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Something seems broken in the Wiki

Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 11:20 am
by Thomas_Lerman
Is something going on in the Wiki? I was working on https://wiki.familysearch.org/en/A_Guide_to_Research, saved it, saw an error at the bottom (looks like the editor messed up links), hit Edit, and tried to switch to Wikitext. I am now getting the following "Error on page."
Line: 590
Char: 5
Error: Object doesn't support this property or method
Code: 0
URL: https://wiki.familysearch.org/w/extensi ... olbar=Wiki

This was not happening before. I tried fixing those links using the editor. It appears that the editor breaks it again when I save it. It looks like ALL links, including images get broken!

Posted: Thu Apr 17, 2008 1:17 pm
by ForbesMM
Thanks for the info. I will bring this thread to the attention of our engineers.

Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2008 7:29 am
by Thomas_Lerman
I have not heard about this problem that I am having, so decided to follow up. I have noticed other people have been making changes to the Wiki, so went back to the initial page that I referred to. This page is still having problems. So, I edited another page without a problem. I am using IE6 on XP. I tried this same page using FF on Linux without any problem. The page is now fixed. I would be afraid to try it again on IE. I do not know what is causing this problem, but feel like we should at least know what is causing the problem quickly. I have not been editing lately because of this problem.

Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2008 1:18 pm
by Thomas_Lerman
I wonder if the page got "too big" for IE to handle . . . it does not seem like this would be the case. I tried editing sections and had the same problem. Actually, I just went back to look at the page on IE and it is messed up again. It looks like Kip has been playing with it. I think this is a bad problem!

Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2008 2:07 pm
by aebrown
Thomas_Lerman wrote:I wonder if the page got "too big" for IE to handle . . . it does not seem like this would be the case. I tried editing sections and had the same problem. Actually, I just went back to look at the page on IE and it is messed up again. It looks like Kip has been playing with it. I think this is a bad problem!
When you try to edit this page, you do get a warning:
WARNING: This page is 37 kilobytes long; some browsers may have problems editing pages approaching or longer than 32kb. Please consider breaking the page into smaller sections.
Now this is not to say that the problems are acceptable, but if it is a browser problem, there's not much MediaWiki can do about it. To my taste, this article is too long for a wiki anyway. In my opinion, "A Guide to Research" should not cover so many topics in such detail. It tells how many rolls of microfilm should be taken from a cabinet, for heaven's sake!

It would be better to break down the article into specific topics (it has a nice outline, where most of the level 1 topics could easily be articles of their own). Then the Guide to Research article would give the overview and link to each article, where people can go if they want to see the finer details.

Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2008 2:25 pm
by Thomas_Lerman
Yes, that is why I said that it might be too big. However, I have edited it when it was too large. Even when editing a section, it still was messing it up. I was just removing BMPs and replacing them with JPGs.

Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2008 5:41 pm
by JamesAnderson
Here's another wiki that may or may not have found a solution.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Main_Page

I think it is possible because they are using a wiki to discuss and create an open-source mapping application that works alot like Google Maps and because of that they may be using it in their wiki as well. Take a look and see what they may be doing.

In fact, it looks like an older version of the Wikimedia software, so there might even be that possibility, a bug in the software as well.

A full use of the application they are talking about can be found at

http://www.openstreetmap.org/