[Mediawiki-l] Severe paring problems in private wiki

[Jorge Candeias]

Hi,

I have a wiki at http://bibliowiki.com.pt that has been experiencing for 
the past week severe (and increasing) parsing problems. It started out 
last saturday as an occasional and apparently random glitch that seemed 
to turn off the handling of template syntax, wereas tables instead of 
showing the values turned up full of {{}} thingies with the variable 
names inside.

This wiki had been transferred in mid September from my previous host 
(which didn't have PHP5) to my current one (which has), and therefore 
its version was pretty outdated: 1.6.X. It was working fine till last 
saturday, though, so as I have been pretty pressed with time, I kept 
postponing the update. When the trouble started, though, I was told a 
few times (in #mediawiki, for instance) that the version of mediawiki 
might be the culprit, so I finally updated a couple of days ago. The 
update went fine, and, apart from the issue, the wiki is working now 
properly in version 1.11.0 (PHP is 5.2.2 and MySQL 4.1.22-standard-log, 
by the way).

The issue, however, remains, and seems to me to be getting worse. When 
it struck only sometimes a few days ago, now it seems to be striking 
almost constantly, and any sequence of clicks in "Página aleatória" 
(portuguese version of "Random article") will almost certainly be 
showing broken tables. Also, other variables, such as the {{SITENAME}} 
one that exists in the login page, also started to show up instead of 
their values from time to time. As an example, the stats page I have 
opened right now, reads exactly as follows:

 >>>Há actualmente um total de {{PLURAL:11 251|*11 251* página|*11 251* 
páginas}} na base de dados. Isto inclui páginas de "discussão", páginas 
sobre o projecto ({{SITENAME}}), páginas de rascunho, redireccionamentos 
e outras que provavelmente não são qualificadas como páginas de 
conteúdo. Excluindo estas, há {{PLURAL:8 62[[:Predefinição:*8 
622*]]icheiro foi carregado|ficheiros foram carregados}}.<<<

Sometimes, adding "?action=purge" to the end of the page's URL helps, 
but that's perhaps only 40% of the times.

The thing gets stranger still. My content is mostly within tables (it's 
a database; I chose the wiki approach because of its greater openness to 
unexpected details compared to the predefined and closed nature of 
traditional databases... and my data does show a naughty tendency to 
turn up surprises), and these tables are defined in simple templates, 
only with the template name and their variables. One would expect that 
if the software failed to recognize the variables, it *totally* failed 
to recognize them, right? Wrong: typically, the first variable in the 
template is properly shown, sometimes the second one also gets shown, 
and only the rest is garbled.

*And* it comes and goes. A few minutes ago, I had the result I'm quoting 
above in the statistics page; just now, a sequence of random pages 
showed them all perfectly fine. I'm totally lost as to what might be 
causing this, and, which is worse, the guys at the host are too, and not 
even the three or four devs I talked to in #mediawiki were able to come 
up with an answer.

Please help...

Jorge Candeias

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