వికీపీడియా:Contact us/Article problem/File download

Problems

Instead of getting an article, I get a file download dialog.

Solution

Force your browser to really reload the page (Shift-Reload in Firefox).

If this is not sufficient, add ?action=purge to the article URL and reload the page.

Explanation

Our systems send pages to our users' Web browsers as compressed files. Normally this works completely transparently and efficiently and the users do not have to know about it. Unfortunately, sometimes our system fails to warn the user's browser that the page that it is about to receive is compressed. The Web browser is then puzzled — instead of getting a viewable page it is getting a weird file, and reacts by proposing that the user saves the contents to a file.

We simply do not know why our systems do that. The problem appears to happen randomly and is impossible to reproduce — we do not know which circumstances trigger the bug. Because of this randomness it is difficult to debug.

A bug report was filed about that issue as early as 2006.

We are sorry about that.