rowan.collins wrote:

The problem appears to be that the other links were sandwiched between two
comments, and the text on the same line as the first confused the parser into
ignoring everything until after the second. A simplified test-case is:

Intro
<!--a comment-->deadly text
invisible text
<!--another comment-->
Outro

or even:

Intro
<!--a comment-->deadly text
invisible text
stray markup-->
Outro

In both cases, the page renders as "Intro Outro", the parser seemingly pairing
the 1st "<!--" with the 2nd "-->"; note that without the second comment there at
all, everything appears as you would expect. However, I notice that this appears
to have been fixed in CVS, in that the test server doesn't show the same
problem: http://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comments displays as it should. So
presumably, this will be fixed when 1.4 goes stable, but whether it's severe
enough that the necessary change should be tracked down and backported, I'll
leave to someone else to decide.

1.4 release imminent, resolving as fixed.