Last modified: 2013-04-11 16:16:39 UTC
Cannot edit whole pages using the tab at the top of the page. Whenever I try, the browser attempts to download the file "index.php". I can, however, edit individual sections in the body of any wiki perfectly well. The result is that I cannot edit the introductory blurb of any wiki. This happens both when using IE and Mozilla.
I have exactly the same problem.
It seems to have been have been fixed by de-checking "Use External Editor by default" in the "Editing" Preferences tab. I got this advice from Sturat. See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29&diff=24002876&oldid=24002666
*** Bug 4475 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 3286 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 4671 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 4802 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 5765 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 7171 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 7828 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 8637 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 8709 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 8991 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 16881 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 26716 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
re-opening this. I think the preference should perhaps be removed, or at least statistics gathered on how popular it is. See discussion on Bug 26716 and Bug 7092 *The external editor feature doesn't need this pref to work, can be replaced by a bookmarklet (and the instructions say that approach may even be more practical) *Does anyone use it? (Stats would be nice) *If accidentally selected, totally breaks editing, without any clear indication as to what is going on. Thus i think we should seriously consider removing it (or even hiding by default, although having a hidden by default pref seems stupid).
^demon was kind enough to get some stats for this. For en wikipedia, 12158 have the external edit preference set, and 10878 have the externaldiff preference set. This includes both active and inactive users.
before i forget, related to this, i committed r80608 which adds a help link to those preferences so people can figure out what they do, and r80610 which adds a comment to the ini file that this option causes people to download explaining whats going on. (However, its mime type is not that of a text file, so users probably won't see the comment, but it might help some people figure out whats going on).
Can someone run query on some big wiki to see how many users have this option set?
Great to see the user figures, thanks ^demon! Either there are a lot of tech-heads on Wikipedia or a lot of dummies like me who clicked the option without fully understanding what it is was for or the impact it'd have on editing. Or a bit of both. Either way, also great to see this issue being discussed and part way resolved.
updated summary
*** Bug 29255 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Not doing this since external editor/external diff were removed in Ic3791d18.
