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Maniphest T272394

PagePreviews show unexpected error message for non-empty pages
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Description

The user experience on pages like https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/1856 is that a lot of Page-Previews show the error message "There was an issue displaying this preview". This is most notable in the navigation bars on top of the page.

Issues:

  • The error message sounds like it might be a temporary hickup, but it's not.
  • The message doesn't give a hint how the issue might be solvable.
  • It looks like an error message, but still acts like a valid PagePreview popup. I.e. I can still click the popup and open the target article. I find this unexpected. This is not something an error message typically does.
  • There is text on these target pages. It's not like they are empty or missing. Why isn't it possible to show something useful?

Suggestions:

  • Rephrase the error message.
  • Remove the error message and have a trivial fallback, i.e. show the title of the target page instead.
  • Teach the RESTBase-API to extract something else when a page does not have text before the first headline. For example, it could return a list of level 2 headlines. Anything is better than returning an empty string for a page that is not empty.

This was originally discussed in T271439#6730837 and below.

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Event Timeline

thiemowmde created this task.Jan 19 2021, 4:04 PM
Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald TranscriptJan 19 2021, 4:04 PM
thiemowmde mentioned this in T271439: Raw wikitext source code appears in extract.Jan 19 2021, 4:06 PM
ovasileva triaged this task as Medium priority.Feb 8 2021, 1:35 PM
ovasileva moved this task from Incoming to Triaged but Future on the Web-Team-Backlog board.
Jdlrobson moved this task from Triaged but Future to Tracking on the Web-Team-Backlog board.Jun 11 2021, 5:50 PM
Jdlrobson edited projects, added Web-Team-Backlog (Tracking); removed Web-Team-Backlog.
Jdlrobson moved this task from Untriaged to Untag on the Web-Team-Backlog (Tracking) board.Sep 7 2021, 9:11 PM
LGoto removed a project: Web-Team-Backlog (Tracking).Sep 21 2021, 8:28 PM
Olson.jared.m subscribed.Oct 1 2021, 7:47 PM
Jdlrobson merged a task: T346686: Disambig previews not working when a summary cannot be generated.Sep 18 2023, 9:04 PM
Jdlrobson added a subscriber: Nux.
Nux added a comment.Sep 18 2023, 11:33 PM

For Polish Wikipedia all disambiguation pages have {{Ujednoznacznienie}} on top and the page preview fails for them.

The summary API shows an empty abstract. Example: https://pl.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/page/summary/Deformacja

{"type":"disambiguation","title":"Deformacja","displaytitle":"<span class=\"mw-page-title-main\">Deformacja</span>","namespace":{"id":0,"text":""},"wikibase_item":"Q1182738","titles":{"canonical":"Deformacja","normalized":"Deformacja","display":"<span class=\"mw-page-title-main\">Deformacja</span>"},"pageid":651493,"lang":"pl","dir":"ltr","revision":"62805664","tid":"30c628a0-1284-11ee-a40b-0f7eb079083b","timestamp":"2021-03-26T20:41:20Z","description":"strona ujednoznaczniająca","description_source":"central","content_urls":{"desktop":{"page":"https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deformacja","revisions":"https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deformacja?action=history","edit":"https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deformacja?action=edit","talk":"https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyskusja:Deformacja"},"mobile":{"page":"https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deformacja","revisions":"https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:History/Deformacja","edit":"https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deformacja?action=edit","talk":"https://pl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyskusja:Deformacja"}}
,"extract":""
,"extract_html":""
}

Other examples:

Jdlrobson added a comment.Sep 19 2023, 3:53 PM

@Nux can you add the "noexcerpt" class to the table with classes "noprint disambig navigation-not-searchable" in https://pl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Szablon:Dmbox&action=edit. That should fix all these pages.

Nux added a comment.Sep 20 2023, 8:54 PM

@Jdlrobson done. Didn't help, but I guess maybe cache? (purge didn't help though)

Interestingly, this worked even before my changes:

Jdlrobson added a comment.Sep 21 2023, 12:40 AM

@Nux it looks like ASCII is working now after your change so hopefully these should work once caches are updated. In the case of [[Deformacja]] the issue is that UL elements cannot be used to create a summary - so you'll need to add a summarizing sentence preceding the list.

That said, for disambiguation pages, this sounds a bit like a slightly different bug to me after further inspection so I'm going to reopen your ticket!

Jdlrobson mentioned this in T346686: Disambig previews not working when a summary cannot be generated.Sep 21 2023, 12:42 AM
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