Last modified: 2010-05-15 15:33:27 UTC
When editing the current version of a page at the italian Wikipedia, in some cases the oldest version is shown in the edit box instead. An example is to be seen at the page http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon The following edit by the user 5Y: http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Klingon&diff=476681&oldid=426011 was done by a simple PHP script that GETs the URL http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Klingon&action=edit and does a preg_replace() on the content of the textarea to disambiguate links (in this case "Capitale"). Comparing the oldest revision and the one by 5Y shows that it must have received the oldest revision instead of the current one: http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Klingon&diff=476681&oldid=475981 The same thing must have happened to other users editing pages manually. Here are two examples where the user only wanted to add a category link: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plugin http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monastero_di_Rila Here are the diffs between the problematic edit and the previous one: http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plugin&diff=458434&oldid=427270 http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Monastero_di_Rila&diff=458428&oldid=438260 And these are the diffs between the problematic edit and the oldest revision: http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plugin&diff=458434&oldid=457838 http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Monastero_di_Rila&diff=458428&oldid=457790 There have been more occurrences of this problem. If necessary, we can try to find them again.
(In reply to comment #0) > When editing the current version of a page at the italian Wikipedia, in some cases the oldest > version is shown in the edit box instead. An example is to be seen at the page > http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon > The following edit by the user 5Y: > http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Klingon&diff=476681&oldid=426011 > was done by a simple PHP script that GETs the URL > http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Klingon&action=edit > and does a preg_replace() on the content of the textarea to disambiguate links (in this case > "Capitale"). Comparing the oldest revision and the one by 5Y shows that it must have received the > oldest revision instead of the current one: > http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Klingon&diff=476681&oldid=475981 > > The same thing must have happened to other users editing pages manually. Here are two examples > where the user only wanted to add a category link: > http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plugin > http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monastero_di_Rila > Here are the diffs between the problematic edit and the previous one: > http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plugin&diff=458434&oldid=427270 > http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Monastero_di_Rila&diff=458428&oldid=438260 > And these are the diffs between the problematic edit and the oldest revision: > http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plugin&diff=458434&oldid=457838 > http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Monastero_di_Rila&diff=458428&oldid=457790 > > There have been more occurrences of this problem. If necessary, we can try to find them again. (In reply to comment #1) Exactly the same happened on April 3rd, 2005 on the German Wiktionary in the entry [http://de.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=%E8%88%B9&action=history] (please see [Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29#Serious_software_problems.21 village pump] for more information)!! -- ~~~~
This happened to me on bg.wikipedia (I was editing with my bot): http://bg.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Diablo_%28%D0%B8%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%29&diff=142430&oldid=120987 --Borislav
In all five cases, the oldest revision id had an out-of-sequence value, being higher than the current revision. This was consistent enough that you can predict where it went wrong just from looking at the "oldid"s in the histories: http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Klingon&action=history http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plugin&action=history http://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Monastero_di_Rila&action=history http://de.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=%E8%88%B9&action=history http://bg.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Diablo_%28%D0%B8%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%29&action=history Coincidence? Is this still an issue in 1.4.5 and HEAD?
Probably caused by bad merging of duplicate 'cur' table revisions when we finalized the unique indexes sitewide. In some cases it picked the older instead of the newer version to keep, which would most likely be a duplicate submission of the original page creation (there were some bugs with simultaneous creation which could get triggered by multiple submissions when response time was very large). The preconditions for this are no longer possible (the page table has a unique index on titles, making duplicates impossible), though it's possible that other pages remain for which an older version was kept as cur during the index updates months ago.
Marking this bug as FIXED per Brion Vibber's comments above (and assuming that there are no lingering timebombs waiting from a year ago).
