Last modified: 2010-05-15 15:33:18 UTC
I made an edit to this person's user talk page, and unintentionally inserted an entire image by putting a wikilink to it as the section title. Upon seeing this on the saved page, I clicked the edit section link, and it brought up the section for me to edit. I changed the link in the section title by inserting a colon to make it a hyperlink instead of inserting the image. I clicked save, but the servers did their spontaneous thing and returned a preview instead. As usual with editing sections, the preview only showed the section I was editing. I clicked save again, and it brought up the saved page, minus the rest of the content on the page. Somehow, editing a specific section (and without access to the rest of the content) had erased anything not in that section. Thankfully I noticed it here and it was not a high-traffic page, so I could revert myself okay. But what if this happened in an article? Would we be losing external links sections left, right and centre?
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 1181 ***
I'm not so sure that this is really the same problem. bug 1806 describes what happened after the edit cookie was lost. bug 1181 describes that this happened directly after editing. He does not mention a forced preview.
Okay, I just got a completely different weird database thing. I edited a section on [[Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/3RR]], and upon saving, it looks like the entire article content got duplicated when it saved. This time there was no spontaneous preview, and I presumed it had saved fine until the person who fixed it messaged me on my talk page. See the diff: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators% 27_noticeboard/3RR&diff=11837757&oldid=11837651
(In reply to comment #3) > Okay, I just got a completely different weird database thing. I edited a section on > [[Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/3RR]], and upon saving, it looks like the entire > article content got duplicated when it saved. That sounds like our old enemy bug 275. Sometimes, it doesn't get spotted for a while, and can be a real pain to clear up; so any extra clues to help diagnose it properly would be really helpful. There do seem to be a whole set of unexplained behaviours of this sort (section or page blankings, full or partial duplications, etc), with edit-conflict-with-self and section-edits being common factors between some but not necessarily all of them. Extremely annoying, and irritatingly hard to track down and reproduce!
