"Timwi" timwi@gmx.net schrieb:

Rich Holton wrote:

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Ummm... [[wikipedia:Orphaned Articles]] is distinct from [[wikipedia:Orphaned articles]] (look closely).

Yeah. Someone pointed it out to me on my User talk page. I suppose we can really delete [[Wikipedia:Orphaned articles]] and move [[Wikipedia:Orphaned Articles]] over to the intuitive capitalisation that matches our naming convention in the article namespace.

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It does sound similar to what you describe, though more muddled. Here we had: -Heading plus sections A & B -Heading -Heading plus sections A thru Z (ie whole correct page) -Sections D thru Z

** PLING! **

Whee, I know what's going on. And I'm really surprised this didn't come up before, but anyway. This is just a theory, but it seems so 100% plausible to me that it just gotta be right:

I think what is happening is this:

• You click the little "edit" link for section editing. In your example, you edited the section "C".
• You get an edit conflict. The top window on the edit conflict screen then displays the entire text of the article as it was submitted by the person that was quicker than you.
• However, a hidden form element still contains the section number. Thus, when you submit, the software thinks you're still section-editing, although you're actually sending the entire article!
• Thus, it replaces section "C" with the entire article text. This is why all sections except for "C" are duplicated.

This definitely needs to be fixed :-) I suppose the easiest fix would be to just remove that hidden form element and have users fiddle with the entire article text. A more sensible fix would be to actually display only that section. However, that latter solution will be extremely complicated in cases where the person that was quicker than you added or removed a section above the one you were editing, so the sections are renumbered...

If that is indeed the problem, it must be a relatively new bug - I have done this kind of thing several times, and as far as I know I only once did this result in the given bug. Alternative explanation is of course that I have caused the bug several times without realizing I did so...

Andre