Last modified: 2011-12-06 02:21:58 UTC
Trying to display an ampersand using %26amp%3B in a url, particularly when it is located in a preloadtitle parameter for index.php, gives a Wikimedia Foundation error: "Error: ERR_ACCESS_DENIED, errno [No Error]" but this method works fine for the %26ndash%3B character.
Isn't that block to stop broken bots who don't interpret html entities properly? I suggest you just don't use & in the preloadtitle. In 99.9999% of circumstances just a plain & will be fine (Actually I can't even think of a single circumstance where this is needed. Just use an &, mediawiki will deal with it fine. If you need to use the & as part of something that'd normally be an entity you can use ). Changing component to Wikimedia, since this is done on the squid level, and does not appear to be an issue with mediawiki itself.
Correct. And & will of course fail in this situation. You would get an empty title http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators'%20noticeboard&action=edit§ion=new&preloadtitle=&thiswouldbeinterpretedasanewparamnameinsteadofasaparamvalue
'&' isn't legal in MediaWiki page titles, so.... that shouldn't be a problem. :) In a URL you should encode & as %26 directly.
Issue can be avoided by properly encoding URL.
