"...Many times I have clicked an article to learn that it was not offline."
I can repro 100% of the time:
Good to know! Are your refering to the message? If so, does the message stay until it is downloaded?
Gotcha - My lists were already available offline, and so when I tapped "save for offline" there was no feedback. I see what you mean now. Thanks for helping me get oriented to the app!
That said, I seemed to find a bug in saving to offline. I can repro 100% of the time. I'm updating this ticket to reflect that bug.
@MattCleinman An excellent catch.
When we added our recent option to Watch an article, we added a network call to check if the article is currently being watched. When you're offline, that call will fail, but in certain cases this is incorrectly causing the entire page loading sequence to fail, too.
An easy fix, and a true bug.
@MattCleinman & @Dbrant - This looks mostly fixed on 2.7.50340-alpha-2021-02-01, but I am seeing something odd with one of my saved lists. I tried it on multiple lists and the ones that have 'special' pages (see below) saved within seem to exhibit this bug. Looking at the heading of the lists it is showing all articles as offline available (example: 9 of 9 articles available offline), but when I go into airplane mode only the articles I previously viewed while connected are available. In some cases I am seeing the can't connect message, on others, I am seeing an error occurred message. I'm not sure if this is because I have a bunch of weird articles saved.
So I uninstalled Wikipedia and cleared the cache on the device and tried again. Now it is all working as expected, but the special pages (below) are showing an error when viewing them offline (which is I think to be expected). Probably doesn't block the fix of this issue but it may be something to remember if we see this come up again.
Special page examples:
Wikipedia Main Page
Sandbox pages
Talk pages
Pages from beta/staging wikis
Pages that no longer exist
Thanks @ABorbaWMF
This is correct -- pages that are outside the main namespace will not behave well when saved to a reading list. The proper solution should probably be to disable the ability to save them to a list in the first place. (Separate task forthcoming)