Forum:Discontinuity pages and search bug

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This may not be the right place to post this but I wasn't sure where else to put it.

I think the discontinuity pages have led to a serious problem. Sometimes, when searching the wiki for an episode name, what actually comes up is a link to the discontinuity page on that episode (or the talk page for that discon page) rather than the article itself. Sometimes the summary is nevertheless that of the article.

I'm not sure I've nailed down the bug exactly, but I have at least one repeatable repro:

1. Go to Forum:Index.
2. Type in "Destiny of Daleks" (without "the") in the search box.
3. The first result will read as if it were a link Destiny of the Daleks, and the summary will be appropriate to that article, and it won't be a redlnk.
4. Click the link, and you are instead taken to Forum talk:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/Destiny of the Daleks]].

--[[User:Falcotron|Falcotron 02:49, May 7, 2010 (UTC)

If you actually type the full name of a page--e.g., "Destiny of the Daleks"--you do go right to the correct page, not to the wrong one. It's only when you do a "search" instead of a "go" (or whatever the distinction is). --Falcotron 02:51, May 7, 2010 (UTC)

Calling this serious is overstatement. It is I grant you reproducable in this one case, but doesn't happen when you search for "ark space", "delta bannermen" or various other truncated ep names. I have occasionally seen this in the past, but it has usually been solved by actually creating the forum page. What is a little weird here is that it is linking to the forum talk namespace, rather than the forum namespace. I don't know why it is doing this but is not a widespread error. Possibly removing the redlink above will sort things out. Will look into this further but am not overly concerned. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 15:36, May 7, 2010 (UTC)

You're right, it doesn't seem as serious as I first thought. At first, it happened to me 5 out of 8 times that I tried searching for 4 different articles from within the forum by copying and pasting slightly-misnamed versions of them out of forum posts. When I tried to repro it, it happened repeatedly with the last one I remembered having failed, but didn't happen with the last one that I remembered having worked. So, I assumed either it happened on 3/4ths of the articles, or it happened on all of them except that some cache effect was saving some of them, or something like that.

But it looks like I was just very unlucky that day, and it's just a few articles that are affected. --Falcotron 18:41, May 7, 2010 (UTC)

Defining the articles affected

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
• The Doctor Dances
• 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 might produce an error.

Here's what I mean:

• Midnight links to Forum talk:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/Midnight
• Castrovalva, 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. On the other hand, The Shakespeare Code was one of the very first subpages added, and it's throwing errors. So I dunno. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 06:56, May 8, 2010 (UTC)

Yes, when I first noticed the problem, I'm pretty sure some were Forum and some were Forum Talk. I think The Time of Angels was one of the ones that went to Forum (I remember copying and pasting "Time of the Angels" out of someone's post on a forum thread and searching for that and only realizing it was the wrong name when I started wondering why I got a search page in the first place), but Destiny of the Daleks was Talk from the first time I tried. But when I came back after your first message, they were all Talk.

Anyway, I agree that it's not a huge problem, especially if it might be some kind of internal caching issue that might (mostly?) go away on its own. --Falcotron 12:20, May 8, 2010 (UTC)

Seems to be resolving

I checked a couple of random pages from the above list today, and the problem seems to be abating. Both The Shakespeare Code and Horror of Fang Rock are clear of this problem, so I'm now strongly inclined to believe the issue was temporary and, frankly, beyond our control. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 14:14, May 13, 2010 (UTC)