Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2010-12-27/Technology report

Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Widespread issues on Christmas Day

Considerable editing issues presented themselves to users around the world for more than an hour on December 25 (wikitech-l). Between 18:50 and 20:20 UTC, edits were lost on a number of Wikimedia sites, although the problem was resolved cleanly on most, including the English Wikipedia. Only the Hebrew Wikipedia suffered lasting problems beyond the 90-minutes within which most problems were resolved on almost all sites. The glitch highlights the challenges of maintaining the stability of a website with as many visitors as Wikimedia sites over holiday periods when volunteers are few on the ground.

Another, unrelated issue, also came to light on Christmas Day. Bug #26429 ("Fatal error: PPFrame_DOM::expand") blocked a number of actions on the English Wikipedia, and quickly generated reports from a number of WMF wikis. Fortunately, the error only temporarily blocked editing and was worked around by reloading the page; it was reported as fixed on the afternoon of 26 December (UTC).

In brief

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

With the resolution of bug #26412, [edit] links are no longer shown alongside the header on search pages, which are not editable by their very nature.
A new module has been added to the MediaWiki API. QueryPage; it allows users to generate the output of certain "query"-based special pages in a machine-readable format, rather than via HTML screen-scraping (bug #14869).

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27 December 2010 (all comments)

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These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.

Although it's not live yet, bugzilla:5899 seems worthy of inclusion as a brief note. guillom 10:27, 27 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm... Sounds exciting. Do you know if anything's actually changed with it this week though? Anyway, now it does have a mention - I'm sure everyone reads the comments section :) - Jarry1250 ^{[Who? Discuss.]} 17:59, 27 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Right. I always forget the comments are actually the talk page, transcluded :) guillom 15:12, 28 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Just as a note, the PPFrame error didn't really block editing since it only intermittently appeared, and was gone if you reloaded the page. Bawolff (talk) 06:29, 29 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Only the Hebrew Wikipedia suffered lasting problems beyond the 90-minutes within which most problems were resolved on almost all sites. - depends on what you call "lasting". Problems with the lost edits being cached and messing up page histories persisted for 12 hours at least. --Tgr (talk) 22:21, 1 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

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