Last modified: 2010-05-15 15:38:30 UTC
Somebody edited MBTA accessibility (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBTA_accessibility) on 05:14, 13 November 2005 68.160.178.62, intending to add "Subway and commuter rail - Reconstruction of State Street has started", but this resulted in truncation of several sections/subsections below that. I found that this is an accident due to a bug: often, if you attempt to edit the previous revision (02:34, 10 November 2005 134.174.110.5) as the whole article (and this is the version that user 68.160.178.62 would have been editing from), the deleted content is already missing in the Edit window. (And the article is long enough that if you really just wanted to edit something in the middle, you might easily not notice.) I had to go to the revision before that (02:33, 10 November 2005 134.174.110.5) to avoid this problem (although success in avoiding it might be just chance, since this bug does not occur 100% of the time). Something in the 02:34, 10 November 2005 134.174.110.5 revision causes the editor to mess up, but I can't think of what it would be, since both that revision and the previous one are ones that I edited (I was 134.174.110.5), and the only change between them was to add a note about elevators being out of service. This seems to be reproducible often, but not 100%: 1. Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MBTA_accessibility&action=history (or get there from the the article by clicking on "history"). 2. Click on revision 05:14, 13 November 2005 (if necessary, page back to get to it). 3. Look at this version of the article and note the sections/subsections that it has (bold text "Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority accessibility" before these isn't actually a section heading): Subway and commuter rail Center island stations Blue Line Green Line Orange Line 4. Click on Older revision -- you will now be on 02:34, 10 November 2005. 5. Look at this version of the article and note the sections/subsections that it has (including spelling errors -- if you see these without the spelling errors, you aren't looking at the the version upon which I saw this bug occur, although I can't rule out that it might show up in some other version): Subway and commuter rail Center island stations Blue Line Green Line Orange Line Red Line Buses Visually Impared Hearing Impared External links 6. Click on "edit this page". 7. Look at the text in the editor window/text box and note the sections/subsections that it has. Expected result (which actually occurs some fraction of the time): * All of the sections/subsections in revision 02:34, 10 November 2005 will be present. Actual result (seems to be most of the time): * Only the sections/subsections in revision 05:14, 13 November 2005 are present. Note: I set the Version to the latest stable version of MediaWiki noted in the Wikipedia article about MediaWiki, but I cannot find a way to determine that this is the version that Wikipedia is actually using as of the time of this bug report. I marked this bug as Major Severity and High Priority because it can cause loss of content without warning, but not Critical Severity and Highest Priority because I have never run into this bug on any other article (after approximately a year of use).
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 1915 ***