Author: me.myself99
Description:
screenshots in zip file
Recently (~ 2011.2.1), pages began being displayed without Wikipedia page "template" formatting, normally delivered via CSS I suspect.
I found a high correlation between this symptom and blocking data transfer with either of the GeoIP lookup servers by my firewall. I.e., when I block connections with the 2 following servers, this symptom appears. When I suspend the blocking, pages appear normally.
geoiplookup.wikipedia.org
geoiplookup.wikimedia.org
Screen shots of normal ("FormattingOK") and broken ("NoFormatting") page renderings attached.
Both browser cache clearing, and server cache purging did not rectify the problem. This symptom may disappear during non-peak times (I haven't tested for this), but is definitely happening now (afternoon, Pacific Time).
If this correlation indeed identifies the cause of the problem, it reveals a bad website design, because blocking connections with non-content-oriented servers, such as a GeoIP server, is and should be viewed as *entirely* reasonable by a user (and sysadmins). Such blocking should not break a website.
BTW, this symptom appeared briefly about a couple of months ago (I think it was), and then went away. Was GeoIP being tested live then?
Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
OS: Windows XP
Platform: PC
Attached: