jeluf wrote:

On which wiki did you see this problem?

At what time did you see this problem?

What's your user name on this wiki?

Is the problem still existing? There were reports about problems with the box below the edit box about 12 to 16 hours ago, but they were fixed within a short time. Your problem might or might not be related.

To me this seems like JavaScript has been deactivated in the browser.

wynhill wrote:

(In reply to comments #1 & 2)

Thank you both very much for your comments. I am having this problem periodically (I hate periodic problems - as you can't tell when they are fixed) with ordinary pages on the Wikipedia. Sometimes I start off with everything working fine - leave it for a while and come back and the editing tools do not appear. also, the Wikipedia information column on the left hand of the main page and others disappears for no obvious reason. It continued doing this this morning.

I checked out all the JavaScript options under Tools - Options - Content and even the Advanced settings - trying all sorts of combinations - so I set them back to where they were originally (all checked) and, so far, everything seems to be working again (but this has happened before after restarts - so I am not convinced it is fixed yet).

I have used the Error Console and got numerous messages saying: Deprecated method document.getSelection() called. Please use window.getSelection() instead.

Am also getting lots of messages such as:

Warning: Expected declaration but found ' '. Skipped to next declaration.
Source File: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Book_of_Han&diff=178596338&oldid=178596243
Line: 0

Warning: Unknown property 'word-wrap'. Declaration dropped.
Source File: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Common.css&usemsgcache=yes&action=raw&ctype=text/css&smaxage=2678400
Line: 69

And there are more. Hope this helps you to understand what I am up against - to me it is all gibberish.

Thanks so much once again for your kindness, John Hill

jeluf wrote:

Removed "shell" keyword. This is either a javascript issue within MediaWiki or the site javascript.
Both changes don't require shell access.

Still occurring?

wynhill wrote:

Thanks so much for everyone's help. Somehow the problems seems to have resolved itself - i son't understand what caused it in the first place and I don't understand how it was corrected - but, most importantly, now it is working! Cheers to you all, John Hill