User:CzechOut/Sandbox7
Looking for error
Okay, this problem is slightly more widespread than I believed, but I can't figure out an actual pattern of the error. Without a pattern, I can't offer a programming solution. I've just spent a few hours looking at every single story, and here's what I came up with.
- Less than 1% of classic serial pages are affected. At first I got excited, because they all seemed to follow a kind of pattern:
- The Daleks
- Destiny of the Daleks
- Remembrance of the Daleks
Was it the word "Daleks" that was throwing things off? Sadly, no, becuase there's also the "wonderfully" random:
- Horror of Fang Rock
- A higher number of BBC Wales stories are affected, but again we're looking at an overall low percentage of the total.
- The End of the World
- Aliens of London
- World War Three
- The Long Game
- Father's Day
- The Empty Child
- Boom Town
- Tooth and Claw
- The Girl in the Fireplace
- The Shakespeare Code
- Evolution of the Daleks (but not Daleks in Manhattan)
- The Family of Blood (but not Human Nature (TV story))
- Voyage of the Damned
- Silence in the Library (but not Forest of the Dead)
- The Stolen Earth (but Journey's End is fine)
- Music of the Spheres
- The Waters of Mars (but not anything else in the 2009 "series")
- Victory of the Daleks
- The Time of Angels (but not Flesh and Stone)
Personally, I can't see what ties these titles together. Note that if the episode isn't listed, it's working fine, with the exceptions noted in point 3.
- If a story has a disambiguated name, like Midnight (TV story), that'll work fine. When you see it in a returned search list, it'll link fine. But the un-disambiguated name won't, necessarily.
Here's what I mean:
- Midnight links to Forum talk:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/Midnight
- Castrovlva, Arc of Infinity Dragonfire, Dreamland and Paradise Towers — that is, the places in the DWU — similarly link weird (but all their corresponding (TV story) pages link fine). Again, though, it's not that all un-disambiguated pages are consistently linking weird. Logopolis, Marco Polo and all the others not listed here are working completely as expected; both the (TV story) and un-disambiguated pages are linking fine.
- Rose and Planet of the Dead doesn't link to the disambig page, but Human Nature and The End of Time and Bad Wolf do. This could be solved by moving these pages to the name, Rose (disambiguation), Planet of the Dead (disambiguation), etc. (Well, technically, POTD doesn't even need a disambig page, cause there are only two legitimate things on the page.)
- I also notice that now, every single one of these pages is linking to the Forum talk namespace. This wasn't the case when I first noticed the problem. These "problem links" used to direct towards just the Forum: namespace. I can't explain that, either. I can only say that this has nothing to do with the coding of the disambig template, as it makes no reference to the Forum talk: namespace.
OVerall, I still don't think this is a big problem. We've made a major push towards completing the transfer of discon material over to the forum subpages in the last few days. It may well just be that the system needs time to "catch up" and recognize it has a valid page now at these locations. The Ninth and Tenth Doctor stories were amongst the last to be moved over, which is the only thing that I think links them. We should look at this problem again in a couple of weeks to see if the titles I mentioned above are still producing errors. Until then, we should prolly just recognize it's not that widespread. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 06:44, May 8, 2010 (UTC)