Platform: Website link to Wikipedia
Browser, if a website issue: Firefox
URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages:
Screenshots of what you are seeing:
Description of problem:
Since last night local time, the about pages displays the above for the Wikipedia summary. Waiting the 30 minutes does not help matters.
the error message refers a to a change that was made related to how iNat gets data from Wikipedia. based on development notes, it sounds like iNat had been hitting Wikipedia too hard, causing Wikipedia to deny requests from iNaturalist. so this change pauses new requests from iNaturalist for a while so that it’s not just sending additional requests that will just get denied. the idea is that once a sufficient time has passed without new requests, Wikipedia should start accepting requests from iNaturalist again. but if you’re saying that 30 minutes has passed, and you’re still getting the same errors, then maybe the change isn’t working the way it’s supposed to (or maybe the change addressed the wrong problem?).
theoretically, this problem should affect only taxa that have no existing recently cached summaries from Wikipedia.(or maybe where a curator has forced a refresh?). taxa with previously cached summaries should be able to load summaries from cache instead of trying to get them from Wikipedia.
this is probably a continuation of (and maybe the result of a change for) https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/wikipedia-links-requiring-curators-to-refresh-to-display/80803, which, in turn, may be related to https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/wiki-links-not-working-even-after-curator-involvement/76825/16.
I also got this last night on Chrome.
i’ve been checking https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/1411373-Ins-celeris every so often since i wrote the above, and every time i check, i see the same error message as noted in the original post:
The Wikipedia summary could not be fetched right now. Please try again in 30 minutes.
so i assume that means that the attempted fix didn’t do what it was meant to do.
This is my mistake in the heading, coming of what I saw on the screen. It is of course not the summaries that are not loading, but the HTML code section to add new data to wikipedia. This would presumably be something that is cached at iNat.
I have accessed a few new species I saw in the meantime that do have full summaries from wikipedia and those have a sort of initial hiccup and then they load, no problem for example https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/204470-Bubo-africanus.
It looks like it is only those that have x is a species of y with z obs pages that refuse to load properly, and then also only the div section that shows the wiki editing html. That piece prefills some fields in wikipedia should a user on iNat decide to write a wikipedia article so that there is actually something there other than the obs count. I’m not entirely sure that piece is something that is cached at wikipedia, but rather something that should be along the lines of an IF THEN ELSE: if no summary at wikipedia then display the div section, else display error. Maybe we are missing the then part of the equation?
Hi everyone, thank you for reporting the Wikipedia caching issues you’ve encountered. I have been working on these fixes and have made a handful of changes:
So far, this has drastically decreased the number of rate-limited responses we receive from Wikipedia.
Please report if you are still seeing this error frequently or are having other issues around the way Wikipedia summaries are loading on taxon pages. Thank you!
i just tried a few of the links from the discussion, and i can’t tell that anything has changed to increase the success rate of no errors. when i’m logged in, i get the rate limiting message and new link to Wikipedia, as shown below:
when not logged in, i get no error message, but still nothing displays:
i tried Ips, Ins, Ins celeris, Bubo africanus, Dasymutilla argentea, and all of those seem to be returning the rate limiting error right now.
i was looking to see if the draft taxobox code would show if there genuinely was no Wikipedia article, but i’m not sure i can find a taxon that doesn’t have a Wikipedia article where i’m not seeing the rate limiting error.
two hours later, i noticed that other taxa are showing the draft taxobox code, and i’m no longer seeing the rate limiting errors at all.
Thank you very much. From the few, including this new one for me this morning https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/579780-Anacampseros-comptonii , that I have checked, those that need the draft taxobox code, load correctly.
This I’ve not managed to check yet as I’ve not yet come across an instance of this.
Thanks @pisum, that’s very helpful! I’ve confirmed that we were rate-limited by Wikipedia yesterday, a little before you made that post. This may continue to happen intermittently, but should be far less frequent than before, hopefully less than once a day. I am planning to let these changes sit for about a month, then check back on how often this happens and any patterns in rate limiting. If you notice other odd behavior, please post it here, and I will take a look at it when I follow up. @jeanelz thanks for testing those and confirming they are working for you!
