Never on wikipedia (that ive heard of) but on third party wikis - a misconfiguration causing double encoding with gzip causes symptoms very similar to what you describe.
But as andre said, without an example is very difficult to say anything. If someone came across something like that again, please include as much detail as possible - save a copy of the broken page, save what http headers you got with the request (if you know how), mention if you were logged in or not, check to see if the page is always served broken or if it was just a one time thing, etc. You never know which detail might be important.
-bawolff On 2013-02-20 8:11 AM, "Andre Klapper" aklapper@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, 2013-02-20 at 12:08 +0000, Thomas Dalton wrote:
I've just had a colleague send me links to a couple of English Wikipedia articles that were displaying as complete garbage - it looked like corrupt character encoding or something (there was no UI - just a page full of random characters and boxes). Running ?action=purge on them sorted it out, but if he hit upon two corrupted pages in a few minutes, there are probably more.
Does anyone know anything about it?
Not without a testcase (URL) to start investigating. :)
andre
Andre Klapper | Wikimedia Bugwrangler http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/
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