User:Gundam785/Bugs to watch out for

MediaWiki is not perfect. There are bugs, some minor, some more annoying.

Of all these bugs, there are some all editors should watch out for; they can cause confusing effects without aparent cause. This page is an attempt to catalog them.

Feel free to edit this page as if it were in the Wikipedia: namespace.

Bugs

Edit conflicts causing text duplication
- Sometimes, an edit conflict can cause part of the page to be duplicated. The exact circumstances in which this happens aren't clear¹. If you can reproduce this in a repeatable way, the developers would probably like to hear about it.
  - Workaround: When encountering an edit conflict, go back and start your edit again (easy if adding a comment to a talk page, not feasible for complex time-consuming edits). If you go on, check the history immediately after saving and revert or fix if part of the page was duplicated.
    - Note: it has been said that sometimes the software will not show the edit conflict, but instead duplicate the sections automatically. See this post at the Administrator's noticeboard.

Subst of <nowiki> on templates fails
- If you try to subst: a template which has a <nowiki> markup, it breaks the template
  - Workaround: Use HTML entities instead of <nowiki> when creating a template that might be used with subst:.

Square brackets lossage
- Sometimes, when using square brackets within a [[internal link]], all the text before the next internal link is eaten².
  - Workaround: Use HTML entities instead of the square brackets.

Redlinked categories
- If you add a category to an article before creating the category page, the category stays a red link.
  - Workaround: do a null edit to the page after creating the category page, or do a purge of the page.

Footnotes

^1 See:

^2 See: