Help:Ghost Pages

This is a general description of Ghost Pages and Images. For more information, see User:DanceDanceRevolution/sandpit/categorization.

Wiki Ghosts are when pages are uploaded into UDWiki with special characters, on the older software of Mediawiki. Whereas on more modern versions of Mediawiki, these special characters are either compatible with Mediawiki and kept, or incompatible and deleted on sight, if the page was created on an old version of Mediawiki, for example, several years in the past, the characters wrongly manipulate the mediawiki entry for the page, and create a ghost page, or a ghost image.

The characteristics of the Ghosts is that they have a separate location from the original page that is recognised by Mediawiki as an actual article. For example, if you click on a link to [[La R�volution]], it won't actually take you to that page, it will take you to La Révolution, the one that Mediawiki recognises from the filename. The same goes for images, for example, [[Image:%E2%80%8EPDA_Badge.jpg]] takes you to Image:PDA Badge.jpg. The whacky code %E2%80%8E is originally a symbol that forces text to go from left to right, originally a default addition to text entries in countries whos language goes from right-to-left.

For a wiki, these ghosts mean that unless you FTP delete the files from the wiki's server (doable only by Kevan on UDWiki) the hidden files behind these ghosts cannot be erased. The regular method of deletion doesn't work, and all ghost images/pages indefinitely show up on Special:Uncategorizedpages and Special:UncategorizedImages, Special:Orphanedpages and Special:UnusedImages.

For a more extensive documentation on past users' experiences in dealing with ghosts, as well as a list of details about ghosts, see here.