Author: pinkampersand.wikimedia

Description:
screenshot of the page in question

[See attached screenshot for details; also available @ http://i.imgur.com/hBHeGSI.png]

This happened at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Template:Glossary. Before purging, Jasper Deng (CC'd here) confirmed that he was seeing the same thing. I'm using Chrome 31.0.1650.62 on a Chromebook; he's using the latest stable version of Firefox on Windows 7. It appeared the same for me on Incognito, too.

This seems to have something to do with a weird quirk of <nowiki> and <code> (not sure if it's a bug itself, or some legacy feature or something), namely that MW reads "foo <code><nowiki>bar</nowiki><code> baz" as "foo <code><nowiki>bar</nowiki></code> baz" (note the missing slash in the first example). Weirder still, this does not hold true if spaces are put between the nowiki tags and the text within them. See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:PinkAmpersand/sandbox&oldid=586486308.

This is precisely the markup error I made when I wrote the documentation for that template months ago. I made it with the text "<code><nowiki>{{Glossary|Item}}</nowiki><code>", which you'll notice is exactly where the superfluously monospaced text began. So, essentially, MW usually reads that second "<code>" as a "</code>", but one time when this page was rendered it did not, and went as far as to not terminate the monospaced text even when it got to the system messages (which are "below" the page content in the source code). Instead of behaving strangely in one way, MW behaved even more strangely in the opposite direction.

I don't think this has anything to do with Wikidata--at the very least, the underlying code/nowiki quirk doesn't, since it held true in my en.wp sandbox--but I've CC'd wikidata-bugs just in case.

Version: 1.23.0
Severity: normal

Attached: