Recently, there was a discussion on a bug (“UNIQ key exposed” https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/14562) about the priority setting I had given the bug.
It was part of the problems I found in Bugzilla last December and gathered into a tracking bug (https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/26213).
It looks like I made the wrong decision on #14562 since it was part of an extension that, while deployed on enwiki, wasn't likely to be triggered.
When I was discussing this with Robla, he suggested I ask about this on wikitech-l, so here goes:
There are at least four bugs live on Wikipedia that leave really ugly UNIQ strings in the wikitext. I've created a demonstration of them on my wiki page: http://hexm.de/4x
The bug numbers are on the page linked to their entry in Bugzilla.
I suppose these are all linked to the parser work that Brion & co are currently working on, but the arrival of the new parser 6 months to a year or more away (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Future/Parser_plan), I'd like to get these sort of parser issues sorted out now.
For those more familar with the current parser: how can those developers who are less experienced start fixing the problem? How important are these issues?
Mark.
Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
Recently, there was a discussion on a bug ("UNIQ key exposed" https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/14562) about the priority setting I had given the bug.
[...]
I suppose these are all linked to the parser work that Brion & co are currently working on, but the arrival of the new parser 6 months to a year or more away (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Future/Parser_plan), I'd like to get these sort of parser issues sorted out now.
For those more familar with the current parser: how can those developers who are less experienced start fixing the problem? How important are these issues?
Bugs have a habit of setting their own priority. If these bugs were regularly being hit by users, they would have been resolved ages ago (in theory!). But they only appear in very, very strange edge cases, which have the lowest user impact (not quite zero, but slightly above).
My recommendation would be to add some parser tests for these bugs, mark them as failing, and if the rewrite doesn't take care of them, re-examine them then. There are so many more bugs that are affecting so many people. The fact that you can't combine three types of esoteric wiki syntax in certain ways currently really shouldn't be a very high concern.
I think that's roughly what Tim was trying to say.
MZMcBride
MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com writes:
Bugs have a habit of setting their own priority. If these bugs were regularly being hit by users, they would have been resolved ages ago (in theory!).
Since discussing this on-list last week, someone pointed me to bug #2700 where Roan speculates a year ago about the possible cause of this sort of bug:
What I think happens is <tags> get armored before PST; <nowiki> needs this treatment, but for other tags it causes this bug.
(See https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/2700#c48)
But they only appear in very, very strange edge cases, which have the lowest user impact (not quite zero, but slightly above).
If Roan is right, then this sort of thing has to be worked around all the time. In fact, if you look at the the most recent comment on #2700 (made tonight), you'll see the troubles of an extension author:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/2700#c56
Another comment tonight (this one quite lengthy) on another bug tonight shows that this sort of problem isn't quite zero.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/22555#c11
My recommendation would be to add some parser tests for these bugs, mark them as failing, and if the rewrite doesn't take care of them, re-examine them then.
I like the idea of gathering these failures together. Perhaps if they were grouped then we could see the sort of things that experienced wikitext writers just don't do, because they are familiar with the problems.
There are so many more bugs that are affecting so many people. The fact that you can't combine three types of esoteric wiki syntax in certain ways currently really shouldn't be a very high concern.
Look at the number of duplicates that #2700 has, the most recent from this past April. And then there is the number of possible duplicates that I'll speculate haven't been filed because people were told “Oh, you can't do that” by someone more experienced than them.
Which reminds me: now I am going to work on that report of duplicates that you suggested a few months ago now
Mark.
On 10/07/11 07:01, Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
There are at least four bugs live on Wikipedia that leave really ugly UNIQ strings in the wikitext. I've created a demonstration of them on my wiki page: http://hexm.de/4x
If the problem is that they are ugly, we could do a search and replace after unstrip, replacing all the strip tags with informative error messages.
-- Tim Starling
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