I reported several months ago that sometimes an anon edit takes place.
My SEWilcoBot account is used for several things, but if you look at my
IP's log you see my replace-based citations bot ("converting/fixing
footnotes") and replace.py tasks sometimes being anon.
On Fri, Dec 16, 2005 at 10:01:34AM -0600, Scot Wilcoxon
wrote:
>...
>Getting a page to check if we're logged in on wikipedia:en
>NOTE: You have unread messages on wikipedia:en
>Getting page to get a token.
>Getting page [[Non-existing page]]
>WARNING: No text area found on
>en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Non-existing%20page&action=edit.
>Maybe the server is down. Retrying in 1 minutes...
>
>It then keeps retrying.
>
>
I have figured out in part what is happening here.
As you may know, a change was made recently (at least on
en.wikipedia.org)
to prevent unregistered users from creating new pages.
The "WARNING: No text area found on
en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Non-existing%20page&action=edit" message
occurs when the bot (for reasons I don't yet understand) is not recognized
by the wiki as a logged-in user, so it is served a page (attached to this
message) that is shown to non-registered users telling them to register if
they want to create a new article. That's why you don't get this same error
if you retrieve an existing page, because the restriction on unregistered
users only applies to creating new pages.
What I don't understand is why the wiki doesn't recognize the bot user when
trying to get a token, even though the bot has already logged in (as the
transcript from SEWilco copied above shows clearly) and is able to retrieve
and edit other pages.
Perhaps someone who is more familiar with the cookie mechanism can take it
from here and diagnose the problem further.
RussBlau
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