[Mediawiki-l] Garbled / Corrupted Text

Thomas Rice thomas at thomasrice.com
Tue Jul 15 10:06:31 UTC 2008


Hi,

I have a private wiki setup, and in the last week or so I've noticed that
some of the text on some of the pages is getting garbled. This is a big
problem, and I was hoping someone could help me diagnose (and hopefully fix)
it!

I've put together some screenshots to illustrate the problem at
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=d9x2r5n_28g9n6gwdw

Screenshot #1 shows what one of the pages looks like -- this page hasn't
been updated since September 2007, but as you can see the formatting and
text is all garbled, as is the table of contents (which reflects the
garbling of headers below).

Screenshot #2 shows what happens when I click "edit" on that page -- the
wikitext that is displayed looks fine, which suggests to me it's some sort
of parsing problem rather than the underlying data being corrupted.

Screenshot #3 shows me copying the top bit of that previous page, going to a
new "Sandbox" page and pasting it in there.

Scerenshot #4 shows the "Sandbox" page after I've saved it -- as you can see
it gets garbled again.

Screenshot #5 shows a bit of the "View Source" output of that Sandbox page
-- note that the html tags like <p></p> seem to be in odd spots, chopping
headings in half etc.

Regarding my MediaWiki set up, I think I'm using 1.12.0. The only extension
I had installed was FCKEditor (recently disabled). I haven't made any
changes to it for many months, but just noticed this problem appearing on
some pages (but not all) in the last week or so.

Anyone have any ideas what I can do to further diagnose or fix this? And
whether it's likely to be a database problem or something else?

Thanks!

- Thomas.


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