Re: [Wikitech-l] Corrupt pages on English Wikipedia

2013-02-21 Thread Andre Klapper
On Wed, 2013-02-20 at 08:59 -0500, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
 Brian, would you take a look at
 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_report_a_bug and maybe update it
 to clarify what sorts of information to try to hold on to for debugging
 purposes?

I'd like to keep How_to_report_a_bug a generic, high-level page.
Case-specific debug information is very welcome on a separate page
though (similar to http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:How_to_debug for
MediaWiki), and could be linked to from How_to_report_a_bug.

andre
-- 
Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler
http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/


___
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

[Wikitech-l] Corrupt pages on English Wikipedia

2013-02-20 Thread Thomas Dalton
I've just had a colleague send me links to a couple of English
Wikipedia articles that were displaying as complete garbage - it
looked like corrupt character encoding or something (there was no UI -
just a page full of random characters and boxes). Running
?action=purge on them sorted it out, but if he hit upon two corrupted
pages in a few minutes, there are probably more.

Does anyone know anything about it?

___
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Re: [Wikitech-l] Corrupt pages on English Wikipedia

2013-02-20 Thread Andre Klapper
On Wed, 2013-02-20 at 12:08 +, Thomas Dalton wrote:
 I've just had a colleague send me links to a couple of English
 Wikipedia articles that were displaying as complete garbage - it
 looked like corrupt character encoding or something (there was no UI -
 just a page full of random characters and boxes). Running
 ?action=purge on them sorted it out, but if he hit upon two corrupted
 pages in a few minutes, there are probably more.
 
 Does anyone know anything about it?

Not without a testcase (URL) to start investigating. :)

andre
-- 
Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler
http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/


___
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Re: [Wikitech-l] Corrupt pages on English Wikipedia

2013-02-20 Thread Thomas Dalton
On 20 February 2013 12:11, Andre Klapper aklap...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 On Wed, 2013-02-20 at 12:08 +, Thomas Dalton wrote:
 I've just had a colleague send me links to a couple of English
 Wikipedia articles that were displaying as complete garbage - it
 looked like corrupt character encoding or something (there was no UI -
 just a page full of random characters and boxes). Running
 ?action=purge on them sorted it out, but if he hit upon two corrupted
 pages in a few minutes, there are probably more.

 Does anyone know anything about it?

 Not without a testcase (URL) to start investigating. :)

I've fixed the ones I know about, so I don't know if they'll be much
help (which is why I didn't specify them before). If it does help,
they were:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Clark_Warren
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_Schwartz

(You can draw your own conclusions from my colleague's office reading habits!)

___
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Re: [Wikitech-l] Corrupt pages on English Wikipedia

2013-02-20 Thread Tim Starling
On 20/02/13 23:30, Thomas Dalton wrote:
 On 20 February 2013 12:11, Andre Klapper aklap...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 On Wed, 2013-02-20 at 12:08 +, Thomas Dalton wrote:
 I've just had a colleague send me links to a couple of English
 Wikipedia articles that were displaying as complete garbage - it
 looked like corrupt character encoding or something (there was no UI -
 just a page full of random characters and boxes). Running
 ?action=purge on them sorted it out, but if he hit upon two corrupted
 pages in a few minutes, there are probably more.

 Does anyone know anything about it?

 Not without a testcase (URL) to start investigating. :)
 
 I've fixed the ones I know about, so I don't know if they'll be much
 help (which is why I didn't specify them before). If it does help,
 they were:
 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Clark_Warren
 and
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_Schwartz
 
 (You can draw your own conclusions from my colleague's office reading habits!)

It's not a test case after you've run action=purge on it. If you want
to report things like this, it's best if you don't run action=purge,
or even report it to anyone who might be inclined to do such a thing.
Cache-related test cases are very fragile, so it takes some care to
get them to a developer intact.

In the past, there have been problems with gzipped output being served
without a Content-Encoding header, due to subtle Squid vary header
bugs. But it's hard to tell if that's what happened here, just from
your description.

-- Tim Starling


___
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Re: [Wikitech-l] Corrupt pages on English Wikipedia

2013-02-20 Thread Thomas Dalton
On 20 February 2013 12:43, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 It's not a test case after you've run action=purge on it.

Which is why I didn't bother including the URLs in the initial report.

If you want
 to report things like this, it's best if you don't run action=purge,
 or even report it to anyone who might be inclined to do such a thing.
 Cache-related test cases are very fragile, so it takes some care to
 get them to a developer intact.

My top priority was helping the person that reported it to read the
page they wanted to read.

A little gratitude to someone trying to help you fix a problem
wouldn't go amiss...

___
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Re: [Wikitech-l] Corrupt pages on English Wikipedia

2013-02-20 Thread Sumana Harihareswara
Brian, would you take a look at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_report_a_bug and maybe update it
to clarify what sorts of information to try to hold on to for debugging
purposes?

On 02/20/2013 07:50 AM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
 On 20 February 2013 12:43, Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 It's not a test case after you've run action=purge on it.
 
 Which is why I didn't bother including the URLs in the initial report.
 
 If you want
 to report things like this, it's best if you don't run action=purge,
 or even report it to anyone who might be inclined to do such a thing.
 Cache-related test cases are very fragile, so it takes some care to
 get them to a developer intact.
 
 My top priority was helping the person that reported it to read the
 page they wanted to read.
 
 A little gratitude to someone trying to help you fix a problem
 wouldn't go amiss...

Thomas, thanks for the bug report.  Sorry for the mixed messages here.
If you run across the problem again and report it to us before helping
your colleague, you can tell him I told you to do it, and blame me!

And I have now learned something about two very different relationship
experts, thanks to those URLs. :-)

-- 
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation

___
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Re: [Wikitech-l] Corrupt pages on English Wikipedia

2013-02-20 Thread Jeremy Baron
Hi Thomas,

On Feb 20, 2013 8:59 AM, Sumana Harihareswara suma...@wikimedia.org
wrote:
  My top priority was helping the person that reported it to read the
  page they wanted to read.
 
  A little gratitude to someone trying to help you fix a problem
  wouldn't go amiss...

 Thomas, thanks for the bug report.  Sorry for the mixed messages here.
 If you run across the problem again and report it to us before helping
 your colleague, you can tell him I told you to do it, and blame me!

You could both get him the info and also preserve the testcase. Don't purge
anything and give him an alternative URL like:

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Clark_Warren?foo (I made this up)
*
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Neil_Clark_Warrenoldid=523949993(permalink
in the sidebar toolbox)
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/?oldid=523949993 (variant of the last one)
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Warren (via what links here)

Or just tell him to log in/make an account. (logged in users bypass some
caches)

HTH.

-Jeremy
___
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Re: [Wikitech-l] Corrupt pages on English Wikipedia

2013-02-20 Thread bawolff
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 9:59 AM, Sumana Harihareswara
suma...@wikimedia.org wrote:
 Brian, would you take a look at
 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_report_a_bug and maybe update it
 to clarify what sorts of information to try to hold on to for debugging
 purposes?

What sort of debugging information is useful depends on the situation.
In most cases the type of information I mentioned would be overkill.


 A little gratitude to someone trying to help you fix a problem
 wouldn't go amiss...

We appreciate the bug report, we just can't do anything about it
without more information. To give a  (not entirely fair) comparison,
imagine someone posted on your talk page that there was a spelling
error on Wikipedia. I assume you would respond to such a report with
where?, it wouldn't be because you're ungrateful that you respond
like that, but simply that you cannot fix the issue without more
information (Wikipedia is a big place). The situation here is somewhat
similar. We're grateful for the report, but would need more
information before we can do anything about it.

--bawolff

___
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Re: [Wikitech-l] Corrupt pages on English Wikipedia

2013-02-20 Thread Thomas Dalton
On 20 February 2013 16:32, bawolff bawolff...@gmail.com wrote:
 A little gratitude to someone trying to help you fix a problem
 wouldn't go amiss...

 We appreciate the bug report, we just can't do anything about it
 without more information. To give a  (not entirely fair) comparison,
 imagine someone posted on your talk page that there was a spelling
 error on Wikipedia. I assume you would respond to such a report with
 where?, it wouldn't be because you're ungrateful that you respond
 like that, but simply that you cannot fix the issue without more
 information (Wikipedia is a big place). The situation here is somewhat
 similar. We're grateful for the report, but would need more
 information before we can do anything about it.

My actual question was Does anyone know anything about it? - I was
trying to determine if this was a known problem, which would help
determine the next step. I think I supplied enough information for
that purpose.

___
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Re: [Wikitech-l] Corrupt pages on English Wikipedia

2013-02-20 Thread MZMcBride
Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
Brian, would you take a look at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_report_a_bug and maybe update it
to clarify what sorts of information to try to hold on to for debugging
purposes?

More to the point (this is a list for developers, after all), if you're a
developer and you find a bug (or a potential bug!), please report it to
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org (aliased as https://bugs.wikimedia.org
or https://bugs.mediawiki.org). :-)

This list (wikitech-l) is fine for discussion of bugs (or possible bugs),
but it _really helps_ when the issue can be properly tracked in Bugzilla.
Mailing lists are ephemeral. Bugzilla is forever.

MZMcBride



___
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l