749835 - Can't make a wiki link to an article with a colon in the title

Status: REOPENED

(support.mozilla.org :: Knowledge Base Software, defect, P5)

Description

[Verdi [:verdi] Best to slack me]

I can name an article "Learn the basics: Get started with Firefox" but article title links to don't work. Using [[Learn the basics: Get started with Firefox]] should work but it just produces the unlinked text "[[Learn the basics: Get started with Firefox]]"

Comment 1

[Ricky Rosario [:rrosario, :r1cky]]

Probably a parser bug? Adding to next sprint for now.

Comment 2

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

Tweaking the scope of this:

We're going to look into this for at most a day. If we figure it out, yay! If it turns out to be complex or not possible to fix, we'll talk about it in a stand-up.

Comment 3

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

I'm going to look into this today and see where the rabbit hole goes.

Comment 4

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

Here's the deal. A colon in a title has syntactic meaning to the parser. It's what the parser uses to denote internal namespaces. That's how Template:, Video:, Include:, and all that works. The problem here is that the article is titled "Learn the basics: Get started with Firefox", but when you put that in a link like this:

    [[Learn the basics: Get started with Firefox]]

that gets parsed into two parts:

    namespace: Learn the basics
    title: Get started with Firefox

and there's nothing that handles the "Learn the basics" namespace in our system. Ipso facto, it doesn't work and produces no link.

If you tweak the link to something like [[Learn the basics: Get started with Firefox|Learn the basics: Get started with Firefox]], then it does produce a link, but the link goes to the "create a new page!" page and not the page you were trying to link to.

I talked with Erik to confirm my prognosis and he says it's worth trying to fake out the parser using urlencoded colon. So I tried that and wasn't able to get it to work putting the urlencoded colon (&58;) in either the article title or the link. It keeps getting converted back to a colon.

At this point, I think it's either not possible to fix this within the constraints of our requirements and how wikimarkup gets parsed, or if it is possible, it'll be a serious project.

I don't think there are other options. I think we should close this out as WONTFIX and make a note near the title field that you shouldn't use colons.

Any thoughts?

Comment 5

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

Ok. Just as I hit "Save Changes", it occurred to me that I can make this work if we use COLON instead of : in the links because this is specifically a link-parsing problem.

WARNING: If you're not into hacktastic solutions, look no further!

I can tweak the link handling bit of the sumo parser so that it tries the article and if it doesn't exist and has COLON in the link, then it replaces COLON with : and tries again. So you'd be creating article links like this:

    [Learn the basicsCOLON Get started with Firefox]]

I can make that work.

Is that too hacktastic?

Comment 6

[Verdi [:verdi] Best to slack me]

(In reply to Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] from comment #5)
> Ok. Just as I hit "Save Changes", it occurred to me that I can make this
> work if we use COLON instead of : in the links because this is specifically
> a link-parsing problem.
> 
> WARNING: If you're not into hacktastic solutions, look no further!
> 
> I can tweak the link handling bit of the sumo parser so that it tries the
> article and if it doesn't exist and has COLON in the link, then it replaces
> COLON with : and tries again. So you'd be creating article links like this:
> 
>     [Learn the basicsCOLON Get started with Firefox]]
> 
> I can make that work.
> 
> Is that too hacktastic?

I'm leaning towards saying forget about it. What are the localization implications of having COLON in the title? I'm guessing we'd have to explain that COLON = :? Anything else?

Comment 7

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

(In reply to Verdi from comment #6)
> (In reply to Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] from comment #5)
> > Ok. Just as I hit "Save Changes", it occurred to me that I can make this
> > work if we use COLON instead of : in the links because this is specifically
> > a link-parsing problem.
> > 
> > WARNING: If you're not into hacktastic solutions, look no further!
> > 
> > I can tweak the link handling bit of the sumo parser so that it tries the
> > article and if it doesn't exist and has COLON in the link, then it replaces
> > COLON with : and tries again. So you'd be creating article links like this:
> > 
> >     [Learn the basicsCOLON Get started with Firefox]]
> > 
> > I can make that work.
> > 
> > Is that too hacktastic?
> 
> I'm leaning towards saying forget about it. What are the localization
> implications of having COLON in the title? I'm guessing we'd have to explain
> that COLON = :? Anything else?

To clarify, this isn't an issue with the article title--this is just an issue with the link. So the title of the article as seen in the kb/new form and other forms and on the site and everywhere else is "Learn the basics: Get started with Firefox". But to use it in a link, you have to replace : with COLON so it looks like "[[Learn the basicsCOLON Get started with Firefox]]".

Do localized articles also go through and localize all the internal links?

Comment 8

[Verdi [:verdi] Best to slack me]

(In reply to Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] from comment #7)

> 
> Do localized articles also go through and localize all the internal links?

No, not normally. Here's a section of an Italian article:
=Organizzare i segnalibri=
I seguenti articoli spiegano come ordinare e organizzare i propri segnalibri:
* [[Sorting bookmarks]]
* [[Bookmark folders]]
* [[Deleting bookmarks]]

I guess my question is that if you have something like [[CookiesCOLON Chocolate chip, Oatmeal raisin and more]] will that display as "Cookies: al cioccolato, farina d'avena uva passa e più" in an Italian article?

Another issue I thought of is that the new forum article link maker thing would need to know to change : to COLON and we'd have to make sure people knew that when copying the title of an article and making it a link you'll have to manually change : to COLON.

Comment 9

[James Socol [:jsocol, :james]]

(In reply to Verdi from comment #8)
> we'd have to make sure people
> knew that when copying the title of an article and making it a link you'll
> have to manually change : to COLON.

How critical are colons in titles? Could they be replaced with hyphens?

Step back and read that with less context. That sounds awful.

MediaWiki itself handles colons in titles, c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Episode_VI:_Return_of_the_Jedi

Maybe our current parser (py-wikimarkup) could be pretty-easily extended to see if namespace is a registered namespace and, if not, rejoin it to the rest of the title?

> def split_title(page):
>     if ':' in page:
>         namespace, _, title = page.partition(':')
>     else:
>         namespace, title = None, page
>     if namespace and namespace not in self.registered_namespaces:
>         namespace, title = None, ':'.join((namespace, title))
>     return (namespace, title)

There's probably a less-hacky way to do that, but let's keep the hacky crap in the code, and not in the user experience, if we have to have hacky crap at all.

Comment 10

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

(In reply to James Socol [:jsocol, :james] from comment #9)
> (In reply to Verdi from comment #8)
> > we'd have to make sure people
> > knew that when copying the title of an article and making it a link you'll
> > have to manually change : to COLON.
> 
> How critical are colons in titles? Could they be replaced with hyphens?
> 
> Step back and read that with less context. That sounds awful.
> 
> MediaWiki itself handles colons in titles, c.f.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Episode_VI:_Return_of_the_Jedi
> 
> Maybe our current parser (py-wikimarkup) could be pretty-easily extended to
> see if namespace is a registered namespace and, if not, rejoin it to the
> rest of the title?
> 
> > def split_title(page):
> >     if ':' in page:
> >         namespace, _, title = page.partition(':')
> >     else:
> >         namespace, title = None, page
> >     if namespace and namespace not in self.registered_namespaces:
> >         namespace, title = None, ':'.join((namespace, title))
> >     return (namespace, title)
> 
> There's probably a less-hacky way to do that, but let's keep the hacky crap
> in the code, and not in the user experience, if we have to have hacky crap
> at all.

After what verdi has said, I'm -1 on the hack--it touches too many people.

I'm pretty sure there is no pretty-easily extended way to do this. The docs suggest that:

https://github.com/dcramer/py-wikimarkup#adding-internal-links

The py-wikimarkup project is pretty dead, so we could fork it and maintain our own fork. But this parser doesn't have many tests and we don't have many tests for the parser, either, so fundamental changes to the parser aren't without risk.

I'll look into it more today.

Comment 11

[James Socol [:jsocol, :james]]

We never used dcramer's fork, always Paul's: https://github.com/pcraciunoiu/py-wikimarkup and, even though he left Mozilla, he's been great about merging pull reqs. Also I still have commit there.

Comment 12

[Verdi [:verdi] Best to slack me]

We are currently making due with hyphens in titles instead of colons, which is fine. I don't think it's that big of deal to waste more time on. I'm ok with not fixing this now and looking into it some other time.

Comment 13

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

(In reply to Verdi from comment #12)
> We are currently making due with hyphens in titles instead of colons, which
> is fine. I don't think it's that big of deal to waste more time on. I'm ok
> with not fixing this now and looking into it some other time.

Sounds good to me.

I'm going to mark it as WONTFIX. If we want to work on this again, we can spin off a new bug.

Comment 14

[Will Kahn-Greene [:willkg] ET needinfo? me]

I retroactively created a research bug for figuring out the deal because there's some good information in here should someone want to fix this in the future.

So I'm reopening this one, bumping it out of the sprint (to be replaced by the research bug), and unassigning myself.

Comment 15

[ARIENGGO]

Attachment: tmp_5979848604940852834-2134271936.jpg

Comment 16

[Alice Wyman]

This problem came up again - see bug 1084343

Comment 19

[Roland Tanglao needinfo please :rolandtanglao, :mohnkuchen, :adobo, :sinigang, :roland]

i doubt we'll solve this! setting to p5 and won't fix if somebody wants to re-do :willkg's research in 2017 (and beyond) please re-open but do the research first before re-opening!!!!!!

Comment 20

[Alice Wyman]

This is still an issue. I edited the metadata today for three four articles, to remove the colon from the title. See:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/premium-subscriber-faq/discuss/11679
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pocket-premium-suggested-tags/discuss/11678
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pocket-premium-permanent-library/discuss/11677
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/pocket-premium-full-text-search/discuss/11676

If this problem can't be solved, can we at least show a warning when we create a new article (or edit the metadata for an existing article) when the proposed title includes a colon?

Comment 21

[Alice Wyman]

Another new article was just approved with a colon in the title. See:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-accounts-renamed-mozilla-accounts/discuss/11723

Comment 22

[Alice Wyman]

Still an issue. This newly approved article includes a colon in the title:
Contributor Policy: Usage of Generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT)

Comment 23

[Alice Wyman]

This came up again. See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-labs-explore-experimental-features-firefox/discuss/12419

Comment 24

[Alice Wyman]

This came up again, with a new article created by Lucas: Firefox blocked by macOS 15 Sequoia firewall: What you need to know
See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-blocked-macos-15-sequoia-firewall-what-you/history

If this bug can't be fixed, can there at least be a message, such as "The article title includes a colon, which prevents wikilinks" when the title is entered in the Create a new Knowledge Base article page, or when you edit the article metadata to change the title for an existing article?

Comment 25

[Lucas Siebert]

(In reply to Alice Wyman from comment #24)

This came up again, with a new article created by Lucas: Firefox blocked by macOS 15 Sequoia firewall: What you need to know
See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-blocked-macos-15-sequoia-firewall-what-you/history

If this bug can't be fixed, can there at least be a message, such as "The article title includes a colon, which prevents wikilinks" when the title is entered in the Create a new Knowledge Base article page, or when you edit the article metadata to change the title for an existing article?

Just updated the article's title to "Firefox blocked by macOS 15 Sequoia firewall - What you need to know". Thanks for the flag, Alice.

Comment 26

[Alice Wyman]

This came up again, for an article originally titled "Placeholder Bug 1929565". The title was just changed to "Firefox connection upgrades: HTTP to HTTPS", which includes a colon. I updated the article title to "Firefox connection upgrades - HTTP to HTTPS".
See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/https-upgrades/discuss/12772 and https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/https-upgrades/links

Comment 27

[Alice Wyman]

This came up again, for the new article "How it works: Firefox Weather" https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-it-works-firefox-weather (I added a comment to the related bug 1944582 asking to change the title).

Comment 28

[Alice Wyman]

This came up again. See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/xframe-neterror-page and related discussion thread.

The article title was changed from Website will not allow Firefox to display the page if another site has embedded it to the current title, which contains a colon: Fix error: “Website will not allow Firefox to display the page.” . The redirect that was created for the old title doesn't work:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/xframe-neterror-page-redirect-1/

The article History shows a revision created and approved by Flavius Floare with Comment: Updated per H2 2025 content audit: Reorganized the article ...<snip> See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/xframe-neterror-page/history (I submitted an empty edit asking for the title to be changed to remove the colon) Flavius, can you review and fix the title?

Comment 29

[Flavius Floare]

(In reply to Alice Wyman from comment #28)

This came up again. See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/xframe-neterror-page and related discussion thread.

The article title was changed from Website will not allow Firefox to display the page if another site has embedded it to the current title, which contains a colon: Fix error: “Website will not allow Firefox to display the page.” . The redirect that was created for the old title doesn't work:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/xframe-neterror-page-redirect-1/

The article History shows a revision created and approved by Flavius Floare with Comment: Updated per H2 2025 content audit: Reorganized the article ...<snip> See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/xframe-neterror-page/history (I submitted an empty edit asking for the title to be changed to remove the colon) Flavius, can you review and fix the title?

Thank you for pointing it out, Alice. I removed the colon.