Author: drkolb

Description:
I have seen this error on all wiki sites I have visited, not just Wikipedia. I've never seen it on a non-wiki site. It happens using
Explorer 5.2.3 on OS 10.3.9 (I know most people have switched to Safari, but Explorer has some features I need). It has been
happening since at least 10.3.6. It works fine on Windows Explorer, Safari and Firefox. I'm not sure if it shows up when running OS
9.2.2 and Explorer 5.1, but it might. The bug is that some text on pages is invisible. It doesn't happen every time, on every page
or even in the same place, but it happens most of the time on most pages, especially complex ones. One example is the Germanic
Language article.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_language

With my computer, the first paragraph is missing the word "change" as in "...most famously the consonant change known as
Grimm's law."

This may not come up as missing on your computer. Sometimes text becomes visible after a reload or once visible text
disappears. To verify, you'll probably have to check many pages. Try to find complex ones with lots of text, tables and links. When
you find some good pages, look for lines that end prematurely in the middle of paragraphs.

The missing text is usually 3 to 9 words long and happens repeatedly throughout an article of sufficient length. The missing text
can be seen if the entire article is copied into a word processing application.

I think that it's usually caused when an internal wiki link, which uses [[link text]], is directly followed or preceeded by punctuation
or perhaps any non-blank character. It may have other causes, like the use of double apostrophes. The text usually turns invisible
at or near the link and then becomes visible when a new line starts.

Thanks

Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
OS: Mac OS X 10.3
Platform: Macintosh