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Editing section leads to erasing all other page content
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Description

Author: ultrablue

Description:
I made an edit to this person's user talk page, and unintentionally
inserted an entire image by putting a wikilink to it as the section title.
Upon seeing this on the saved page, I clicked the edit section link, and
it brought up the section for me to edit. I changed the link in the
section title by inserting a colon to make it a hyperlink instead of
inserting the image. I clicked save, but the servers did their spontaneous
thing and returned a preview instead. As usual with editing sections, the
preview only showed the section I was editing. I clicked save again, and
it brought up the saved page, minus the rest of the content on the page.
Somehow, editing a specific section (and without access to the rest of the
content) had erased anything not in that section. Thankfully I noticed it
here and it was not a high-traffic page, so I could revert myself okay.
But what if this happened in an article? Would we be losing external links
sections left, right and centre?


Version: 1.4.x
Severity: normal
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Berkut&action=history

Details

Reference
bz1806

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 21 2014, 8:20 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz1806.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

zigger wrote:

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 1181 ***

jeluf wrote:

I'm not so sure that this is really the same problem.

bug 1806 describes what happened after the edit cookie was lost.
bug 1181 describes that this happened directly after editing. He does not
mention a forced preview.

ultrablue wrote:

Okay, I just got a completely different weird database thing. I edited a section on
[[Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/3RR]], and upon saving, it looks like the entire
article content got duplicated when it saved. This time there was no spontaneous preview,
and I presumed it had saved fine until the person who fixed it messaged me on my talk
page. See the diff:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%
27_noticeboard/3RR&diff=11837757&oldid=11837651

rowan.collins wrote:

(In reply to comment #3)

Okay, I just got a completely different weird database thing. I edited a

section on

[[Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/3RR]], and upon saving, it looks like

the entire

article content got duplicated when it saved.

That sounds like our old enemy bug 275. Sometimes, it doesn't get spotted for a
while, and can be a real pain to clear up; so any extra clues to help diagnose
it properly would be really helpful. There do seem to be a whole set of
unexplained behaviours of this sort (section or page blankings, full or partial
duplications, etc), with edit-conflict-with-self and section-edits being common
factors between some but not necessarily all of them. Extremely annoying, and
irritatingly hard to track down and reproduce!

  • This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 1181 ***