Last modified: 2012-04-16 09:15:37 UTC
In previous versions of Mediawiki, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BadTitle would show http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Badtitletext , but it now says that the special page doesn't exist, which is not a helpful error when someone enters an invalid character as the title in a URL.
There was never actually a Special:BadTitle afaik; I think it got stuck in as a replacement title when there was a bad one, and then special handling for it took over.
(In reply to comment #1) In any event, MediaWiki:Badtitletext used to turn up for bad titles, and now nothing locally editable turns up. This should be fixed.
(In reply to comment #1) > There was never actually a Special:BadTitle afaik; I think it got stuck in as a > replacement title when there was a bad one, and then special handling for it > took over. The problem here is that if you visit e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/[foo], you get redirected to "No such special page" error:P
Changing to 'major' because causes contentlessness of previously substantive URLs like <URL:http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%5b>.
Not so substantive, it's not as if it was a valid title before. Although I agree it is wrong to show a "Special page" error, the right behavior was the old one ("The requested page title was invalid, empty, or an incorrectly linked inter-language or inter-wiki title. It may contain one or more characters which cannot be used in titles. ").
(In reply to comment #5) > Not so substantive, it's not as if it was a valid title before. Was that in reply to my: > Changing to 'major' because causes contentlessness of previously > substantive URLs like <URL:http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%5b>. ? That URL *was* substantive. It transcluded <URL:http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Unsupported_titles>, which includes the content sought at <URL:http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%5b>.
Seems the problem is fixed in trunk, so we should find out the appropiate revision to backport. Basically, Wiki.php uses a fake special page named 'Badtitle' when there is a bad title provided, but instead of being shown, in REL1_18 it redirects.
Going back through the revs it doesn't appear this is the result of the Wiki.php related RequestContext changes... There is a gap in the revs where some bad code as a result of the RequestContext changes leaves bad titles with a php error due to some things not passing a proper Title instance. But before the RequestContext stuff and after that gap the Bad title functionality is still working.
Platonides identified r98764 as the rev that fixed this bug in trunk. Tagged for backporting into 1.18.
Fixed in 1.18. Waiting for deployment.
Appears to be working now. Thanks everyone!
