2014/1/3 S Page <spage@wikimedia.org>

Flow was supplying an empty string as a parameter to a message, due to a bug 59198. What surprised me is the rendered HTML turned into a preformatted (typewriter-style) block. This happens because the 'flow-topic-participants' message goes through parse(), and in wikitext a leading blank formats the text as a <pre> tag. You can see this using eval.php:

Is there any other wikitext besides the magic words? You could just use ->text() instead of ->parse().

I fail to see importance of this problem if it is only triggered by other bugs. Isn't it a good thing to fail in visible way so that issues are easy to detect and get fixed?

-Niklas