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 | This page in a nutshell: The many quirks have workarounds:
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This essay is intended to try to explain what is happening, hourly, to Wikipedia, and to suggest work-around solutions. Everything is changing, without warning, and lots of it is quirky. There are hundreds of unusual, or unexpected quirks or glitches in the way things sort-of-do, sort-of-don't work. On any given day, new problems might arise, or old problems get fixed, as the developers adjust the servers or hack the MediaWiki code to alter character-shift typesetting for the 200+ Wikipedia languages (see below: Why quirks occur).
Not all problems are caused by Wikipedia's software configuration. Many problems are actually from each user's PC setup or browser, such as pressing F5 (before edit-preview) and losing all edit-text (see below: Browser nightmares). Also, Wikipedia is not alone in having website quirks, even Google has had them (see section below: "Google quirks").