I just thought that I'd point out that the random page bug is back again. I though I would wait until someone else reported it this time, but they haven't, so I'll report it again.
PLEASE could the URL rewriting feature be backed out. The URL rewriting bug is a much more severe bug than the '&' issue that the URL rewriting hack fixes -- the whole Wikipedia is currently unusable for readers, as well as most writers.
If a web spider such as Googlebot comes by when this bug is in effect, the whole index for Wikipedia on that search engine will be corrupted for as long as the search engine uses that set of indices: usually about a month.
This also gives another reason why different international Wikis should have the possibility of different front-end hosts: resiliency against software upgrade bugs through diversity. (Databases can still be shared over the network, something that will surely be the next step in scaling).
Regards,
Neil