About the first case, where an external link was added and a <br> tag can also be observed, User:Drongou notes that it is "utterly incomprehensible. It's impossible to add a <br> vith VE, and VE itself does not seem to generate it. It must have come from copy/paste (snowmen are typical of failed copy/paste). Really strange, (one would rather expect a <br />): all the inclusions of <br> should be checked."

I roughly translated his words. I didn't notice that before - he's right that adding <br> by hand in VE would produce nowiki tags, which are not there.

Here's another odd set of snowmen, this time at the Javanese Wikipedia.

https://jv.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Igor_Stravinsky&curid=73209&diff=881366&oldid=830233

The edit was inappropriate (poor English replacing Javanese) and was reverted.

• Bug 67591 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I believe that we fixed the last of the snowmen issues (ha!) with the re-write last week; I've not been able to reproduce these edits at all now. Provisionally marking as FIXED.