Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:58 UTC
Working with [[Template:Derefer]] Some links render correctly (link with description underlined) but others don 't (no rendering of link or text). There is no obvious cause for this. Page demonstrating this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:FT2/test01
Theres definitely a bug in cite.php. See the above sample page, there's an ordinary [...] external link that renders correctly on the page, but incorrectly in a footnote. Permalink provided.
PS -- the article it's affecting is being honed by Raul for a featured article. I know that's not a crucial thing but if it is by chance an obvious quick fix, it'd be great :) Thanks!
It's due to the = on the Url. It's treated by mediawiki as a template parameter name. Use instead {{Derefer|1=<URL>}} instead of {{Derefer|<URL>}} You can see my fixing edit
I see the fix and thank you. Problem is that its very unobvious and will probably catch others out too. Should the template rendering system be tweaked slightly so that "=" is not taken as a template parameter definition but as part of the text, if certain obvious conditions are met? Obvious conditions are that if the text to the left of the "=" includes "http://" or simply the "/ " character, then an "=" to the right is probably part of the data, and not a parameter setting.
In any case, this is just a part of the way the parser for templates works. As with the updated docs for the derefer template, most templates with this as a potential problem mention it in their documentation, so this is not so much of a problem. I don't think there is a Cite.php bug here after all, so closing as WONTFIX, since I suspect, given the complexity involved, the guys working on the parser level will not change things there for corner cases like this.
