The following is an article name cut and paste from Wikipedia:
J._S.Fry%26_Sons
The Wikipedia pack fails to find the article. Replacing the “%26” with “&” fails as well and returns a “no article found …” error message. Copying and pasting the entire URL does returns an error message in which the “%26” is replaced with “&”.
Thanks for posting this. I’ve added it to our internal tracker so we can take a closer look. I tried all permutations of that title I could think of as well and wasn’t able to get the article to come up. I’ve noticed some articles in the wikipedia api do have a tough time, so we’ll check and see if its something we can remedy.
I want to post a link to “wikipedia”/wiki/Scharffen_Berger_Chocolate_Maker to preview that it exists but the comment system will not let me post a link to that source. Hmm?
So the pack is a great resource for what I am trying to do, but perhaps not as robust as it could be.
I think there’s a flaw in your copy of this page ID which is apparently munged by the forum app when pasted - it’s actually this and cannot be rendered here fully unless it is formatted as a code fragment:
J._S._Fry_%26_Sons
But, it doesn’t change anything - this link won’t hunt (in the Pack). I also tried many different encodings without success.
Oddly, Coda (itself) has no issues with it:
Whatever the cause, this URL is solid so I’ll bet a turkey sandwich that the Pack is being faked out just like this forum is unable to render it.
I provided a number of examples where the Coda Wikipedia pack fails, not just the JS Fry example. The system thought I was posting SPAM and so I was locked out of editing the URL properly – I tried with and without the HTML encoding and I did miss one of the underscores in one case.
One of our engineers worked on figuring out what was going on here and why the pack was not returning a value while the URL in the canvas might.
It turns out that none of the URLs that are broken have a description attribute, so it’s not being grabbed by the pack. A URL being parsed is more of visiting the site and reading the code, not reading values returned through an API. That’s why we’re seeing two different things happen.
This is more of a matter of those pages needing a description attribute in order to play well with the Wikipedia API than it is something we can fix and force on our side.
A pack written with minimum expectations (such as assuming there’s always description attribute) will be brittle. At the very least, the Pack should assume there is never a description and use the description when it is available. (i.e., it should fail gracefully)
This is precisely why Coda needs to open up the Pack-building pathway; instead of lengthy discussions about how it continues to fail, there would likely be a version of the Pack published here that works when no description is available.
Is the description something I can add/edit to a Wikipedia listing that is missing it? That might be a simple way for me to update pages missing this information.
But in any event I agree that finding a way for the pack to fail gracefully is important.
I honestly have never tried updating a Wikipedia article, but the basis of the entire platform is crowd-sourced support and contributions. I’m sure it’s possible, I just don’t have a screenshot walkthrough.
So, as long as we’re looking for things that might make the Wikipedia pack brittle for a 2.0 update, there is the need to gracefully handle redirects. I want to enter CATIE as the article name and display CATIE not Centro Agronómico Tropical de …
On a related note, even if the pack cannot retrieve the article because there is some missing information, how about displaying the pane that’s shown on the mouseover hover? Yeah, the info is not in the table but at least it’s accessible. For the moment I’ve created a column for URLs for articles that cannot be fetched so at least they are in the table for reference.
I was finally able to create a Wikipedia account (it was a challenge to locate an IP range that was not blocked) and added descriptions to some of the entries the Wikipedia pack was not pulling in and after waiting a couple of days and refreshing, the entries are still not being displayed properly. So I am happy to hear there is a fix being pushed. I will heck it out and let you know.
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