user resets the counter, and the article will only time out after another day The article displayed will be the newest article that has not been edited for a whole day, or has been edited by a mature user, or has been edited by the same IP address as the viewer. This rule can theoretically mean that a new edit never becomes visible, but in practice this will rarely happen, and the next rule helps avoid it anyway.

Modification of the article by a mature user makes the article immediately visible. This can make immature users edits visible- clearly the mature users are supposed to check to make sure that any previous edits are appropriate... the wiki software could help by pointing out if there had been recent changes...

Any mature editor caught making inappropriate edits has their account locked out. They have to start from scratch, this means that at most 0.5% of editors edits are bogus, even if an editor is a rogue.

Ok, my view is that these rules are not absolutely perfect, there's probably no such thing as perfect rules, but they are enormously better than what we have at the moment.

Note that these rules may seem computationally expensive to implement. However, they really aren't. Only a comparative small number of articles have been edited in the last day or so, and a list can be kept of these, and which version should be showed to the user. The rest of the articles in the wikipedia work the normal way during viewing.

The relatively expensive calculation only needs to be done during an edit, and the exception list is self cleaning since entries time out automatically from the list unless updated by an edit. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Wolfkeeper (talk • contribs) 08:51, 17 December 2005

• Interesting idea. I think it might get more attention as a policy discussion Policies Herostratus

Request for a spell checker

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)

BugZilla. Rob Church (talk) 01:57, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Sock bug

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

Tried all solutions on my end. Martial Law 05:32, 4 February 2006 (UTC)