Forum:AWOL Article

I'm a sysop on the Genealogy Wiki. One of our users has reported an article dissappearing from the Wiki. I checked, and can find no obvious reason for it to be AWOL.

The search function turns up the following


 * William COWAN (1750-1809)‎ (37,023 bytes)
 * 2: ...loat:right;padding:5px;border:0px solid;">[[Image:Cowan_crest.jpg|100px|]]|left]]
 * 6: The content of this page contributed by: Margie Cowan
 * 11: ...&GSdyrel=all&GSst=45&GSob=n&GRid=7073051& William Cowan's DAR Marker], Maryville, Blount Co., TN
 * 16: ...rior to 1756. Many think that his father was John Cowan, though the basis for this is not clear. It is wo...
 * 25: .... It is reasonable that one or the other could be William's father. (See "Research" below).

Note that there is an article for William Cowan (1750-1809), and it contains 37kb of information....which makes it a moderately hefty artic.le. yet, when you click on the link provided by the seach you get


 * William COWAN (1750-1809)
 * There is currently no text in this page, you can search for this page title in other pages or edit this page.

The empty article above shows no history, The Deletion log shows no history

Is there something that we're overlooking? Is this a problem unique to this particular article? Is there a possibility that we have other articles AWOL?

How do I recover this article?

Bill 13:26, 2 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Hello Bill, thanks for reporting this issue.
 * This article had an unusual (invisible) character at the end of the title, and the new MediaWiki obviously is more sensible to such things, so the page wasn't accessible without a fix.
 * The page is back now, see William COWAN (1750-1809) :-) Greetings --rieke 15:00, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

thanks
HI Reike

Thank you for finding that problem so quickly! We had looked at it internally over the weekend, and had no ideas a'tall. Glad that it turned out to be a bug in the MediaWiki, and not, say some clever spammer, or an unresolable problem.

By the way, on another matter, could you explain again why  is better than  ?

is compatible with HTML and XHTML (HTML adapted to XML). only is compatible with HTML. Idem with ,,  , etc. --Ciencia Al Podertalk-@WikiDex 18:01, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Also, Thanks, I appreciate the feedback, but  works on the wiki now, why is it that we need to worry about XHTML compatibility? Enough so that we should be scrubbing this? That's really why I didn't understand a suggestion previously made by Reike. Don't have a problem with implementing, just don't understand the need. Bill 18:43, 2 April 2007 (UTC)