Last modified: 2005-01-30 04:14:23 UTC
Links on a current Wikipedia ArbCom page such as: OLD LINKS, USED TO WORK, NOW FAILS: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml? title=Talk:Zoophilia&diff=6946799&oldid=6946719 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml? title=Special:Contributions&hideminor=0&target=24.61.31.36&lim it=1000&offset=0 CURRENT LINKS, WORK CORRECTLY: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml? title=Talk:Zoophilia&diff=6946799&oldid=6946719 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php? title=Special:Contributions&hideminor=0&namespace=&target=24.61.31.36&limi t=2000&offset=0 which worked up until recently, now do not work. Replacement of & by & fixes it. Whilst it makes sense as a fix, this also breaks many old links which now will not succeed. Probably due to upgrade to 1.4 fork. Solutions? 1) Send a bot out to convert all relevant links with & in the URL to the correct character 2) re-modify the mediawiki code to allow the old (less correct) form.
I believe the "&" was a bug. Probably dont want to reimplement it :(
That makes sense. The problem is, there are now links within WP that used it and now no longer work. Since it almost certainly was unintended, and it is quite sensible to remove the behaviour, perhaps a bot that goes through WP cur and history, and replaces internal links containing "&" with "&", would be a good way to fix that problem?
The links with & in the original text work as expected when inserted directly in text, but get double-escaped in [http:...] enclosed links. This was probably caused by an incorrect fix for completely unescaped links.
Bug now fixed. Affected pages should be ?action=purge'd to rebuild parser cache.
