Forum:Page Distortion

Some of the pages on the Genealogy Wiki are displaying erratically. One user described the problem as that the page "appears all squished up". The problem temporarily goes away if you open the page as if to edit it, and then save it. However, after an indeterminate time the problem returns. This only affects certain pages. They tend to be large pages, with heavy use of tables and/or images.

An example is the Community Portal at http://genealogy.wikia.com/wiki/Genealogy:Community_Portal

Another page is http://genealogy.wikia.com/wiki/Family_History_of_the_Matthias_Brimberry_and_Mary_Anderson_Families

At the moment, the Community Portal is displaying correctly, though I don't know how long tht will last. The Brimberry page is displaying poorly. Opening and closing it will restore it temporarily.

Would appreciate any help in correcting the problem---especially the community portal, as it needs to look right consistently. Presume the cause of the problem is the same in all cases. Bill 23:15, 22 June 2007 (UTC)


 * No way! The Zelda Wiki has the same problem, though it looks a bit different. Look at, for example, Link and Ganondorf. They look exactly the same with the Genealogy pages. I thought it was just a template, but now I think it might be the length or something like that. Wierd.--Richard (Talk - Contribs) 01:18, 23 June 2007 (UTC)


 * I think had the same problem in the Geomag Wiki, and I found it to be related to the use of, also described here. --Amafirlian 14:26, 24 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Its good to know that others (Richard1990, :Amafirlian) have seen this problem in other locations. There seem to be multiple causes after all, but the use of  seems to be part of the problem.  Certain other typos in HTML formating also seem to trigger it.  For example, in one case mistyping a question mark for an angle bracket in a table cell (eg, ?td> instead of   caused a similar (but persistent) problem. Since I notice this mostly in large complex pages I suspect the problem occurs because its harder to spot small typo's in a complex formating task. Bill 15:09, 24 June 2007 (UTC)


 * http://validator.w3.org --Ciencia Al Poder (talk) -@WikiDex 15:49, 24 June 2007 (UTC)


 * PD: the major part of the markup errors are not fixable editing the article. If a document has errors, there's no way to assure that the page would look fine in all browsers. It's responsability of Wikia and MediaWiki developers to fix them to provide a reliable service. --Ciencia Al Poder (talk) -@WikiDex 15:58, 24 June 2007 (UTC)


 * If there's a bug in the underlying MediaWiki, then its certainly a Wikia/developer problem, and all we can do is try to find workarounds. However, if its a markup error, then that's a problem that needs to be dealt with by the individual authors.  Page distortion errors are probably arising from both causes.  It might be useful for Wikia to provide some guidance on the types of errors that result in this problem, so that it would be easier for users to debug their pages, but the deeper seated problems related to a bug in the MediaWiki, are simply a Wikia/developer problem.  Some guidance on temporary workarounds would be helpful there as well, but perhaps that's something the user community could develop.  For example, the simple expediant of getting rid of the TOC, or perhaps placeing it outside of the div, seems to work in some cases. Bill 16:17, 24 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Workaround: Purge page cache (add ?action=purge to URL) with a user that does not have in-page editing (anonymous users do not count for this, and you may well have noticed the problem after an anonymous user edited the page). The problem seems to be caused by wikiwyg stuff inserted into the cached version of the article. I've dropped an email to the developers and they are investigating. --GreenReaper(talk) 05:24, 25 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks!. I'll pass that around on the Genealogy Wiki. Bill 12:40, 25 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately that didn't do the trick on this template. If I put before the basic usage section, it is distorted (in IE6), and ?action=purge doesn't change that... so I guess I'll have to live without  for a while! --Amafirlian 19:38, 25 June 2007 (UTC)