Garbled / Corrupted Text

[Thomas Rice]

Hi,

I have a private wiki setup, and in the last week or so I've noticed that
some of the text on some of the pages is getting garbled. This is a big
problem, and I was hoping someone could help me diagnose (and hopefully fix)
it!

I've put together some screenshots to illustrate the problem at
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=d9x2r5n_28g9n6gwdw

Screenshot #1 shows what one of the pages looks like -- this page hasn't
been updated since September 2007, but as you can see the formatting and
text is all garbled, as is the table of contents (which reflects the
garbling of headers below).

Screenshot #2 shows what happens when I click "edit" on that page -- the
wikitext that is displayed looks fine, which suggests to me it's some sort
of parsing problem rather than the underlying data being corrupted.

Screenshot #3 shows me copying the top bit of that previous page, going to a
new "Sandbox" page and pasting it in there.

Scerenshot #4 shows the "Sandbox" page after I've saved it -- as you can see
it gets garbled again.

Screenshot #5 shows a bit of the "View Source" output of that Sandbox page
-- note that the html tags like <p></p> seem to be in odd spots, chopping
headings in half etc.

Regarding my MediaWiki set up, I think I'm using 1.12.0. The only extension
I had installed was FCKEditor (recently disabled). I haven't made any
changes to it for many months, but just noticed this problem appearing on
some pages (but not all) in the last week or so.

Anyone have any ideas what I can do to further diagnose or fix this? And
whether it's likely to be a database problem or something else?

Thanks!

- Thomas.
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[Brion Vibber-3]

Thomas Rice wrote:
> I have a private wiki setup, and in the last week or so I've noticed that
> some of the text on some of the pages is getting garbled. This is a big
> problem, and I was hoping someone could help me diagnose (and hopefully fix)
> it!
>
> I've put together some screenshots to illustrate the problem at
> http://docs.google.com/View?docid=d9x2r5n_28g9n6gwdw

As the page source looks fine, it sounds like some kind of problem with
the wiki parser or the underlying system being broken.

First, make sure any trace extensions are disabled. Since you'd been
using FCKEditor, also make sure that there were no modifications to the
main MediaWiki source code due to that that remain. Confirm you've got a
clean copy of MediaWiki...

Also check a 1.13 branch checkout (currently SVN trunk) in case there
was something specific about 1.12.0 behaving odd on your system.

-- brion

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[Thomas Rice]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 9:52 PM, Brion Vibber <brion@...> wrote:

>
> As the page source looks fine, it sounds like some kind of problem with
> the wiki parser or the underlying system being broken.
>
> First, make sure any trace extensions are disabled. Since you'd been
> using FCKEditor, also make sure that there were no modifications to the
> main MediaWiki source code due to that that remain. Confirm you've got a
> clean copy of MediaWiki...
>
> Also check a 1.13 branch checkout (currently SVN trunk) in case there
> was something specific about 1.12.0 behaving odd on your system.
>
> -- brion
>

Thanks Brion. What I ended up doing is installing a fresh copy of 1.12.0 on
a different server, then moving across the database, settings & images from
the old server and it seems to work fine. So I guess the parser must have
gotten corrupted somehow -- not sure how, but guess that doesn't really
matter now that I've got it working again. :)

Thanks for your help!

- Thomas.
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